I think we’ve done this in the past, but I thought I’d bring up another thread.
I was watching parts of “One Hour Photo” on TV last night which I last saw a few years ago. (Robin Williams’ character, Cy, who works in a one hour photo lab, fixates on this family that has been bringing its pictures to him for years, and obsesses with becoming part of the family.) There’s a scene where he tries to awkwardly flirt with a woman bringing in her stuff (non related to the family), and another one where he’s trying to make conversation with the wife of the family in the food court. Just the fact that he clearly didn’t fit in, and was trying so hard…gah! Eventually, I had to turn the TV off and stop watching. It hurt too much.
I can think of a long list of certain violent scenes that I can’t handle in otherwise amazing movies. (Pan’s Labyrinth for example).
I think though that a better example is the wedding reception scene in Fiddler on the Roof. It breaks my heart every time I watch that film to see the family and by extension the entire village go through that.
Especially the dinner party episode that aired recently. That had me squirming the whole time.
May I follow that up with David Brent? The one that springs to mind is the sensitivity training episode. But there is a lot of that in the British Office.
In In the Company of Men, when the Aaron Eckhart character informs the innocent deaf girl that he’s basically seduced her in order to break her heart, basically for fun
I don’t usually cry for fictional characters, but that one really broke my heart.
Also. in Babel, when the babysitter leaves the 2 kids in the desert, and then can’t find them
The scene in Swingers where Mike calls the girl whose number he just got and leaves more and more painfully embarrassing voice messages on her machine.
Hmmm, there seem to be a lot of violent scenes coming up. Which is all good but not what I had in mind. I guess that says something about me…watching a violence filled movie like Clockwork Orange doesn’t really faze me nearly as much as seeing someone make a complete idiot out of themselves. It’s the…the awkwardness that makes me squirm and want to kill myself rather than continue to watch it. I WISH gut wrenching stuff like “Sophie’s Choice” made me uncomfortable. But really it’s stuff like “One Hour Photo” or Monica’s “breezy” answering machine message to Richard on “Friends.”
I did watch all of Borat but was uncomfortable through most of it.
It’s only redeeming value was when Borat is chasing his manager around the hotel naked. I was laughing so hard especially when they ran through the conference room full of people and the looks on peoples faces just made it funnier.
The best part though was when he chased his manager into the elevator and there were people already in it and everyone just stood there all silent and awkward. That part had tears coming out of my eyes.
There is a scene in The Pursuit of Happyness that was almost physically painful for me to watch. It is the scene where his boss, obviously ignorant of the level of poverty the main character is living in, says that he left his wallet upstairs and can he spot him a $5 bill for the cab and Will Smith is standing there with what he knows is dinner money for his kid and having to take 30 seconds to weigh whether to give it to him or not.
I saw this movie a few months after I went from excruciatingly poor to pretty comfortable and watching it gave me a knot in my stomach.
The scene in Last Exit to Brooklyn where Harry Black – the closeted-gay strike-line foreman who was under the impression that he could spend the strike fund on whatever he wanted so long as he “got receipts” – is confronted by Boyce (Jerry Orbach) who demands he pay back everything he’s spent entertaining his new boyfriend. “But . . . but . . . what about my hand?!” (Black having been injured in the strike violence and having enjoyed minor-hero status for same until that moment.) That scene is even more painful to watch than the gang-rape of Tra-La-La; or the scene not long after where Black, drunk, puts the moves on a neighborhood boy and is promptly mobbed and crucified on a fence.
shudders Yeah I looked away at that one. We watched it after a long night of partying, I don’t know why the guys put it in but I think I was the only one who stayed up and finished watching.
I watch a lot of violent movies, but they are generally over the top. I can handle people being blown up, shot etc but stuff like the curbing or anything more personal and deliberate is really hard to watch. (Another example is Braveheart… I can watch the war scenes, but I close my eyes when her throat gets cut.)
I can’t watch stuff like There’s Something About Mary and I turned off Meet The Parents. I watched American Pie and that was fine, but I haven’t seen the rest in the series except for the one with the dog… and the cream puffs… I can’t watch that one either. That sort of thing is just too much. Any ‘comedy’ that makes me squirm or gag isn’t funny IMO (and this obviously varies since I see a lot of comedies coming out that really don’t appeal to me).
There have been a few episodes of Extras that had me squirming in my seat out of empathic embarassment. Actually, I shouldn’t say a few, because that covers about three-quarters of both season one and two.
Particularly squirm-inducing and awkward - the episode with Samuel L. Jackson, and the one with Kate Winslet.
I can watch people get killed in the most gruesome ways possible without flinching too much, but what really makes me cringe is watching someone in an embarassing situation.
My husband routinely has to go watch The Office from around the corner in the next room because he can’t be in the same room with the awkwardness. If he can’t get up, he becoms a “shirt ninja” by pulling the neck of his shirt up over his eyes until the awkwardness has passed.
Freaks and Geeks had a lot of scenes like that too. Almost all of the scenes where Jason Segal is wooing Linda Cardellini are just painful, as is his drumming audition for a band. That was an incredible show, but I’m sure it was just impossible for some people to watch.
The scene in Monster where Charlize Theron’s character has tried to clean up her act and get a normal, office job, and the interviewer belittles her.
Not just because he’s so rude, but because I agree with essentially everything he’s saying, and she could learn something from hearing it, but it’s still so harsh and she takes it so hard and I feel so sorry for her.