Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things is supposed to be a comedy, I think.
If I had been tempted to laugh at any part of it, the temptation definitely wore off by the ending. And what an ending that was.
Doubly so if you’ve actually had to care for a permanently wheelchair-bound relative.
Really? I came away loathing Peter Greenaway.
I’ve read of starving wolf packs during times of heavy snows hunting down peasants in medieval Europe.
I’ve also read about dragons and angels of wrath descending upon and destroying sinful towns in medieval Europe. Fiction for everyone.
T’ain’t no angels.
That’s just god when he’s drunk.
Wolf Attacks on Humans. Admittedly rare but not unheard of.
I described them in a review as Wolves of Unusual Size whose growls sounded like velociraptors’. If they hadn’t overdone the wolves to ridiculous extremes (like Jaws with wolves), I mighta bought it.
It’s the description of otherwise healthy wolves methodically hunting a group of adult humans that I took exception to regarding The Grey. That’s just nonsense.
I’ll toss in Thief, with James Caan. Usual tale of a top-flight burglar who decides to quit and is blackmailed into one more mega-job by the mob. Great on the technology and technique of vault cracking etc. but utterly depressing final third and outcome. The kind of film you turn off and stare at the black screen and just say, “Shit,” in a low voice.
I’ve seen quite a few of these and actively avoided many. I think Blue Valentine wins.
Come and See is one of those movies that just has you transfixed at the end. It’s like Spielberg watched this and said “This gives me somes idea for Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, but let’s tone it down a bit. And not make the Nazis so evil”
I think I’ll stick with heroic Western Front and non-China Pacific War movies from now on. Go John Wayne!
To my mind, what makes Come and See so horrifying is that it has definite touches of surrealism … but as the movie progresses, you realize that the cold factual reality of what happened in that time and place is more bizzare and horrible than any surreal imagery conjured up.
Back in the 1980’s, James Wood’s cocaine melodrama The Boost was pretty bleak. Haven’t seen it since then, so it may have lost some of its potency because of potential 80’s fashion traumady and synthesizer soundtrack horrors. I actually thought this was worse than the one where Robert Downey Jr. was being pimped out by James Spader because RDJ went from nothing to loser, while James Wood’s went broke. :eek:
Another vote for Come and See…
Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal is pretty grim.
Re: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. It’s not upbeat by any means but I don’t know that I’d call it especially bleak…
The villain gets his comeuppance in grand fashion so there is at least a sense of closure and satisfaction to be had.
I must be a sociopath.
I’ll nominate Biutiful.
I just saw this film tonight and WTF re: the last 15 minutes!? I don’t understand what I just watched. Reminded me a bit of “A Serbian Film” actually.
Not really a film I’d recommend. I could barely understand half the dialogue even though it was in English.
I mentioned Eraserhead, but another candidate could very well be the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985). We’ve watched all nine-hours-plus of it.