Sorry to respond to a zombie but nobody has mentioned Winter Light
It’s brilliant but bleak. Compared to other Bergman films, it makes Fanny & Alexander look like Mary Poppins.
Ironweedseconded. Relentlessly bleak. Here’s the plot summary from IMDB:
I missed the references to fairness and loyalty. I just wanted to lie down on some railroad tracks when it was over.
Closely related to Thief is The Gambler - another movie starring James Caan. The man has a huge amount of style but the movie is just devoid of much substance.
Interestingly enough, both films were very closely rated on IMDB. One was 7.2 and the other was 7.4. I thought they were very exciting when I first saw them in 1974 and 1981. But watching them again in the current year, they were really both all style over substance. Very disappointing and very bleak. Both films had really nothing to say except that both gambling and stealing are bad.
My vote would be for a little seen Robin Williams film called Carpe Diem.
Basically ruins the rest of your day.
The Parallax View is also particularly bleak. Of Alan J. Pakula’s “Conspiracy Trio” of films it’s the best. But it’s so bleak that it is unlikely to ever be remade.
You mean Dead Poets Society, the 10th most popular film of 1989 with almost $100 million in box office receipts?
(Or did I just get woooshed?)
A lot of these I deliberately avoid. I’m sure I’ll eventually see Grave of the Fireflies". No way in Hell will I see Salo, A Serbian Tale, or much of Lars Von Triers’ work (tho I did enjoy “The Hospital”).
David Lynch amuses & intriques me as much as he disturbs me. I’ll squirm through some of Eraserhead & laugh out loud the next second. Same with Blue Velvet or Wild At Heart.
My nomination for the title… “Johnny Got His Gun”.
Why is this so rarely known?
Be sure to start with In Harms Way.
I would put *The Paperboy *up there with Requiem for a Dream as the two bleakest movies I’ve seen. I actually wanted to take a shower after Paperboy.
I can’t believe 21 Grams hasn’t been mentioned. Not a happy moment in the entire movie.
You got wooshed.
This film:Seize the Day (1986) - IMDb
Wow. Had no idea that film even existed. Bizarre that the title for one of Robin Williams’s films became the (Latinized) catchphrase for another, more successful film of his.
But Jennifer Lawrence’s character succeeds in her quest. That alone is enough to set it apart from some of the more dismal films here. In many of the films in this thread there is no redemption whatsoever.
Out of the Furnace is a recent entry in this category.
And speaking of Casey Affleck films, has anyone mentioned Gone Baby Gone? I actually kind of like that one, since it has some points to make besides “Life is shit.” It is at least thought-provoking, as compared with some of the films here, which just seem designed to depress the audience for the sake of depressing the audience.
The movie Very Bad Things.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Bad_Things
It’s billed as a black comedy; but I was so freaking depressed after seeing it.
It’s from 1998 so I’m not going to put anything in spoiler tags. It stars Christian Slater, Jon Favreau, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Stern, Jeremy Piven and Jeanne Tripplehorn.
A group of guys go on a bachelor party and accidentally kill a hooker. Security guard finds out, so they kill him. They cut up those bodies and bury them in the desert. Over the next few days the guys are cracking under the pressure of killing two people. This causes one guy to run over his brother killing him. Worried that the dead man’s widow will now call the police, one of the other groomsmen kill her. The living brother is then murdered to try to make the widows murder look like a love triangle.
Geez, only half of the deaths are done; check out the wiki link to try to make sense of the dismal plot.
God, thank you. I couldn’t quite belive I’d almost gotten to page six of this thread and no mention of The Paperboy. That made Last Exit to Brooklyn look like the Sound of Music. What a miserable tale, I am still trying to forget many of those scenes and characters.
I did, however, like House of Sand and Fog and Magnolia, despite the mostly downer subject matter.
And speaking of Casey Affleck films, has anyone mentioned Gerry?
I don’t even want to discuss it.
Engineer Dude writes:
> Even though it’s been on Comedy Central many times and has a lot of Porky’s-like
> humor, I’d have to say The Last American Virgin.
This would be my choice too. It’s strange to choose this, since nobody dies or really is even physically hurt. It appears to be another of those teenage sex comedies that were common in the 1980’s. It came out the same year as Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The closest analogy to what happens in this film is to imagine if there was an action film that started with the hero’s wife being killed. The hero spends the rest of the film searching for the villain who killed her. There are the usual successes and failures for the hero as he gets closer and closer to finding the villain. In the final scene, he finds the villain. He pulls out his gun and you think that he’s going to kill the villain. However, the villain pulls out a bigger gun and shoots the hero, walks over and spits in his face, insults him, and shoots him dead. The villain then walks away happy.
The Last American Virgin is more depressing than many films with huge body counts because it’s closer to the lives of most of us. We’re probably not going to die in a war, be shot dead on the street, or die of a drug overdose. Those films can be dismissed as too far from our own situation. We’re accustomed to expecting that a film about a teen romance will end at least vaguely happy though. We expect that if we’re a nice person that someone will love us. Well, guess what? They won’t.
For everyone citing Grave of the Fireflies, you’ve only begun to to scratch the surface of soul-crushingly bleak Japanese movies about the aftermath of WWII.
I give you:
And, the most bleak of them all, Fires on the Plain.
From a contemporary review of Fires on the Plain. “Never have I seen a more grisly and physically repulsive film than ‘Fires on the Plain.’ So purposefully putrid is it, so full of degradation and death… that I doubt if anyone can sit through it without becoming a little bit ill… That’s how horrible it is.”
It would make a fine double-bill with Come and See.
Described as " … An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever."