-either the whole theme or at least one scene/performance hits too close to the bone.
Weighing the risk between not chuming the thread-waters, and pointing off into an over-personalized dead-end tangent, I would say mine would be two movies:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I had an original cast (Uta Hagen & Arthur Hill) LP from which I memorized the text, which served to neutralize the otherwise star-belabored Liz/Dick movie version. The ultimate, painful take-away which no casting could ruin was the author’s theme of a married couple who exploited accumulated intimacy for the sake ofhoning in on eachother’s sore points with deadly accuracy. As we do, don’t we? (ouch)
Long’s Day’s Journey into Night, the play that even Katherine Hepburn couldn’t ruin (KH was so pre-indisposed to playing a victim that, on a sub-genetic level, she’d be compelled to sabatoge any production that so cast her). Again, the author’s theme overrides (in this case, "the sins of the fathers - this particular sin being parsimony or simply being donkey Irish - shall be visited upon the sons). When Jason Robards’ character comes home drunk from the whorehouse and delivers his "I love your guts, kid ’ monologue, there’s not a dry eye in the house; house: population me.
So, when did you last tune in a movie and painfully see your life story/theme… (if you’ll allow that movies can, rarely, be up to such a task)?
Well, it’s not my life story, and I think it’s a wonderful movie, but the last couple of times I’ve tried to watch Brassed Off, I’ve had to stop, because in parts it’s so sad. There’s a lot of humour in there, and triumph in the end, but eviction and attempted suicide because the mine is closing are really not a happy story.
Not my life story either (they don’t make movies about people like me - too boring), but I hate hate hate watching films where people lose it to drug addiction. Have no idea why as I never suffered from a drug addiction, but there it is. Go figure.
Closer left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach for days.
And much like JohnT, people losing it to drug addiction makes me uneasy. I found Requiem for a Dream to be both fascinating and completely unwatchable.
The Celebration is my family, only speaking Danish. It came out about 6 months after my father’s suicide, so I think that’s why it hit me so hard. I have no desire to ever watch it again.
Another Dogme 95 movie, Breaking the Waves, is another movie I’ll never watch again. I can’t tell you why, but it definitely hit a nerve. I avoided Dogme 95 films after that.
I walked out of a theater production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at intermission, only because I didn’t have the nerve to leave before then. The production and acting were excellent, and that was the problem. If I wanted to endure that kind of abuse, I could go to my grandparent’s house, for free, instead of paying $75. Way, way too close to home.
I watched this with a sense of anticipation, waiting for the really dreadful bit at the end as I’d been told that it was a great film but the last 20mins were quite harrowing. They weren’t wrong! Having said that, I think that toning down the final sequences of the film would have taken a lot away from the power of the story and although I still find those scenes difficult to watch, I wouldn’t have wanted another ending to the film.
It will be a long, long time before I watch United 93 again. That said, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Schindler’s List I have seen twice. I may see it one more time before I die, but that will be enough.
But the film that upset me the most is Whose Life is it Anyway?, which I had to rewind to watch again because I was crying too much to see it properly. I’m not even sure how good the movie is - it was a long time ago and I haven’t watched it since - but that was absolutely the hardest movie for me to watch.
“Hits too close to home” seems to be a common theme here.
I will never again watch Pulp Fiction. In college my roommates were watching when I came in just as someone had been killed and two guys were talking about stuffing the body into the trunk to take it away.
I was returning from the county jail where I was visiting a friend who eventually got 65 years for double homicide (he had used the victim’s car trunk to move the bodies across multiple state lines).
I’ve seen it several times, but can’t watch it anymore. I’m in tears from the moment when one of the main characters has her passport taken away and torn up in front of her face.
I nominate the New Zealand movie “Once were Warriors”.
Doesn’t hit close to home, but boy are there some raw scenes in that one.
Especially the suicide scene and aftermath just leave me with frayed nerve-endings.