1984
Cast-Away
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (“Stupid movie! Stupid, jerk movie!”)
Add in some more votes for;
**
Happiness (actually I’ll add about a thousand vote for that one)
Kids
In The Company Of Men
Bully
Requiem For A Dream
**
… and I’ll add
**
Bad Leuitenant
The Elephant Man
**
K-19: The Widowmaker was pretty damn depressing.
Also, 187 with Samuel Jackson.
I’d have to throw in Vertigo.
One of the best pieces of film making I’ve ever seen but I felt so bad at the end, I’ve refused to see it again.
- Heavenly Creatures. * I literally cannot watch this film’s final scene. Highly disturbing.
I can’t agree with THE ELEPHANT MAN as a pick- I mean, John Merrick did get what he had hoped for at the end. It was a bittersweet ending but not a “feel bad” one.
1984 definitely.
Oh! I gotta add JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, MOTHER NIGHT and almost every David Cronenberg film I’ve seen.
Cheer up there’s lots of rib ticklers left
8mm - no smiles here.
Angel Baby - Aussie doomed love story.
Midnight Express - enjoy your holiday?
Platoon - war is hell…or worse.
Dead Man Walking - fixin’ to die.
Another Day In Paradise - junky crooks what else do you need.
This Boy’s Life - he can have it. Once was enough.
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story - a porno contraceptive.
Before Night Falls - all is unhappy until the unhappy ending.
Bad Lieutenant - NYPD very very blue.
Sid and Nancy - there’s no business like show business.
Ladybird, Ladybird - it’s a Ken Loach movie, who brought the razor blades.
Das Boot - dying in a tin can.
Chinatown: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”
I felt emotionally exhausted and terribly sad after watching Monster’s Ball . In parts of this movie I actually felt nauseated. Brilliant movie with fab acting, but it disturbed me so deeply I vowed never to see it again.
Has it got theatrical distribution? Or release directly to VHS/DVD? I urge everyone to see this. It might very well be the most important film to come out in the last decade. You will feel ill. But you will also feel the need to go out and smash something/kill someone/start a revolution.
I wasn’t thinking of the ending so much as the way he was paraded and humiliated in front of all the people. I can’t watch that movie and feel anything but negative/sad thoughts.
This is going to get me laughed at, but I was shell-shocked after watching Babe II: Pig in the City. I was expecting it to be like the first Babe, which was a cute and mostly harmless little flick about a pig living on a farm with people with funny accents.
The sequel is dark, depressing as hell, and despite the desperately happy ending there’s no escaping this impending sense of doom over the whole movie. From the Nazi-esque Animal Control Officials to the fishbowl shattering, it’s just scene after scene of heartbreak.
The classic period for feel-bad cinema is late-1930s France. I forget who it was who complained that the downbeat, fatalistic mood of films like “Le jour se leve”, “La bete humaine” and “Le quai des brumes” was largely responsible for France’s easy capitulation to Hitler. But someone definitely said it.
Pennies from Heaven, made so much worse by the showtune sequences. “Look – life is happy and gay and carefree and… <kathud> Oh look - it’s Mr. Reality Anvil!”
Funny Games. Those wacky Germans. I gnawed my fingernails down to the second knuckle watching this one. Never again.
I’m suprised no one’s mentioned Boy’s Don’t Cry. I’d really like to see it, but any movie that ends with the brutal rape, beating, and murder of the main character is just hard for me to get psyched for.
Paragraph 157. A documentary about the Nazi’s treatment of homosexuals during WWII. Then again, I’m pretty sure any WWII Holocaust documentary would suffice.
One quick question, though:
What’s so “feel-bad” about this movie? I mean, aside from the fact it’s in the top ten WORST MOVIES EVER MADE? Greg Araki is shit, and there wasn’t anything about this movie that made me feel anything but hatred for whoever greenlighted this waste of film. Of course, I own the directors cut and subject myself to watch it every few months, BUT STILL! It’s nothing but shit and really warrants no emotional response anywhere near as powerful as any of the other movies mentioned in this thread.
Boys Don’t Cry is indeed harrowing. People stood around outside the cinema after I had been to see it and didn’t know where to go, or what to do. I think certain films should have manditory group councelling afterwards.
Gia - Portrait of a Supermodel is a fairly feel-bad movie too. Identified a bit too much and was messed up for about a week after.
actually yesterday I watched this movie, and it really made me feel depressed 
I got the same kind of feeling when I watched
Grave of the Firefly , which was a japanese cartoon created by Studio Ghibli
I was terribly depressed after watching Once Were Warriors. The end was meant to give you a sense of hope, but it didn’t work. Really a brutally hard movie to watch throughout.
I saw it in the theater, but I live in the Bay Area, so it’s a little easier to find limited-release arthouse films like this. I imagine it’ll get a video release at some point (though not likely to turn up at your corner Blockbuster).
However, I can’t agree that it’s important in any way (except as the breakout film for the wonderful Oksana Akinshina). I was actually disappointed that Moodysson abandoned the humanistic tone he set in the wonderful Together and Show Me Love to wallow in the classic Euro-Art-Film cliche of Real Life = Depressing Squalor, in all its vivid detail. I’m not saying there can’t be good movies like that (and Lilja certainly isn’t a bad movie), but it seems a much easier route to take, abandoning incisive observations on human relations to dwell on How Much the World Sucks in its Unfairness (especially if you’re an “Innocent”). Akinshina’s radiance certainly makes up for a lot, but I was disappointed, and if I were to recommend one of his films, the other two I mentioned would certainly place a lot higher than Lilja.
ArchiveGuy.
It’s important, because most people chose not to see what is really happening around us. I agree with your POV, that it’s a departure from his previous venues. Though dark in places, Show me love and Together had a great deal of humor.
A recurring theme in Moodyson’s movies is… I guess you could say siding with the young, the kids in their early teens, and seeing what the grown ups do to them.
I live in the same town as he does and the actual event that inspired him to do the movie took place in this town too*. I guess he couldn’t find anything in the story to use as a lighter note. The two other movies are better, but this thread is about ‘the feel bad movie of the year’, and I certainly think it qualifies.
- A girl in her mid teens from the former USSR is lured to the west with a promise of a life as a live in nanny. In turns out she was a victim of trafficking. Upon arriving in Sweden, her passport is taken away and she was locked up in an apartment, forced to prostitute herself to pay off the ‘debt’ she had to the ‘toru agency’ for arranging her trip to the west.
After being abused for a couple of months, in this small apartment, she managed to escape. Time and time again, Swedish pedophiles had sex with her. When leaving the apartment, seeing no real way out, no way to go back to her former life, no way to go forward, she decides to take her own life and does so by walking to a nearby overpass, throwing herself from the bridge, down on the freeway below.