dennis0bauer (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dennis0bauer) wrote,@ 2007-10-12 08:55:00 |
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Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice
The movies i saw are; Bad Lieutenant, Audition, Irreversible, Boys Don't Cry, Grave Of The Fireflies (i cried), When The Wind Blows, Leaving Las Vegas,Million Dollar Baby (i do not know why that one is on the list)
taken from; http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/no
1. Requiem For a Dream (2000)
Darren Aronofsky's brutal adaptation of Hubert Selby's novel depicts the horrors of substance abuse in many forms—heroin, pot, caffeine, prescription pills, hope—with such visceral, breathtaking force that shell-shocked audiences were forced to think long and hard about pouring that first cup of coffee the next day. The result is one of the only genuinely effective, non-hysterical anti-drug movies ever made. Dream flirts extensively with delirious camp during its fever dream of a climax, but retains a pummeling power thanks to Aronofsky's unblinking willingness to trawl deep into the bowels of hell alongside his heartbreakingly fragile characters.
5. Winter Light (1962)
Perhaps the grimmest entry in Ingmar Bergman's "Trilogy Of Faith" (also known as the "God's Silence" trilogy, which should be a good indicator of the bleakness standards at play), Winter Light follows a small group of parishioners who have no celestial answers for their anguish. The opening scenes alone constitute one of the sparest expressions of Bergman's dour spirituality: As a rural pastor performs his noon service, a handful of the faithless faithful go through the requisite motions, but with a palpable disconnection from their meaning. Though he offers himself as counselor, the pastor can't comfort them, because he too is in spiritual crisis; after serving in Spain during the civil war, he witnessed so many bloody atrocities that he struggled to reconcile the idea of just loving God with the reality of human cruelty and violence. In the end, apostasy is the only answer.
7. Straw Dogs (1971)
A forceful, unrelenting statement on masculinity and violence, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs sounds like a perfectly watchable home-invasion thriller, concluding as it does with the hero standing his ground and beating back his formidable attackers. But like many of the films on this list, it's a case where the moviemaking is skillful enough to make even its simple revenge scenario seem dangerously potent. Critic Pauline Kael described it as a "fascist classic" for casting Dustin Hoffman as a wimpy, bespectacled academic and pacifist whose manhood remains questionable until he's put through a bloody rite of passage. Hoffman's gruesome showdown with a group of crude locals would be shocking enough on its own, but the infamous scene that prefaces it counts as even more disturbing. Left alone in their home in a seemingly quaint Cornish village, Hoffman's wife (Susan George) is raped by her former lover and his crony. Initially horrified, she eventually responds with something close to ecstasy, underlining her husband's weakness in the context of an indefensible rape fantasy.
8. Audition (1999)
"Kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri!" ("Deeper, deeper, deeper…") J-horror maestro Takashi Miike has plenty of disturbing images to his credit—a man suspended horizontally by hooks and doused with hot oil in Ichi The Killer, the infamous lactation sex scene in Visitor Q—but Audition, his best film in a walk, unsettles because its shocks are character-oriented, in addition to merely being gross. The first half of the film could be mistaken for austere melodrama, as Miike follows a widowed producer who "auditions" a new wife under false pretenses, and finds a quiet, petite young woman who fits the bill. But the woman turns out to have a dark agenda, and she answers his deceptions in a horrifically extended torture sequence involving a very long needle. Her retribution is Miike's sick idea of social critique, addressing the problem of female objectification with unspeakable (and yet weirdly erotic) acts of cruelty.
9. Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)
Simply describing the sadomasochistic stunts pulled by Bob Flanagan, a performance artist who died from cystic fibrosis at age 43, is enough to get half the population wincing as if they were sucking on a lemon wedge. But seeing Flanagan's work in Kirby Dick's surprisingly moving and inspiring documentary Sick is another matter. As a way of combating a body that was constantly betraying him, Flanagan tested his astounding pain threshold in shocking ways, most notoriously including a nail pounded into his penis. (In close-up.) It may sound like something no one would want to watch the first time, let alone twice, but Sick is redeemed by Flanagan's wicked sense of humor and courageous defiance in fighting a disease that normally strikes down the afflicted during childhood.
10. Come And See (1985)
Many films use a child's perspective to tell a war story—it's a easy way to chronicle loss of innocence and portray the consequences of violence. Nothing on film drives this point home quite as effectively as Elem Klimov's Come And See, the chronicle of one boy's struggle to defend his Belarusian village from the Nazis in 1943. Aleksei Kravchenko spends the early part of the film eager to join his comrades, finding a damaged rifle of his own and dressing in oversized military clothing, camouflaging his youth before the war actually takes it from him. Kravchenko's face tells the story, as repeated close-ups document his transformation. By the film's end, it's hard to tell whether dried dirt or actual wrinkles are violating his once-youthful visage. The scene where a Nazi officer gleefully pushes Kravchenko to his knees and points a pistol at his temple to pose for a photograph may once have brought to mind Saigon and that notorious execution of a Viet Cong officer. Now, it's hard not to think of Abu Ghraib.
13. Irreversible (2002)
Gaspar Noé's Irreversible picked up some well-deserved notoriety for its centerpiece, a gasp-inducing nine-minute single-take sequence in which Jo Prestia anally violates Monica Bellucci at knifepoint in a grimy (and highly symbolic) red underground tunnel, then beats her to an unrecognizable pulp. There's nothing cinematic or subversively sexy about the rape scene; it's a ghastly, raw experience that seems to go on for hours, with Bellucci's muffled cries and wide, blank eyes becoming increasingly inhuman as the process drags on. But Noé doesn't make the rest of the film any easier to take. Laying out the story in reverse chronological order, he begins with a stomach-churning act of revenge for the rape, then sets his camera spinning slowly end-over-end, preventing viewers from gathering their bearings and turning the film into a ghastly carnival ride. Throughout the film, his shocking content and his startling intimacy with his characters make for a strikingly vivid, immersive, intense experience, but it's a singularly exhausting one as well.
14. Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Graphic rape scenes are tough enough to sit through without squirming, but the brutal assaults in Boys Don't Cry make repeat viewings of the film an act of psychic self-abuse. Based on the real-life tragedy of transgender 21-year-old Brandon Teena—played with haunting depth by Hilary Swank—Boys is relentless in its portrayal of barbaric bigotry in small-town Nebraska. After Swank starts a romantic relationship with Chloë Sevigny's Lana Tisdel, Lana's redneck friends forcibly expose Teena as a biological female, then savagely rape her before the hatred escalates to an inevitably horrific end. Just as sickening as the violence, though, is the complicity of Lana's mother—who calls Teena "it" and ultimately gives the boys sanction to "clean up" the situation—and the outright antagonism (bordering on titillation) of the hick sheriff who grills Teena after the rape. The fact that the film's events are based on truth—and the lingering attachment Boys Don't Cry has to the hate-fueled murder of Matthew Shepherd around the time of its release—only magnifies its gut-crawling impact.
15. Grave Of The Fireflies (1988)
From the opening scene showing 14-year-old protagonist Seita dying on a train-station floor as harried travelers look on bemusedly, it's clear that Grave Of The Fireflies isn't going to be easy to watch. An animated Japanese film as visually beautiful as it is emotionally draining, Fireflies finds tragedy in the horrors of war and the dangers of human pride. The story of two Japanese siblings orphaned during the firebombing of their village during World War II, Grave draws out the suffering of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko over 88 quietly horrifying minutes as they struggle, and eventually fail, to survive in a bleak, war-torn landscape. In spite of its dark subject matter, Fireflies is brightly colored and peppered with sweetly innocent moments between brother and sister, making their eventual fates all the more disturbing.
16. When The Wind Blows (1986)
This deceptively sweet little British animated feature emphasizes the cost of war on a very personal level, by observing a quiet rural couple preparing for impending nuclear conflict, then slowly dying of radiation poisoning afterward. Naïvely accepting everything their government pamphlets tell them (though they don't understand much of what they're told, and remain sure that since they can't see or feel any radiation, it can't possibly be hurting them), they fumble through their days, gently squabbling and supporting each other in homey old-married fashion without comprehending either the scope or the causes of the fight that's killing them from afar. Perhaps the saddest part is their conviction that nuclear war will be no different from World War II, which they lived through, and that if they just tough it out and tighten their belts, they can get through lethal radiation poisoning the way they got through wartime shortages. Much like Grave Of The Fireflies, When The Wind Blows is adorable in its personal, knowing details, and excruciating in its big picture.
17. Leaving Las Vegas (1996)
It's been a long fall for Nicolas Cage, from celebrated Best Actor Oscar winner a mere decade ago to the star of Next, Ghost Rider, and (tee-hee, "How'd it get burned?") The Wicker Man. It's honestly hard to remember at this point what a revelation he was in his Oscar-winning role in Leaving Las Vegas, as a failed screenwriter pointedly setting out to drink himself to death. The film, written and directed by Stormy Monday's Mike Figgis, is more consciously polished and Hollywood-y than most of the films on this list, but it has much the same quality of unstintingly, aggressively delving into just how miserable human beings can get. It isn't enough, for instance, that co-star Elisabeth Shue is trapped in a degrading life as a Vegas prostitute. It isn't enough that her best friend is an abusive, suicidal drunk who seems content to drag her down with him. It isn't enough when she gets gang-raped, and subsequently evicted from her home by landlords clearly uncomfortable with the disreputable appearance of a bruised-up, limping rape victim. No, she actually has to get mocked and abused on her way home after the rape, as her taxi driver, noticing how gingerly she's moving, asks if she got "a back-door delivery you weren't expecting," then tells her she was asking for it by dressing the way she does. Only Figgis' glittery, somber direction and the leads' stellar performances turn this wallow in miserablism into something sadly poetic.
18. Jonestown: The Life And Death Of Peoples Temple (2006)
This is a sad, chilling documentary about the rise and fall of psychopathic cult leader Jim Jones's People's Temple. Back home in Indiana, Jones had a morbid fascination with death and charismatic religion as early as age 5. He displayed an admirable acceptance of people of color, but he also killed small animals to serve as subjects for death rituals he conducted, a disturbing trait not uncommonly associated with adult personality leanings toward callous violence.
Untrained in the ministry, he nonetheless started his own church in Indiana - an offshoot of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) - while still in his early 20s, later, in 1965, moving it west to a rural commune-like setting in Ukiah, in Northern California, when he was 34, where he also renamed the church People's Temple Full Gospel Church.
After 9 years, in 1974 he moved the church again, this time to San Francisco, where he ingratiated himself with local politicos like George Moscone and Willie Brown, and, in return for his support of Moscone for Mayor, Jones was appointed to the city's housing commission. By 1977 Jones had the itch to move again, and this time his church bought a large tract of land in the interior of Guyana, in northwestern South America. There a settlement, Jonestown, was rapidly established to permanently house over 1,000 church members. In November, 1978, after receiving complaints that all was not well in Jonestown, that people were being forcibly separated from loved ones back home and more or less held hostage, a California Congressman, Leo Ryan, made a trip to Jonestown to see for himself what was going on.
Ryan never returned, for he was shot and killed on the aircraft runway at Jonestown by armed stooges of Jones's, on orders to do so because Jones feared that Ryan would bring trouble if allowed to return to the States. Later that same day, November 18, 1978, Jones used his extensive PA system to order all of his supplicants to take a cyanide drink, to escape the misery that would befall Jonestown once authorities came in large numbers, to go on over to the other side, i.e., presumably to Heaven, where they would find peace.
911 church members died that day, many infants and children given poison by their parents, who then also took the poison drink to create possibly the largest mass suicide in history. Some who did not take poison were, like Rep. Ryan, shot to death. This was also the apparent cause of death for Jones himself. Another 80 members were away on some sort of field trip and were spared.
This is the fifth and perhaps most unusual of director Stanley Nelson's documentaries, which always concern race and the African-American condition (his prior feature films have taken up black press journalists; Marcus Garvey; Oaks Bluff, a black summer community on Martha's Vineyard; and the musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock).
Nelson's interest in Jonestown is connected with the fact that a majority of Jones's supplicants were black. Jones pandered to the suffering of poor blacks and whites alike. He also had sex with many women in the church, and even offered to sodomize anyone - female or male - who asked for or wanted this kind of connection to him, and apparently many did.
Nelson's approach here is intensely personal. He intercuts archival footage - of Jones's life, his activities and various stages in the development of his church - with contemporary interviews of persons who lost loved ones in Guyana. There are no talking heads: no sociologists, no academics who study religious cults, not a single mental health professional to educate us here. Nelson doesn't want us to understand the root causes of this tragedy; he wants us to feel the pain, the grief that this horrible and senseless loss of life wrought, just to feed the craving for power that was obviously Jones's main source of sustenance. It is an agonizing story to witness. My grades
19. S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)
Though they take drastically different approaches, the Jim Jones documentary Jonestown and S21 are both far too intense and draining for repeat viewing. S21 coldly but powerfully appraises the devastating aftereffects of totalitarianism through the firsthand stories of survivors of Khmer Rouge terror. Jonestown, meanwhile, traces the tragic rise and fall of Jim Jones, a fiery idealist and social activist corrupted by power. People's Temple attains an almost unbearable intensity in a heart-stopping climax that draws extensively on audio footage miraculously documenting Jones' endgame strategy of poisoned Kool-Aid and mass suicide. It's as close to being there as humanly possible.
20. The Last House On The Left (1972)
Taxi Driver is considered the definitive rebuke of '70s vigilante movies, but it's a laugh-a-minute joy ride next to the vengeful depravity depicted in The Last House On The Left. Drawing from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Wes Craven's brilliantly unwatchable first feature is a no-holds-barred depiction of the rape and murder of two teenage girls by a pack of hippie lunatics, and the graphic revenge the girls' parents enact on the murderers. Last House looks cheap and amateurish, which adds to its snuff-film-style realism. Never has the gulf between "great film" and "enjoyable" been so wide.
21. Million Dollar Baby (2004)
The first three-quarters of Million Dollar Baby play like an old-fashioned sports movie, focusing on the heartwarming father-daughter dynamic between coach Clint Eastwood and boxer Hilary Swank. Then (spoiler alert!) Swank suffers a horrible accident in the ring, and Million Dollar Baby is suddenly rich with ripped-from-the-headlines relevance as Eastwood wrestles with the question of whether he should euthanize his surrogate daughter. The decision is appropriately gut-wrenching, and Eastwood's direction is always tasteful, but who wants to ponder the difficulty of putting a loved one out of their misery if fate doesn't require it?
22. United 93 (2006)
Writer-director Paul Greengrass dramatizes the events of September 11 on the ground and in the air with a "you are there" veracity that's gut-wrenching and surprisingly probative. From the initial confusion to the panicked response, United 93 explains what the whole last six years have been like, from shock to violence to exhaustion. But Greengrass' refusal to insert any kind of distancing effects means that viewers get to relive every second of sick horror from one of the worst days any of us will ever experience. A lot of Americans didn't want to see United 93 even once, and it was hard to blame them.
23. Lilya 4-Ever (2002)
Just prior to Lilya 4-Ever, Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson made Together, a movie so generous in spirit that a lot of its fans found this follow-up, a comparatively bleak story of a teenage Russian sex slave, too tough to take. Actually, Lilya follows logically from Together as another profound illustration of how people need people. (A little familial support would've prevented most of the movie's string of tragedies.) But in spite of a spectacular lead performance by Oksana Akinshina—and a lyrical final scene that tries to put a happy spin on human misery—Lilya 4-Ever essentially asks its audience to watch the hopes of a bright, pretty girl get crushed one by one. It's powerful stuff that lingers in the memory so strongly that a second viewing may not even be necessary.
24. Nil By Mouth (1997)
Gary Oldman has openly said that he appears in dreck like Air Force One because Hollywood paychecks let him fund his own indie films. So far, though, his only writing-directing project is Nil By Mouth, a gritty, grueling drama in Mike Leigh mode. Like Irreversible, it centers on a protracted, nauseating act of violence against a woman, framed within a nervy, talky plot. But Nil By Mouth is less story-driven; it mostly captures, intimately and unsparingly, the details of working-class life in South London, among addicts and alcoholics. It's an impressively immediate, immersive film, but a hard one to sit through, thanks to its direct look at physical and emotional abuse. Then again, the accents are so dense, and the dialogue flies so fast and furious, that it may be necessary to watch it twice just to follow what's going on. Sometimes even the most exhausting films have to be watched more than once.
