Has a TV show or film ever upset you?

Cafe Society
61

I won’t pretend that any or even most of these are moments of great cinematic art, but they sure hit me hard…

A.I. Artificial Intelligence - When the little boy is…

abandoned in the woods, begging to return home and be loved… and later, when he has the one perfect day with his “mom.” Blew me away.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - When Spock quietly concludes that he must…

sacrifice himself to save the ship. Incredibly powerful and sad (but, alas, cheapened IMHO when they brought him back to life in the next movie).

On the Beach - The young parents decide that…

poisoning their infant and themselves is the only semi-sane choice left in a world dying of radiation poisoning.

The X Files - An early episode, when government goons…

shoot dozens of alien-human hybrids and leave them in mass graves. I wasn’t so much upset as I was appalled. I know about Wounded Knee and My Lai, but dammit, that kind of thing just couldn’t happen because of the U.S. Government’s actions in this day and age… or so I’d like to have thought, before some of the reports out of Iraq. Breaks my heart.

Breaker Morant - Morant and Handcock…

walk to their deaths before a firing squad, silently grasping hands as they do. My heart was in my throat.

It’s A Wonderful Life - The little kid is…

hidden and lovingly misled by his dad in order to survive a concentration camp, thinking it’s a giant game of hide-and-seek. Oh, man. That really knocked me for a loop.

Aliens - The Marines find a young woman enmeshed…

in hardened alien goo, and she pleads with them to kill her, then stiffens in pain as the chestburster emerges. Then she just hangs there, her arms limp, as they torch the chestburster. Just… wow. I can still remember that scene, almost shot by shot, a decade since I last saw it.

62

Wow…they really show a heavily edited version of that movie around Christmas, don’t they? :smiley:

I think you mean Life is Beautiful.

63

I’ll second this one. It hit too close to home to me because at the time I was, shall we say, pursuing some very similar activities.

But the film I came in to mention was the original “Lord of the Flies”, which I think came out in 1963. I was only a couple of years older than the older boys in that film, and the grimness of the last half hour got me very depressed for a few weeks at the horrible things that even children could be turned into.
Roddy

64

Everytime a bell rings an angel gets his wBANG!

roll credits

65

I’ve never seen the Shield, but I did see the clip of some episode where some guy gets “necklaced” (held in place with tires, then the tires are lit on fire) and is screaming in a high voice and struggling and stuff. It was actually part of some “inappropriate television” montage that I saw…maybe in school or something. I don’t remember. I kept referring to it as “that scary show where they burn that guy in the tires (crying noises)” until someone told me what it was (I still refer to it that way, actually). I say it jokingly but it really does scare me, especially since I know it’s a real practice. Perhaps it would have helped if I’d known the context, but I don’t think so.

Oh, and I don’t remember how young I was when Schindler’s List came out, but pretty young. I hid in the movie theatre bathroom at some point in the middle of the movie. Now I can watch it all the way through, though.

66

Viridiana, that great movie that may or may not have inspired your screen name is pretty disturbing.

67

My family has lost a member to suicide (by jumping), and any depiction of suicide or falling from a height brings my wife to the edge of tears. And you would be surprised how often this happens in movies & TV (even comedies); you probably don’t even notice if you’re not hyper-sensitized to it.

Yeah, I think I’ll give The Bridge a pass.

68

:smack: :smack: :smack:

Uh… yeah.

69

Alive, Titanic and Cape Fear all affected me on a visceral level. To this day I have maintaned my vow to never see either of them again.

70

This is trivial, but since it was real, I’ll include it. On Top Chef, when the group of chefs gets drunk and catches Marcel, the outsider, and start to shave his head, I was sickened. He was just so at their mercy, and they were laughing and holding him down. Marcel ended up spending the night hiding in the bathroom. I think they should’ve all gotten kicked off for that. For reality TV, it was just a little too real.

FTR, Marcel was a little twerp. But he didn’t deserve that.

StG

71

Child abuse squicks me out. Way back when I was a kid, Good Times had a storyline with Penny (played by a pre-adolescent Janet Jackson) as an abused child. I remember one scene where her mother burned her with a hot iron. I was just traumatized…that stuck with me for years.

The movie Radio Flyer is a more recent one that affected me…I couldn’t watch after the scenes where the older boy was abused.

It’s not even that it brings back traumatic life events to me…I’ve never been abused by anyone, and especially not by my parents. But my empathy for child victims is so strong that it just won’t allow me to watch anything where abuse is simulated.

Likewise, I can’t read books like “A Child Called It”. I’ve tried. Can’t do it.

72

Incidentally, I found that actually extends to some plays that I’ve otherwise enjoyed. There was a local production of Gypsy about two years ago that DIDN’T downplay the abusive aspects of Mama Rose’s domination of her daughters. Rose was not the lovable, bigger-than-life, Mame-like character that the movie and the TV adaptation with Bette Midler made her out to be. She was a monster, constantly driving her children to become what she couldn’t, regardless of their wishes or their well-being. For instance, the scene at the railroad platform (Everything’s Coming Up Roses) was very uncomfortable. You caught a real sense of the relief that Louise and Herbie felt when it looked like Rose might take June’s marriage and abandonment of her as a sign that it was time to settle down and have a normal life, and you could see their dawning horror as Rose launched into her manic assessment of the kind of star she could now make out of Louise. It wasn’t physical abuse, but it was very much emotional abuse. And this production is really the first one I’ve ever seen where it was played as such, rather than as this madcap adventure through the world of vaudeville and burlesque.

73

I could have written that sentence.

74

I’m a sensitive sort, though I’ve gotten tougher with age.

I vowed that Saving Private Ryan would be the last war movie I see. Ever. The raw horror of Normandy, the murder of the Jewish soldier (“Wait, wait, wait, wait…”) I can still hear and see that scene, and it haunts me these years later.…yeah, that’s enough for me. I know war is hell, and I’ve seen it now. I don’t need to see it again.

The Day After. I was a child when I saw it, about 12, and it instilled in me a very palpable fear of nuclear war that still lives in me today. I want to be further from downtown Los Angeles, a prime target. I don’t want to be dealing with waiting around and watching my loved ones suffer and die. I still remember Jason Robards going back to downtown, looking for his wife among the scorched bodies, the looters trying to yank wedding rings off the bodies. Yeccccch.

I will never be able to see United 93. It’s still too fresh and too real, and I just don’t want to see that brought to life. I did catch the last few moments of it accidentally on Showtime or HBO about a year back, and even that disturbed me. The reality of it, as removed as I may be from it, was enough for me. MORE than enough for me. I do not wish to see a re-enactment.

And, now that I’m a mother, I get all freaky about anything with small children getting hurt. I just recently rented I Am Legend, (which I know was heavily criticized here–I thought it was very powerful until it turned into Dawn of the Dead) and the scene with Will Smith driving his wife and daughter to the evacuation…the little girl making the butterfly, wanting her Christmas presents, lost, confused, frightened, and then I, as a viewer knowing the inevitable end…I was crying before anything happened to them. The little girl is close enough in age to my son that it hit me at a maternal level, and I just couldn’t bear it.

That was Will Smith’s real-life daughter, too. I can’t IMAGINE filming scenes like that with my own son. [:(]

ETA: Just remembered another–caught The Prince of Tides on TV over a decade ago. The graphic child rape scenes–played on national TV!!–freaked me out to no end. I wanted to throw my TV out the window.

75

There is a film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist out there that I was lucky enough to be warned about beforehand. The mere description of the film’s ending makes me upset.

The survivors, including a man and his son and three other people, run out of gas as they flee aimlessly through the Mist. The boy is asleep, and the adults decide to kill themselves rather than suffer any more of the horrors they’ve seen. They have a gun with four bullets in it, and the father shoots his own son and the four other people, but has no bullet left for himself. He goes out into the Mist to seek death at the hands of one of the monsters, and a National Guard convoy that has been picking up and protecting survivors rumbles up out of the Mist instead.

76

That whole bit’s pretty awful, but

the scene where he has to strangle his own dog to death

was the hardest scene for me to watch.

77

United 93 bears repeating. Man, I was coming apart at the seams during the last 20 minutes or so. It physically hurts to watch something like that and feel as if you are a part of what’s happening.

78

I’ve posted this before, but the last episode of “Six Feet Under” tore me apart. My brother died shortly after this aired, and they’re mixed up together (can’t ever watch it again).

*Terms of Endearment * is a movie I can’t watch again. I went to see it with my mother right after my father abandoned us (mom + six kids). We sobbed through the entire film.

*Angela’s Ashes * was difficult to watch b/c I had read the book several times and knew what was coming.

I saw *American Beauty * when I was going through a really, really tough life change. It absolutely stunned me; not sure if I could see it again.

And, of course, any and all shows where dogs die: “Jurassic Bark” (Futurama), Where the Red Fern Grows; Old Yeller, etc, etc . . .

79

Mr. S enjoyed Angela’s Ashes, both book and movie, because (he said) he and Frank McCourt shared many similar experiences growing up. He’s told me a lot of stories from his childhood (which featured both extreme poverty and alcoholism), but not all of them. Once, during a particularly deep discussion, he opened up his vault and gave me a few examples. Both stories were extremely appalling. I’ll listen if and when he ever wants to share more, but I’ll understand if he chooses not to.

80

I saw Finding Nemo shortly after our son was stillborn. My wife, kids, and I thought it would be a nice, light diversion. Boy were we wrong. I think it is a wonderful movie and Ellen Degeneres was fantastic, but I can’t watch it. A father searching for his lost son – I cannot imagine why I would have thought that was okay at that time. :smack: