Not a date story, but last year's decision to watch the 16 minute Treevenge with my partner and her adult son flopped. I think this reflects poorly on them, not me

As for actual date night fare, Chuck and Buck checked all my boxes but my date just seemed speechless.
posted by ginger.beef at 9:52 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

It was around Halloween 2006 that an acquaintance invited me to go explore an abandoned house with his friends. I had a crush on one of those friends, and I was tentatively interested in this "urban exploration" thing I had read about online, so I agreed to meet him at the local mall. I had no idea that he intended this as a date.

I mentioned this plan to my older brother and, uncharacteristically, he kindly offered to give me a ride. Once we got there, my acquaintance and I found out the real intention: my brother is extremely superstitious, and thought exploring an abandoned house would result in ghosts haunting me and my entire family. His goal was to prevent me from going entirely.

Okay! What now? This mall does have a movie theatre, perhaps we should go watch one instead, suggests the acquaintance. In this moment, I realize he intended this to be a date, and unsure what to do, I agree.

My brother agrees too. He has stuck around, apparently not realizing this was a date. Hey, do you mind if I choose the movie?

This boy, my brother, and I went to watch Borat (2006).
posted by Pitachu at 9:53 AM on December 15 [5 favorites]

I saw Transformers: The One with the Literal Truck Nuts with a casual boyfriend when I had argued for X-Men: First Class instead. To be fair, I had had a decent time with the previous Transformers movie. However. And with one thing and another, I never did see that X-Men movie.

Also, it doesn’t count, but my parents and my grandmother and I went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know what we were thinking, unless maybe nobody was violently raped with objects in our copies. I can’t remember now. My grandmother, a saturnine woman, said nothing of it.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:55 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

I took my pretend girlfriend to go see ,Boys in the Band...the original one. She didn't like it. I loved it. We separated months later.
posted by Czjewel at 9:58 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Requiem for a Dream. Hey, it was her pick! The amusing anecdote doesn't even involve either of us. It was a couple who were sitting in front of us. At the end of the movie, in that little bit of stunned silence which follows watching RfaD for the first time, the silence was broken by that couple in front of us, when the man turned to his date and said, "If I learned three things from this movie, it's 1) Don't do drugs, 2) Stay out of jail, and 3) Call your mom!"
posted by notoriety public at 10:06 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

Dancer in the Dark.

Sigh.
posted by mochapickle at 10:13 AM on December 15 [8 favorites]

Mine isn't a movie, but a play. My partner (then friend) was given two tickets for a play from someone who had something come up and could no longer attend. So he invited me to join him, and I decided this would be the night I made a move. I knew nothing about the play though, other than it was experimental and half play, half dance, by a Zimbabwean American artist. It was good performance, but a large part of it was the artist playing with various intense gender/sexuality stereotypes - not exactly "date night" material. I had psyched myself up enough though that I still went through with my plan, though not until a couple of post-show beers and conversation.
posted by coffeecat at 10:16 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

I took my friend Bob (not his real name) to dinner and a movie for his birthday and invited my latest crush, the ex Mrs evilDoug. Dinner was at a local pizza joint that got great reviews, for reasons we were not able to discover. Our pizza was awful. On top of that the ex mrs got her period during dinner. We had decided to see one of the star Trek movies (yes, I know) it was either 4 or 5, I don't remember. The movie was awful, not that we were paying much attention. During the movie, without a word spoken the ex mrs and I decided we were going back to her place. After the film I told Bob I would take him back to his place and then take ex mrs home. He galantly insisted that he would keep us company (and keep my honor intact) He was not to be dissuaded until I insisted that no, he was going home first, or else, take a hint Bob. And the rest of that night went as you can imagine. I won't tell you my bad date film story (it was just as bad as you can imagine).
posted by evilDoug at 10:16 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

I am going to say that the kid whose parents followed him to the cinema on his first date are awful shits.
posted by biffa at 10:29 AM on December 15 [7 favorites]

Not me, a friend. Excited about his first date, we asked what they were going to do. The cinema, to see Evita. Fair enough.

Turns out he had no idea what Evita was about - very specifically, he did not know it was a musical. So, when Madonna first started singing, he turned to his date and said, "What is this shit? Is this a fucking musical?" Yes, she replied. "What? No. I'm not... We can't stay for this." and insisted they leave.

Reader, she married him.
posted by deeker at 10:33 AM on December 15 [6 favorites]

Went to see Battlefield Earth in the theater with my girlfriend at the time. The relationship did not last.

With the girlfriend; Battlefield Earth remains one of my awful movie BFFs.
posted by phooky at 10:35 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

I took my partner to see Sorry to Bother You, selling it as a satire on racism in the workplace which was what I thought it was. I mean... it did turn out to be that, but it also goes off in a surreal sci-fi direction. It's positively bonkers.

Between this and my previous pick (Midsommar) I lost the right to pick the movie for like six months.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:51 AM on December 15 [6 favorites]

My husband's bad movie date story from the late 80's: "We were in high school and I rode the school bus with this girl, let's call her Donna. I asked her out to the movies without checking out what was playing, just looking for somewhere to maybe go and make out. Donna says "I heard Beaches is good." Being a teenage boy I knew nothing about the movie and agreed. We proceeded to have a highly emotional, somewhat traumatic experience together over the next 2 hours. Needless to say, there was no making out. It was a quiet ride home and I dropped her off with quick kiss. Although we continued to ride the same school bus the rest of the year, we never spoke again."
posted by platinum at 10:53 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

Ugh, Children of Men. My now ex and I both disliked it so much, we each thought about walking out, but we didn't know each other that well yet. So neither of us suggested leaving, and we suffered through the whole awful, uncomfortable thing. Then we complained about it together and laughed a lot after.

Heh, so much of that relationship was based on shared complaint, and well, it didn't last. What a weird first movie date!

Sorry to Bother You, though... If I recall correctly, my now partner suggested that multiple times early on, I watched it, and it was great. I feel like our both liking that movie so much was an excellent indication of shared tastes.
posted by limeonaire at 10:56 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

Dancer in the Dark.

ME TOO. First date with the person who became my first girlfriend. So I guess my first date ever?? I guess it worked out but WOW. Rough.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:59 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Ooh -- I at first was like, I don't think I have a story -- but here's what I got:

In college at about age 19, I was hanging lights in the black box theater, and a woman, another theater student, that I sort of knew but hadn't really spoken to suddenly appeared at the bottom of my ladder and asked if I wanted to go to a party at her place, and I said, sure. Theater parties were usually loud and fun.

When I arrived, it was her, myself, her roommate (another theater student I only sort of knew), and another guy who I barely knew and also seemed to not really know the women either. After a while I was wondering when anyone else was going to show up.

We were just hanging out and chatting with music on, and the roommate suddenly went, 'oh, you guys have to see this' and put Edward Penishands in the VCR. I don't know why I linked that for clarification or disambiguation, it's all right there in the title but whatever.

We kind of laughed and joked at it but I really didn't know what to say, and she turned it off after a little while, and then we went back to talking and listening to music, along with a halfhearted game of 'never have I ever' (I didn't drink alcohol at that time so it was very half-hearted). At about 11pm, I decided I was tired and went home; the other guy seemed relieved to also have an exit and left when I did. I saw the women in class from time to time but didn't really talk to them again.

It was, like, years later, when the memory of Edward Penishands resurfaced, and then all the pieces came together, the lightbulb turned on above my head, and I realized that I totally could have gotten laid that night.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:07 AM on December 15 [8 favorites]

I apologized to my date after Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion did NOT live up to the trailer.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:11 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

Requiem for a Dream [...] the man turned to his date and said, "If I learned three things from this movie, it's 1) Don't do drugs, 2) Stay out of jail, and 3) Call your mom!"

Can also confirm that's a bad movie to watch with your parents. My mother turned to me right after the credits rolled on Jennifer Connelly and said "Do you see? Do you see what drugs do to a person?" and I'm thinking "There might be a larger message in play here, but I'm keeping my mouth shut."
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:32 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

I invited a woman I’d just met to go see Sleeper in a Woody Allen festival at a local art house theater, and we were so involved in conversation that I wasn’t paying enough attention to our surroundings to notice that the Woody Allen festival had ended the night before.

We ended up seeing Taxi driver instead.
posted by jamjam at 11:34 AM on December 15 [5 favorites]

My worst movie date:

When I was in my 20s, I was a well-known storyteller within the lesbian community, performing often in the city where I lived as well as in other cities within a certain midwestern radius, and at the occasional music festival. As a result, I was often asked on dates, and I usually said yes, because I'm basically a "default yes" kind of person.

One year, I had blown up a good relationship by getting involved with an extremely charismatic butch who was amazing in bed but also a pathological liar. It was only six or seven tormented weeks, but it got me so spun around my own axle that I broke up with my long-time lover, and though the friendship between me and said lover recovered and then some—we continued to be best friends and cohabitated for a number of years—my own behavior troubled me, and I decided to take a break from sex for awhile to give me time to cool down and figure some things out. I had done this a couple of times in the past, to good effect.

There were two young women (younger than me; I was maybe 26 or 27, and they were 21 or so) who formed a fan club of two. They made t-shirts with an iconic item from one of my stories from it (a hot pink disposable bic lighter, for the record)! They showed up at every show!

We became friendly, because I was always and still am a very open kind of person. One of these two young women asked me out, and I told her I was happy to spend time with her but that I was currently celibate, that I had made the decision not to have sex with anyone until at least my next birthday, at that point five or six months away.

We began occasionally spending some time together. Unbeknownst to me, she had interpreted me saying, "I'm not having sex until my birthday" to mean, "We can date, but we can't fuck until my birthday," and she was telling people that she was dating me but we were waiting until my birthday to have sex.

I promise all this backstory is going somewhere.

One of the times we hung out was at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival; I think we went to Night Stage together, and then hung out for awhile afterward. For some reason (maybe it was raining a little? maybe I was just really tired?) I ended up spending the night in her tent with her; we cuddled a little, maybe; talked for awhile; and slept.

At some point, I made it clear to her that I was not, ever, going to sleep with her, and though we stayed friendly, we didn't see each other one-on-one again.

Let's call her Joline.

Months later, another lesbian who is younger than me by a few years asks me to go to a movie with her.

The movie is Eddie Murphy's Boomerang.

I hated it. This is never a good experience to have on a first date, but my date absolutely loved it. The meanness and sexism of the humor in this film (as I vaguely remember it) was so offensive to me that it was inconceivable that I would want to go on another date with a person who didn't see it at all, and who also thought that a movie I found painfully unfunny was hilarious. Also, one of the pleasures of seeing movies with people is discussing them afterward, and it was very quickly obvious that we would not be having a lively discussion of the film.

I had not yet figured out that you can end a date early if you've realized it's going nowhere or it has become something you feel you are merely enduring, so I let myself be taken to a bar for a drink (also a bad move on a date with me: I have never cared much for bars, and rarely drink).

At the bar, she says something that makes it clear that she expects that, after a drink or two, we will go back to her place or my place and have sex.

I tell her that is not going to happen.

She wheedles. She makes puppy eyes. She tries to convince me to have another drink.

I have also not learned that if someone can't gracefully take "no" for an answer, it's time to go, so I endure this for a bit, continuing to say "no" in various ways.

At last she comes out with this:

"But you slept with Joline!"

We can dispense with the explanation of why "you have to have sex with me because I know you had sex with someone else" is a bad, bad thing to say, and move on to me saying, "No, I didn't."

She argues with me. Joline has told her, apparently, about the night I spent in her tent at Festival. I knew that people seeing me get out of her tent in the morning (she was camped with a bunch of people and they were awake and around the fire by the time I got up) would assume we'd had sex, and that I didn't care about. But apparently, Joline was compounding that by actually telling people we had.

Again, the argument goes back and forth. I have since learned that if someone offers "but you slept with so-and-so" as an argument for why you are required to sleep with them, it's not only time to leave, but it's totally OK to throw the remains of your drink in their face first, but I didn't know this yet, so I found myself in the ludicrous position of arguing about my own sexual history with this unpleasant person.

Me, exasperated: "Listen: I never slept with Joline!"

Date: "I know you did! I have it on good authority!"

Me, squeaking a bit: "Better than me?"

And that's my story.
posted by Well I never at 12:08 PM on December 15 [19 favorites]

posted by Well I never

Eponysterical, to boot!
posted by notoriety public at 12:13 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]

I think I've told this story before, so to sum up in short:

Blind date. College, Doublefeature - Blade Runner and A Clockwork Orange.

We watched Blade Runner in silence, then spent the fifteen-minute intermission between films also sitting in silence. Then ten minutes into Clockwork Orange we asked each other "you wanna just leave?" and did; we stood around the lobby awkwardly for a minute or so before finally saying "okay, so....see ya," and then going our separate ways. I never saw him again and I think it's just as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:19 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

This wasn't our first date but it was pretty early in our relationship, and in my defense Daredevil (2003) was advertised as a date night movie! It was released on Valentine's day! I was a huge fan of Daredevil comics and didn't yet know that comic book movies mostly don't work for me!

Long story short I begged my now-husband to take me to Daredevil (2003) for Valentines day and yet our relationship survived.
posted by muddgirl at 12:35 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

Todd Solondz’s Happiness. The posters make it look like a comedy. It is a comedy of uhhhh sorts. It’s not at all funny. It’s not an early date film. (Two decades later we are still together).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 12:38 PM on December 15 [8 favorites]

Judge Dredd. It worked for a while.
posted by whatevernot at 12:42 PM on December 15

best I have is "Shakespeare in Love" which I went to see on a date and mid-way we looked at each other and quickly agreed that this was nearly the dumbest movie we'd ever seen and promptly left. Zero regrets -
posted by djseafood at 12:54 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

1992 or 3. Not an actual date. I was roommates with an old friend and he had a girlfriend who he sorely neglected. I wasn't into her, nor her into me, but I liked her, she was a decent and caring person, and my friend treated her as a sex toy and occasionally humiliated her. I was waiting for a job to start, so we hung out a lot, never in a romantic way, but she was like why does my actual boyfriend work 12 hours a day instead of hanging out with me? So we'd go see movies in the middle of the day, get super high in the parking lot and watch Jurassic Park again, that kind of thing. One thing that she started to circle around when talking was that she'd clearly had some kind of abusive childhood, but this was 30+ years ago and not everyone had the vocabulary to talk about it. I had an idyllic childhood, so I sometimes had a hard time telling between abuse and just normal: lots of parents, I was learning, were just kind of crappy and didn't try real hard.

But then I saw a poster for a new film, and it was based on a TV show I'd loooved, so when it was my turn to pick, I picked that, and did NOT think it through because I thought its creepiness was good art and super cool, aaaaand that's how I ended up with me trying to explain to the paramedics that no, I wasn't her boyfriend, and no, as far as I knew nobody was being actually abusive to her, just neglectful, and her balls to the wall panic attack where she ran out screaming into the theatre lobby was just because the movie reminded her (nobody would have said "triggered" back then) of some shit I was NOT privy to that evidently went down in her childhood, and that in 20/20 hindsight, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was an obviously terrible choice to drag the poor girl into blind.

As it turned out, the soon to be ex friend was in fact abusive to her, and also cheating on her with our other roommate, who was a 33yo woman (the rest of us were like 25) who was also fucking a 17yo guy, who had as it turned out dropped out of high school, moved to our town and hung out at the high school so as to procure victims for the 33yo woman and another friend of hers who was a photographer, and when the STBX friend and I were both out of the house after my job started, would do underage erotic photography in the living room. Now that was fun to explain to the cops. Good times.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:55 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Not a movie. A stage musical. Cats. Back when the show first opened its Chicago run. Ugh. We left before intermission. Luckily, the tickets were gifted to us.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:13 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Oh my gawd, Fiasco, Happiness might be the worst all time.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:27 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

Not a movie. 1993 or so. My sister bought a bunch of tickets for a local band (Big Vern & The Shootahs, if you must). Me, a quiet lad, had just started dating someone I'd met on a conservation work/holiday thing the summer before. One of my sister's party cancels, so sister suggests I bring along my date. We go. It is fun. We dance together, a bit.

The magic is somewhat ruined at the end by me blurting It was really great you could come because we'd have wasted the ticket otherwise!. From then on, that night was known as The Un-Date. We're still together.
posted by scruss at 1:54 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Me and my friend took two girls we liked on a double date to see They Live when it came out in High School. I stand by that decision.
posted by Liquidwolf at 2:27 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

David Cronenberg's "Crash." it was an all girls nursing school in ohio and I came home smelling like oranges. it was a strange night.
posted by evilmonk at 2:36 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

The Human Centipede Part 2.

I was with my then-boyfriend at a party thrown by my housemates, and we left early to see this! On opening night! Because said boyfriend was a self-professed film snob who somehow loved the hell out of part one! (“It really does exactly what it says on the tin,” he said).

Part two was so unbelievably disgusting and gory that it became the first film he ever walked out of. Us and maybe 3/4 of the rest of the theater. I still have nightmares about it once in a blue moon.

The fact that we kept dating for even a few more weeks after that disaster is a miracle.
posted by ActionPopulated at 2:44 PM on December 15 [5 favorites]

Thanks (?) for dredging up a memory from the last millennium: As I left the theater after watching The English Patient, I realized that the shoulder of my sweater was completely drenched - with the tears of my date. That should have been enough of a signal that her sensitivity and my, well, lack of sensitivity were not a good fit, but of course it wasn't.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 2:55 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

“Dead Man Walking.” First date. No second date.
posted by Ollie at 3:54 PM on December 15

Ha! So glad to see Damage on this list, as it was *my* bad date movie!

We were two students at a university newspaper conference. We met, got on like a house on fire. A day stretched into an evening, we left campus to find dinner in the big city, walking across a park holding hands to stop each other from falling on the ice, found a pub with a cozy nook, nuzzled a bit. She suggested a movie. We went, excited for more of each other’s company in the dark. She picked Damage, and all was lost. She couldn’t look at me afterwards. I had no idea how to read her pick. We ended up at a late nite house party, I tried reigniting the evening, but the damage of Damage was done.

I’m sorry, Julie. That day with you before the movie remains a treasured memory, thirty years on.
posted by Capt. Renault at 4:03 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

If only you'd gone to see The English Patient with Elaine.
posted by emjaybee at 4:25 PM on December 15

Hmm. Not exactly a first date. Barb and I had known each other for years, but we'd not dated much. It was 1980, and we both decided an Olivia Newton-John movie might be good. Xanadu. With that began my decades-long love affair...with the movie. Barb and I? Well, we stayed friends (she married one of my best friends, I married one of hers). Her actual reaction to the movie: "I thought those boots ONJ was wearing were really nice. Then I saw they were leg-warmers."
posted by lhauser at 4:28 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

The thing about Human Centipede Pt. II as a date movie is uh, it didn't exactly sneak up on you, did it?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:42 PM on December 15

Not really a date, but in my early/mid twenties, I moved into a houseshare with a bunch of friends-of-friends who were strangers to me. I really got on with one of them, and we started to hang out in their room together a lot. Eventually we got together (a year or so later) and married (12 years after that) but one of the first things we did together was watch Pusher. Not the light hearted Scouser remake (pretty sure it was before it was made, actually) but the bleak, misanthropic, pessimistic Danish original. Needless to say, we didn't kiss and make out during or after.

It wasn't even my first time watching the film, I knew exactly what I was letting us both in for: a full on psychic wound. I guess shared trauma is a bonding experience?

(If you haven't seen Pusher and you have any kind of time for Winding Refn, I highly recommend it. Such a powerful film. And Mads Mikkelsen's acting debut!)
posted by Dysk at 4:52 PM on December 15

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