Seven Things We Gave Zero Shits About In 2013

It doesn’t matter how caring a person you are: the world is full of too many things, and you can’t give a shit about all of them.

In the spaces between Miley Cyrus, The Red Wedding, and the awesomeness that is Doge, there was quite a lot of stuff that just bobbed past unnoticed. Some slipped under the radar, some were consciously ignored, and some were just victims of NOPE.

Here are eight of the things you might have missed, for better or worse.

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Downton Abbey‘s fourth season

Liking Downton Abbey is pretty much the same as liking pain. It builds up your hopes, makes you invest, and then shoots you in the hand in the middle of World War One.

Season Three followed a formula of gloom, complication, joy, baby, death, healing, gloom, complication, joy, baby, death. Maybe people were afraid to be hurt again; maybe they just forgot about the show; maybe they were huge fans of O’Brien. Whatever the reason, season four was just as excellent (and frustrating and angsty), and yet barely made a ripple of impact.

Perhaps they’ll  kill everyone in the Christmas special this year, and force us all to start talking about it again.

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Lady Gaga’s performance at the VMAs

Despite having more costume changes than the number of minutes in her MTV Video Music Awards performance this year, Lady Gaga rated not so much as even a .gif.

She demonstrated that her voice stands up without any synthetic help, and that she can simultaneously dance, sing, and get dressed without batting an eyelid — but she forgot to have a married dude dressed as Beetlejuice rub up against her.

Better luck next year!

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The Hunger Games tributes from districts five, eight, nine and ten

In a movie where 24 people are sent into an arena to kill each other, there are only so many feels the viewer can have before descending into a spiral of bleakness and depression.

Once you’re done caring about Katniss and Peeta and Finnick and Johanna, your empathy is all dried up; if, halfway through the games, a baby kitten mewed plaintively while licking its newly broken leg, you’d probably just shrug and wave your Team Peeta flag.

Same goes for the remaining tributes. Did you know the actress playing the District 9 female tribute is a well-respected stunt woman who worked on Reservoir Dogs? And that the male tribute has been studying martial arts for thirty years? No? Probably because, along with the other canon fodder, they had only around twenty seconds of collective screen time, and only one line. If throwing up on a wall counts as a line.

The odds were not in their favour.

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Scary Movie 5

Do you remember that movie where Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen make a sex tape, and then he dies but keeps partying while his kids go missing? No? Good. Neither does anyone else.

When did they even make Scary Movie 3 and 4? How is there even money going into these things, when Veronica Mars needed a Kickstarter? Uggh.

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The plot of The Wolverine

If you went into The Wolverine hoping for a plot that drew on the rich abundance of source material available to the writers, then chances are high you found yourself disappointed. The film should have instead been titled “The Muscles of Hugh Jackman in Japan”.

Featuring lingering shots of Jackman in singlet tops, and unnecessary scenes where he is being washed in a tub or sitting near a tree, it’s as though the director said “my vision for the film is: abs. Just fill in the gaps with some flashbacks and a Transformer.”

X-Men: Days of Future Past looks like it is going to be better — but it is safe to assume there will still be abs.

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The existence of The Carrie Diaries

Sex in the City, the TV series, was pretty great. The movies were awful. The Carrie Diaries sits somewhere between the two — but it doesn’t really matter, since nobody ever actually watched it. At least not on purpose.

It’s kind of a shame, too. The prequel centres around a young Carrie Bradshaw floundering around high school in the ’80s, and keeping a diary which apparently reveals her to be some kind of writing wunderkind. It’s funny and highly watchable, and yet somehow trapped halfway between a children’s afternoon program and a romantic comedy.

Carrie’s taste in men (boys?) is still terrible.

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Katherine Heigl’s new movie

Co-starring Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, Heigl’s gritty dramatic turn as an unemployed teacher forced to look for “alternate” means of getting income in order to provide for her emotionally abusive yet terminally ill mother has earned her some early Oscar nods.

LOL JK! It’s a romantic comedy called The Big Wedding, where everyone has sex with everyone and a divorced couple are forced to pretend they are married!

Laffs are had by all, except by those who put money into this thing, because it flopped more than  a school of beached fish.

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Elizabeth is a freelance writer with a focus on film, television and pop culture. She edits Subterranean Death Cult, has been published in Film Ink, Metro, The Punch, and Lip Magazine, and tweets terrible puns @ElizabethFlux.