I don’t need to sit through a three hour movie for that. I just need to watch the morning news. My eyes well-up at least once a week just watching my local news and the Today Show.
Well, with all respect, I suggest that your tendency to cry at the morning news–a highly artificialized form of information–is because perhaps you are not as aware of the entire scope of real-world human behavior.
Watching Shoah will sure give you some perspective, and make you that much more grateful for every day above ground.
Has anyone ever seen Grave of the Fireflies more than once? I was in tears about 10 minutes in.
That said, the movie is very good. It is just very sad.
The English Patient will depress you because you will wonder why everybody liked it so much.
One more for Grave of Fireflies, except the kicker is, I own a copy of it. Bought about five years ago. Never have managed to work up the nerve to watch it.
With all respect, my tendency, if you must call it that, to well up at highly a ‘highly artificialized form of entertainment’ has nothing to do with my awareneness, or lack thereof, as you suggest, of real-world human behavior. When I hear, for example, a little girl died in a fire and her mother received burns over fifty percent of her body trying desperately and ultimately in vain to save her, my lachrymal glands tend to secrete a bit. When I hear about a newspaper reporter’s throat being slit by religious zealots and that his pregnant wife who is left to raise their child all alone will never see her husband again, never get to celebrate the joy of the birth of their child with him, my eyes get a bit misty. When the anchorperson tells viewers a mother beat her children to death with rocks, one of whom was eight years old, the same age my son at the time, forgive me, but watching Shoah to gain some perspective is the last thing I want to do.
Thanks so much for the suggestion, though.
I saw this movie, I think it is actually one of the best movies I have ever seen, and having said that I will never, ever watch it again, I just can’t.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Schindler’s List
The Passion of the Christ
Sophie’s Choice
The House of Sand and Fog
Reds
I am some sort of movie freak and I pride myself in seeing lots and lots of stuff. A lot of the Holocaust documentaries I’ve seen are a testament to human strength more than anything else.
I will pretty much watch anything, nothing will stop me. I like CKY and Jackass TV show as well.
Then I heard about the movie Bum Fights . It was interesting because it was basically self-censored within the internet community. The messageboards on the net all pretty much completely frown upon it. The only thing I have ever heard the intenet community so riled up against is child pornography.
In other words I had to see it (of course not child pornography silly). A friend and I made a pact to make it all the way through the movie, as we had heard that it was going to be gruesome. Well, we could not do it.
They were picking out random homeless people on the street and paying them $10 or 40 oz. of beer to
-fight each other
-hurt themselves
-degrade themselves with public displays of nudity (that ended in arrests -also on camera)
Then they had this thing where they wandered around a park with homeless people and spraypainted?? them?? until they woke up??? What kind of people could do this?
Then the “Bumhunter” (a parody of the Crodile Hunter) would jump out of a van and tie up a sleeping homeless person, and then gag him/her. He would procede to describe the height, size, weight, “markings” of the bum. Like they were animals.
Needless to say the filmakers are in JAIL now like they deserve. I don’t really know what they were charged with and how long they got – does anyone know??
So then recently Bum Fights Volume II has been circulating around the internet, apparently made before the “Bumfight Krew” were sent to jail. Well it had been a couple of years and the imagery was numbed in my mind. And we just had to see what they could do next.
Another pact was broken.
I very much have to disagree with Life is Beautiful. Go see it. Yes, it does have it’s down moments, but in the end it’s one of the most life affirming movies you might ever see.
Girls Don’t Cry. I don’t want to see a movie that ends with a murder.
Irreversible, everyting I’ve read about the rape scene makes me want to go nowhere near this thing.
(Schindler’s List is overwhelmingly uplifting, btw. Don’t let the holocaust stuff scare you away)
Saving Private Ryan. Own it; watched it once. Don’t think I’ll ever do so again.
Loved your last post in this thread JuanitaTech.
I too find reality pretty depressing at times and prefer escapism in my movies. I will probably never see Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan although that is partly because of my ambiguity towards the works of Stephen Spielberg. I suspect I will never see Passion of the Christ.
I could see myself watching Life is Beautiful sometime.
Hmm…
for me there are a number of movies that I won’t watch, often because I have no interest in seeing a movie made from events I’m already familiar with, or because I don’t feel a need to injest more filth to meet some kind of sadness quotient. Hearing that suggestion leaves me feeling mad, honestly. However, if a film is well done I may watch it, even knowing it’s a downer. The same is true of books, too.
So, while I knew what would be happening in Grave of the Fireflies, I bought and watched it. It’s a great film, with very little by the way of redepmtion, but avoids leaving one with the impression of being hit over the head with a club to get the point through.
Having said that, I’ve yet to see Schindler’s List. I’m not ruling it out, I just havn’t seen it, yet. For me it’s the movies where the main character isn’t sympathetic. American Beauty being one of the top at that category: I tried watching it, really, and by the end of half an hour saw no reason to keep viewing.
For the most part, I choose to select my movie viewing based on what will be entertaining, not which film is going to affirm my ability to feel pain. I could, for example, appreciate the skill and artistry of Fargo but I didn’t enjoy the movie, and will not be seeing it again. Ever. Nor do I plan to see The Passion, Girls Don’t Cry, or even Fight Club.
I rarely see movies about historical events, either. And, most of the time I’ve broken this rule I’ve come to regret it. (Does anyone else remember the disappointment that was Titanic?) There have been exceptions, I’m sure… I can’t think of any at the moment, but that’s not conclusive. 
I’d enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. But I don’t expect I’ll see either film ever again. I don’t plan to see Enemy at the Gates, but that’s a philosophical objection more than anything else: to reduce the battle at Staingrad to simply a sniper’s duel strikes me as the worst sort of cheap sensationalism. A more horrifyingly accurate microcosm of the battle would have been the fighting over the one really good hill in the city for artillery spotting, Mamalev Kurgan. At one point, when Zhukov lost control of that hill, he sent a newly arrived division of Cossack cavalry to retake it, plus whatever else he could scrape up. That division of 10,000 men ceased to exist after that battle. That would have been a more complete picture of the battle, showing the costs, and scale, of that struggle. Or better still to focus on some of the men and women working at the Tractor Works factory, throughout the battle.
I expect I’ll see, eventually, The Madness of King George, but I don’t feel any rush to be about it.
If I’m looking for a glimpse of something like the Halocaust, I think that a good book on the subject, or a return to The National Halocaust Museum is better than any movie. Instead of being led by someone else’s view of it, at their pace, with no time for reflection, I can take my own time to look and think. (As an example: the exhibit of shoes and hair taken from people being processed stunned me for half an hour, or more… just looking at the different shades of hair, the different walks of life represented by the shoes moved me more than any film would be able to do to me.) For slavery here in the States, I’d rather go to the Frederick Douglass House.
Finally, Lissener to complain about morning news being artificialized while advocating any movie seems a bit two-faced.
I will not see The Passion because it sounds like an exercise in extreme sadism.
House of Sand and Fog never got to the point of making me depressed, because I was too busy rolling my eyes at nearly every character’s dumb decisions.
Requiem for a Dream…Oh, man, this is one downer of a film and tough to watch. It may be worth it to you for the performances, however.
I haven’t seen the other two, but Requiem for a Dream is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it all the way through twice now, but I really have to be in a certain mood to watch it. There’s just something about it that draws me in.
OTOH, KIDS is a movie that I’ve only watched once and I never, ever want to see it again, although I think it is a great movie. There’s just something about children barely in their teens engaging in self-destructive behavior that I can’t stomach.
I’ll never see Shindler’s List * because I watched * Shoah in high school and those images have stayed with me until now. As a black person, I find it very difficult to watch anything that features violence spawned by racism. Movies like that just rip my heart to pieces and makes me dwell on how evil people can be to each other for no reason for days on end.
My husband has tried to get me to watch * American History X* on several occasions and I simply refuse to watch it because I know I will be depressed for a long time after seeing it. I’m sure it’s a good movie, or else he wouldn’t want me to watch it so badly, but I know my limits and I just can’t do it.
The same goes for movies like Amistad and Glory.
I also have a problem with movies that depict very graphic violence in a realistic way. I’ve never seen Scarface or any of the Godfather movies or Reservoir Dogs, but I love cheesy horror films. I think it’s just the realization that there really are people in the world that would do these horrible things to each other, most of the time without remorse.
Ironically, or hipocritally rather, I’m very eager to see The Passion of the Christ. But that may be because I consider myself a nominal Christain and I’ve always been fascinated by religion in general and Jesus specifically.
There’s probably nothing I wouldn’t watch at least once. Though some movies like Passion of the Christ I don’t plan on seeing but if the opportunity comes up I probably would. However some movies I really have no interest in seeing again, like Schindlers List, Saving Private Ryan and probably some others I can’t think of.
The only movie too depressing for me to watch again is Rain Man. It just hits too close to home.
I just thought of another one. Is American Splendor as depressing as the comic book version of his life story that they printed in EW made it out to be?
Smack Fu, we loved American Splendor! It was too funny to be permanently depressing – and too clever.
Here’s an old, old one that I think is the most depressing fiction that I’ve ever seen:
They Shoot Horses Don’t They
It came out in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s. It has plenty of familiar faces in it. See it when you just want to wallow in your misery, but not when you are seriously clinically depressed.
If I remember correctly, the actor who played the role of “Master of Ceremonies” later murdered his new wife and then took his own life.