Celebrities We Loved To Hate: Where Have They Disappeared To?

By Petr Navovy | Lists | May 13, 2016 |

By Petr Navovy | Lists | May 13, 2016 |

It’s a funny thing, celebrity hate.

It doesn’t really make much sense at all, investing so much emotion in rich and shiny strangers that we’ll never meet. And it’s not like it’s Mussolini or Dick Cheney we’re talking about here. Those people it’s rational to hate. The people on this list are all famous because of the entertainment industry. They might’ve done something bad with their spotlight; might’ve spoken out in some hateful, harmful way; but it’s not like they murdered foreign civilians with drones or passed some regressive legislation. Mostly, they just put out shit work or were — to put it as eloquently as possible — too fucking annoying.

There’s a sort of rotating villain’s gallery in the collective Pajiba hivemind. Characters will annoy us for what seems like the longest time and we spend that time cursing their name and wishing they would just shut up and disappear.

And the thing is: some of them then do exactly that.

Long-time readers will probably have some hatestrings jogged by these faces.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HATED GONE TO?

Brett Ratner

To ‘Ratnerfuck’ something. It ain’t no accident this steaming pile of dickturd ended up as the crucial component of a word that means ‘to destroy a beloved franchise’. Some crimes seem to mellow with the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight. Not so X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Because I am nothing if not fair, I re-watched this recently with a few beers (to dull my critical faculties and to be more easygoing) and rather than it seeming not-quite-as-bad as we remember it, it was worse. It managed to give me a hangover while I was still drinking.

Look at that inflated doucheballoon up there. What a hateful mug. Where he is now?

He’s… Making a movie with Johnny Depp called The Libertine, which will be ‘a Dominique Strauss-Kahn-inspired tale centering on a French diplomat (Depp) who is accused of sexual assault and put under house arrest.’

Oh good.

I’m sure that’ll be a great moment for everyone.

McG

Some days you wake up and forget that Brett Ratner and McG are not the same person. Those days are called weekdays. The confusion would seem a mystery, as aside from both being white dudes they look nothing alike. In terms of their track records they are relatively distinct too, with McG trading in more mediocre, forgettable fare, as opposed to the retina-scarring shit-fires that Ratner pumps out.

Our resident The OC acolyte, Courtney, however, has given McG her Free Pass card for producing that show, so I shan’t rag on him any more than that.

I’m just gonna sit here and enjoy his absence.

Paris Hilton

A walking, talking, carcinogenic embodiment of capitalism’s worst facets, the vacuous heiress helped usher in the Age of Kardashians that we are all now wading through, face masks clutched to our mouths, mirrors angled around corners to avoid making direct eye contact with the the clan of plastic Gorgons. Hilton started all of that. Or near enough, anyway. Man, we hated her. Wherever did she get to? Did a local peasant’s uprising strap her to a rocket and blast her into the Sun?

Nope.

She’s producing a feature-length documentary about herself.

Pete Doherty

Middle class faux-bohemian hipster skeleton. Fucking hell did this train wreck get on our nerves. Even more so because he wrote some pretty damn good tunes.

Then he disappeared.

Honestly, as heartless as it sounds, we just assumed he was dead.

Nope.

He’s still around, playing music, just being a much less conspicuous wazzock about it. Good for him.

Paul Haggis

Crash.

That was basically it. But it was enough. That pompous piece of patronising drivel was a one-strike transgression that made us really hate on the dude.

Then he made two decent enough movies that made very little money and another that sunk without a trace, during which he underwent a very public split with Scientology that endeared him to us, but we haven’t seen nor heard anything from him in what feels like years.

Is he alright?

Does Xenu have him in his basement?

Friedberg and Seltzer

You might not know their faces or their names, but you should fucking hate these slobbering sacks of effluent.

Why?

This is why:

That’s right. Now you know the names of the destroyers of fun; the faces of the guys who think that pointing a finger at a reference and then doing nothing with it is enough of a joke.

I don’t know where they are right now, but fuck them.

Zach Braff

We hate him and we don’t!

How could we fully hate him? We all love Scrubs.

Of course we all love Scrubs! Even though that cloying sentimentality that cuts through the show like a Spielbergian schmaltzblade makes it a helluva chore sometimes. In fact that duality pretty much sums up our feelings about Braff himself. Half the time he seems to be floating about in some twee hipster dream cloud version of reality, and goddammit is that annoying! But then he’ll post a picture of himself with Donald Faison riding a tandem bicycle and oh-my-god-that’s-the-most-twee-thing-ever-but-fuck-it’s-Turk-and-JD!

When last we saw Braff he had ran afoul of the internet pitchfork machine with his ill-advised Kickstarter campaign that made many people ask why we should be funding his movie pet project instead of his many millionaire friends.

It was a messy affair, and since then we haven’t really heard much from him.

Come back, Zach, we miss you!

I think.

Do we?

I think so.

——-

Petr Knava lives in London and plays music