24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice

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Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright
Oh and the one movie above all others that should have been on that list but wasn't- Threads. The totally realistic, unimaginably horrific depiction of an armageddon that at the time always seemed days away from happening for real scared me to my soul and scarred me forever.
I have never seen Threads, but have heard about it I think, wasn't that the BBC created mini series? Sort of like The Day After, but done a hell of a lot better, and far more realistic?
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London To Brighton was too much for my girlfriend to watch. We had to turn it off a quater way through. I thought i'd be able to handle it as I have a genuine interest in films that excessively depict characters that are paedophiles/rapists/prostitution etc.

I thought that I was gonna sweep through the film with ease, but even I found it uncomfortbly hard to watch. There are many scenes and just the overall tone of the film that gives the word gritty a whole new meaning all together. Nasty film.

My girlfriend had a pretty hard time watching Dead Man's Shoes, which is understandable if you know the ordeal that one of the characters goes through. When I watched it, I handled it by thinking "Paddy is gonna kick some arse". And he did so. In style.



It may seem like it doesn't have much entertainment value, but I'd rather see a film like this twice than one in which gratuitous violence is there as pure entertainment.
Lord, I didn't mean for my questioning of Boys Don't Cry to be in any way an endorsement of gratuitous violence! But I think I understand what you mean.

Like I said, I understand BDC is extremely well-acted, but I remember reading about the case in the newspapers and you know from the start where the movie is headed, and that just makes me uncomfortable.

Funny thing--you can make a violent movie about something way in the past, like Fistful of Dollars or Glory!, or one way in the future like Star Wars or Outpost, or something entirely imagined, like Lord of the Rings, and the violence doesn't bother me. But make a film about something that really happened in my lifetime (1943-2007) like Charles Starkweather or the Holocaust or Boys Don't Cry, and I usually can't watch it. Too much of a squirm factor.



When I first saw the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, I eventually started thinking to myself, "My God, when is this going to stop?" Not because I thought it was bad cinema, but because it kept driving home the point of what it was like, on a very individual level, what it was like to be there (think the quick scene of the guy going back to pick up his own arm that had been blown off - granted, that hopefully never actually happened, but it could have).
Just goes to show how people see things differently. When I saw that scene, all I thought was, "Oh, look, there's an extra with one arm tucked inside his shirt and carrying a plastic fake in his other hand." Most of that film did not look at all realistic to me; in fact, the most realistic thing in the first few minutes with the Normandy landing was the immense noise--you couldn't hear a word anyone was saying.

Generally, however, I was extremely disappointed in that movie after all of the early hoopla over how realisitic it was and how Hanks and the other leading actors had gone through training under military experts to look authenic in their movements. I found most of the movie to be very unrealistic and occasionally historically incorrect, and the patrol rambled about like a flock of sheep.

That said, however, there was one extremely powerful and moving scene in that movie, at the end of the hand-to-hand combat where the German soldier has the American solder down and is slowly slipping his knife into him. The American begs in a whisper, "No, No!" and the German answers in a whisper, "Shuuush, schlafen, schlafen." ("Shuuush, sleep, sleep,") as though speaking to a child. To me, that was the one really authenic and moving scene in that whole movie, but still not enough to make that film worth seeing.



I have never seen Threads, but have heard about it I think, wasn't that the BBC created mini series? Sort of like The Day After, but done a hell of a lot better, and far more realistic?
That's the one (though it was originally a TV movie I think, it may have been shown in pieces at times). It was amongst the most realistic movies you'll see (including, for example, chunks of truly horrifying real government public information films on what to do in the event of an attack), and so utterly frightening that it was a real and continuing effort to block fear of nuclear war out of my head as much as I could for the next several years. I wish I hadn't seen it. But god, as an anti-war statement, you couldn't do much 'better' than to show that war as thoroughly and well as they did.



I've seen quite a few of them more than twice such as

Requiem For A Dream
Dancer in the Dark
Audition
Irreversible
United 93
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The Reaping 7/10
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