I’m watching The Savages (with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) right now. It’s about two adult children of a father with dementia dealing with putting him into a nursing home and it’s scaring me. My parents are in their 70s and still healthy and on their own, but I fear what could lie ahead.
Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Not because of any particular personal incidents, just because it’s so…unsettling. Never again. Worst line, easily: “Dad, would you ever rape me?”
Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. I thought it was a terrible movie (as in, not good), as well as just terrible. I’m sure that little girl crawling all over her dead dad, and then they stuff him and thank god I don’t remember what else, was supposed to be over-the-top in some artsy, meta sorta way or some such bullshit, but it just didn’t ring my bell. That movie was putrescent in every way, and I feel dirtier for ever having watched it.
In a similar vein, Rabbit-Proof Fence had a scene where three little girls are literally torn from their mothers’ grasp by a constable who bundles them into his car and drives off with them as part of Australia’s policy of “rescuing” aboriginal children from savagery. Not particularly violent, it was still emotionally wrenching. In the commentary track, it was mentioned they could do only a take or two, and afterwards all the actors involved hugged each other and cried as a catharsis.
I know this is ancient history, but the first (and only) time I saw Clockwork Orange was when I was snowbound for a week with two kids under the age of 3. I was not expecting the rape scene (had no idea what the movie was about) and I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I couldn’t even finish watching the movie. Blech.
Night and Fog. Because I’m human. Because the survivors were human. Because the guards were too.
I couldn’t really handle gruesome violence on the screen until I was well into puberty. It didn’t matter how unrealistic it was or what the context was–I just tried to avoid anything that might contain gruesome images. I had a particular horror of seeing the, shall we say, inner architecture of the human face partially exposed, although clean white skulls didn’t bother me. Needless to say, I avoided horror movies, but I was still seriously upset by certain images from the Batman and Indiana Jones series, plus a few episodes of Doctor Who. It was actually quite annoying because I really liked all three of these series.
On the other hand, I abhorred Monty Python until I was at least fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t matter that the violent parts were ridiculously fake-looking and surrounded by silly dialogue–I just didn’t understand why the men who made the show enjoyed showing such repellent scenes. It totally killed the humor for me. Now, of course, I love Monty Python.
In many cases, I have found that the description of a disturbing program bothers me but the program itself does not. This is probably because descriptions often focus on the lurid parts without giving any context. I remember an incident from my childhood when some public-decency group took out a one-third-page ad in the newspaper that decried, with righteous indignation and red type, all the depraved and immoral things being shown on television. The kicker is that the ad was run on the Sunday comics page where kids like me were guaranteed to see it, and contained vivid descriptions of the shocking content, two of which I remember to this day:
“SHAME on [some network] for planning a TV show in which a pair of teenagers SHOTGUN THEIR PARENTS TO DEATH!”
“SHAME on [some late-night show] for showing A WOMAN IN LEATHER CHAINS WHIPPING THE BARE BOTTOM OF A MAN ON A TORTURE RACK!”
I think I may have been about eight when I read this and it horrified me to imagine such things, none of which I had ever seen since I mostly watched Wild America on PBS. The irony was not lost on me, even then, and I was very angry at the people who placed the ad. In fact, I still get angry when I think about it. Congratulations and fuck you to Concerned Parents of Whatever; you scared a little kid.
A lot - I’m a crier. I’ll start bawling at the drop of a hat.
But especially, Once Were Warriors. Before I went to NZ, someone said that I needed to see this movie. I didn’t. But while I was there, I saw the musical version. It was the worst professional play I’ve ever seen. It was miscast, misdirected, they threw the timeline to hell, the music was horrible, and the acting was passable. The only redeemable thing was the choreography, which was gorgeous, but didn’t fit the rest of the play. Apparently, it’s an iconic film in NZ, but the changes they made made the whole thing a giant mess to anyone who wasn’t really familiar with the play. Imagine “Grapes of Wrath” the musical where Rose of Sharon is played by a 45-year-old man with a pillow stuffed under his shirt, who does pop-and-lock from time to time. It was worse.
Then I came home and saw the movie. The movie was powerful and disturbing and meaningful and amazing. And I spent part of it curled up in the fetal position and crying.
I REMEMBER THAT!!! I thought Dihann Caroll (of JULIA) was the mother, but it doesn’t seem to match anything in her IMDB credits.
I’m with you on the hurting pets thing, with two exceptions- the re-re-animation of the cat in, of course, RE-ANIMATOR, and Vincent Price’s dispatching of Robert Morley in THEATRE OF BLOOD (“Oh, I do wish my two little doggy-woggies were here to enjoy this meal with me!”)
Okay, Night and Fog left me downright traumatized. And I’ll add Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Return to Paradise haunted me for days afterwards. But…
Okay, this is really stupid, especially because I was an adult when I saw it. One of the Star Trek movies had an evacuation. As a parent was running down a hall carrying a child, the child dropped his teddy bear, and the camera cut briefly to the poor teddy, lying doomed in the hallway. Brings a lump to my throat just thinking about it. I don’t know why, but I totally empathized with the boy and was totally horrifed that his beloved bear had been torn from his grasp to die. A teddy bear. :smack: But it really did upset me.
Oh dear…I’m sorry.
I just happened to post about the last few minutes of that ep. in another thread. The song they use in it just did in. It was also hard for me to watch Nate and his AVM issues. My older brother has the same disorder.
I’ll second Once Were Warriors.
The British medical show Bodies, friends of mine (who’d worked as midwife / doctor for the NHS) said it was so close to reality that they couldn’t watch it beyond the first episode. (IIRC) at the end of the second season, a patient is allowed to die because of the incompetence of one doctor. When his junior tries to get help, he’s told “Do nothing” because the political gains would be better that way.
Wire in the Blood (series) - the first season was the best (IMO) and regularly left me slightly hysterical. Whee.
Wit (movie) Emma Thompson plays a deeply unsympathetic character who discovers she has ovarian cancer. It was a brilliant movie - haunting on many levels and I can’t imagine ever wanting to see it again.
House of Sand and Fog - the destruction of the window to make the widow’s walk and the long slide into the increasingly inevitable ending. “No, it’s not my house”
Actually, I don’t remember, don’t wanna. Best candidate would be Law &Order:SVU. Possibly one of the CSI franchises.
FWIW, the (real) bad guy fled the country and got murdered by a Philipine pimp, it would seem. Justice of a sort.
Man Bites Dog. It’s one thing to see horrific images onscreen. It’s another thing entirely to be charmed by a character only to discover true depravity underneath. It’s the only movie that ever made me hate myself.
What you learn about the character of Elaine on the 70s sicom Soap.
She was the loud, obnoxious daughter of a mobster Danny had been working for. He ended up marrying her in order to get out of the mob. Her father had made a promise to her dying mother that he would take care of her until she got married. Once married though, she was cut off from his money and would be on her own.
In one scene she tells Danny that her father told her he wished she had been killed in the auto accident that claimed her mother.
Once this was revealed, Elaine became a decent person.
One day, she is kidnapped by a couple of goons who don’t know, at first, that her father would never pay her ransom.
She manages to escape, but is shot in the back in the process. She makes it home just in time to die in Danny’s arms.
Even after 30 years, it makes me sad.
Dancer in the Dark. Lars von Trier’s experiment in depressing.
The Futurama dog episode upsets me to even remember that it exists. What you have seen you can not unsee.
A few other things that were not so much upsetting as existentially mindfucking-- the X-Files episode with the giant mushroom hallucination/s. Actually, the whole genre of unreliable narrator stuff. I love it and it befuddles me.
I couldn’t get past the first 5 minutes of Natural Born Killers. The Rodney Dangerfield character just. . . yeah.
Now that I have kids, I cannot handle “child in peril” plot lines. I saw Gladiator before my oldest son was born- no problem. Then I saw it again after he was born- holy crap! That shot of the team of horses running down that little boy… plus the description of what they did to him after… no fucking way.
I had to turn off Cape Fear when I saw DeNiro raping that woman and taking a bite out of her face while he’s breaking her arm. Nope, sorry- turned it off, took it back to the store and never saw it again.
Million Dollar Baby. i think it’s the only non-crappy show which i simply refuse to watch a second time.
I couldn’t make it through Dancer in the Dark, but more because I thought it was boring and pointless. I posted a thread here about it halfway through, in fact, asking “should I bother to finish watching this?” basically asking if it got any better. The dopers advised that if I didn’t like it by that point I wasn’t going to, so I stopped.
ABSOLUTELY agree about the Futurama episode. Someone should be shot for that.
Put me in the group of people who can’t stand to see bad things happen to animals, either. The SPCA runs commercials here once in a while that are a bunch of shots of abused animals; I leave the room until my husband tells me it’s over.
Oh god the animal PSA ads are the worst! I remember one growing up about abandoning animals… puppies in a box in the backseat of a car, and you hear children’s voices narrating the puppies’ thoughts… they’re all excited to be in the car and going somewhere, wondering what cool thing their People are taking them to do. Then you see the box sitting on the side of the road and the car driving away…and you hear the puppies saying “I bet they’re coming right back” etc… god it’s probably been 25 years since I saw that and I’m still traumatized.