The cure to my depression lies within these films

I feel really down right now. My copy of Star Wars A New Hope just broke. I'm not happy with my life at the moment and am having trouble sleeping. I haven't been watching as many films lately and I think this may be the cause of my sadness. So here's the cure! Behold:

Big Trouble In Little China
Back to the Future
Back to the Future part 2
Back to the Future part 3
Blade
Blade 2
The Big Lebowski
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Evil Dead 2
From Dusk Til Dawn 3
High Fidelity
The Ninth Gate
Pitch Black
Pulp Fiction
The Return of the Living Dead
Robocop
Reservoir Dogs
The Thing
True Romance
Total Recall
Wonder Boys
Face/Off
The Matrix
A Better Tomorrow part 2
Heavy Metal
Mallrats
Lifeforce
The Color of Money

Plus.. anything new that I pick up (which, if anything, will either be T2- Extreme or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back)

Anyone else use movies to cure their blues?

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"You will taste man flesh!" - Saruman

When life just sucks and it won't go away, I usually turn to these classics:

Wayne's World
Blazing Saddles
Beavis and Butthead Do America
Ghost Busters
Spaceballs
South Park
Howard the Duck
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Evil Dead Trilogy (The best trilogy EVER!)
Cannibal The Musical
Fritz the Cat
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
Happy Gilmore
The Muppet Movie

and the ultimate in movie "Comfort Food":

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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"You, me, everyone...we are all made of star stuff." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

https://shawnsmovienight.blogspot.com/

My Blue Heaven (1990), Kelly's Heroes (1970) and Wayne's World (1992) are the best movies but a surtin aussie slapstick show called The Adventures of Lano & Woodley always cheers me up

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It's a god-awful small affair, To the girl with, the mousy hair, But her mummy is yelling "No", and her daddy has told her to go, But her friend is nowhere to be seen, Now she walks through her sunken dream, To the seat with the clearest view, And she's hooked to the silver screen, But the film is a saddening bore, For she's lived it ten times or more...

I'm feeling a bit better now that I've seen A Better Tomorrow part 2 and eaten a bunch of pizza pockets and a ham/cheese/lettuce sandwich.

This defiantly what you should be watching if you are depressed, stay away from sad, violent, and ones about peoples emotional struggles until you feel better, and that is an order.

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

My first forgotten post bump!! I feel like I am "becoming"...
Red dragon reference, anyone?

I go the exact opposite when I'm down. Usually, I break out The English Patient, Moulin Rouge!, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Michael Clayton, Meet Joe Black, Splipstream, or some other emotional roller coaster that really sets the depressions in right. =/

As to music, I'll have Chris Cornell's Euphoria Morning, Songbook; QoTSA's Like Clockwork; Tricky's Maxinquaye; or David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Hours, and Heathen all on loop for days.

Iderno. It becomes like a pathway of experiences with these movies and albums acting as a guide. In a way. They magnify the emotional wave and kind of all focus the chaos. Like...just focussing on the one thing instead of the normal spastic ramblings from day to day. It's oddly comforting to slow down like that, but damn it can wear me out.

Really the only thing that clears my head is driving. If I can get a solid hour+ in highway speeds, then i can usually organize my thoughts, clear my head arguing with myself over whatever has me hung up until I can resolve it (or at least rationalize it), and just calm the hell down.

Eh. To pull this back to movies/tv, when I was a kid, late night in bed I'd have racing thoughts from one topic to another. The only way I could organize them all was to imagine each train-of-thought as a different television station. Then I could close my eyes and turn my head just so, as if I were clicking through an old 13-channel rotary dial on the old console sets. With each turn of my head, I'd visualize the mental channel changing. I would then cycle through until I found a "channel" of that classic Poltergeist white noise static. Then I'd fall asleep.

Watching the dark comedy The Cable Guy KINDA freaked me out a bit lol.

This might help

https://www.movieforums.com/communit...ght=laugh+matt

'Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain' might help a little bit

As the tagline suggests...

In my experience, and as odd as it seems, comedic films always made me feel worse. For me, the more depressing a film is, so long as it's a great film, the less depressed I feel. Granted, a horribly depressing affair that's horrible (e.g. Deer Hunter), makes me feel worse. I watch stuff like Ran, Ikiru and My Way (2011) to feel better, among others, and feel the best. I also watch fluffy films, like Good Bad Weird and Good Bad Ugly, or deep films, such as the Human Condition trilogy.

If you have Netflix, check out Big Eyes, No Country for Old Men, Good Bad Weird, Burton's Sweeney Todd, El Dorado, and Quiz Show.

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Thanks again, Mr Portridge.

Yea so this is an interesting topic. Do the more serious, darker and morbid films help? Are they easier to relate to in terms of the tone, the characters, the feel. Is it good to see a struggle different or similar to your own, as struggling is a part of life we can chose to accept. I would say, opting for a comedy when you are in a depressed mood is harder than watching something darker in my experience. Harder meaning, if I'm depressed I would feel less inclined, less drawn to a comedy. But choosing the opposite does it just continue that negative environment. No way do I think you can just put on a comedy and bam goes depression, I feel film is a very short term fix regardless but sometimes you need that a short burst of inspiration which can be attained from film. Or maybe its just returning to the movies you love, be they comedy or serious. I have a preference for the serious as you can see by my top 10. I

Even after 14 years it's still good advice.

I like good comedy movies when I'm down like There's Something About Mary and Coming To America.

They say laughter is the best medicine. I guess that's still true. Very holistic.

Loved Big Eyes. I think those are all good transitional movies for me.

Generally, I'm a silly person and love silly movies (Kung Pow is in my top 10 ffs!), but when I'm down, comedy is the last place I want to spend my time. I don't know why. It's like a weird positive feedback loop. I feel down, so I seek out downer movies/music to exaggerate the experience. Then I slip farther down that hole. Eventually I reach a point where I almost separate myself from my thoughts, and become an observer of the depression in way. The only way I can describe it is like I become a third party, analyzing my own emotional reactions to whatever stimuli I place in front of me. I'll create little mental fantasies of this or that. Odd little fictional tragedies that I'll project myself into. Most times, I get story or song ideas from the experience. Poetry, lyrics, whatever. When I clear it all I'll pull up my laptop and start writing while the anxiety is still fresh.

Eh. It reads way worse than it really is! I'm only detailing to try to translate it. I don't have local friends that can relate (at least none that will admit it), so I'm always curious how others deal with similar experiences. Whether they find it interesting, productive, or defeating.

It always seems to resolve itself and usually I come out of it inspired to create one thing or another.

Comedy though would probably irritate me in that mode.

I think that is partly the reason for me. Watching a depressing movie both exaggerates my own emotion, and at the same time it sort of helps transition the self-indulgent side of it all, helping me focus on a character's plight. From there, I start to imagine myself as a character in my own story and then the depression becomes more approachable. If that makes sense? I'm just exploring it all now as I type, trying to translate as I said in my post from a moment ago. But I do think there is something to that. The movie removes me from myself, then I can self-reflect and look at my own depression from a distance.

Thanks for the replies everyone! Really, I'm very curious about how others feel, observe, and deal with their own demons. Of course this is about movies, at its heart. A bridge. So yes. Thanks for the replies

Well said sir.

I was trying to see if we had a depression thread. This is the closest thing. Probably not going to start a new one.

I would never describe myself as someone who’s experienced depression, but dear mother has had it non-stop since I was born, maybe partly because I was born. And I’ve been kind of wondering, wait for it, whether it’s even ethical, whatever that means, or desirable to have kids if you know you are depressed for life.

They won’t make you happy, save for a short-term oxytocin boost that I think wears off and largely goes unnoticed by depressed people anyway (the kind that were really NEVER EVER HAPPY, as Chris says in one of my favourite films of all time, Resolution).

The average kid is likely to be unhappy too, because they’ll feel guilty for not managing to cheer up the permanently depressed parent - a losing battle, if there ever was one. If the kid doesn’t try to make the parent happy (read “feel better”), that’s even worse, there must be something wrong with the kid, right?

And overall, it just hit me like a ton of bricks that it’s the most selfish thing in the world to have a kid anyway, and it’s a billion times more selfish if you know you’ve always been depressed. Not post-partum, always. I just nearly wrote a very non-pc thing, but anyway.

Anyway. What I deal with through film is not depression but fear. I find watching something, as long as it’s good, not necessarily horror or morbid stuff as suggested above, usually helps keep my mind busy, and that’s kind of good enough.

As noted above, yes, it is a short-term fix, but if you do it non-stop, it works. And the reason I think I’m not depressed and never have been is that I always am engrossed in films, more so or less. When it comes to film, I’ve never experienced the apathy characteristic of depression. So I guess there’s some good news.

But I’ve definitely been very much off since COVID began (fun fact, I started writing “since depression began”, speaking of Freudian slips) and I find I don’t have anything to watch that will hook me. I guess this sort of stuff doesn’t strictly belong here, but what can you do. I do feel acute resentment towards my depressed parent, which I’ve never noticed before, or at least never let myself acknowledge.

The two things that destroyed my life in 2019 and 2020 (and that I'm unlikely to survive) also destroyed a huge, long-term cinephilia project. So I've been watching much fewer movies since then than I did all my life before, despite a solid corpus at hand. Films don't represent a help in my case, they have become a symbol of... loss ? For lack of better terms. Like movies come too late, or even new movies represent/belong to the past.

That's why I don't really post in new-movies-you've-watched or last-dvd-you-bought kind of threads. I don't really have a present-and-future approach to films. I'm more here in a weird retrospective inventory mindset.

In the light of this, I’m sorry if I sounded harsh during recent exchanges. You never know what people are going through, and blah, blah, blah. I guess what I can say is a retrospective mindset has its benefits.

I used to discuss film with someone who died in 2018 and it has never been the same. I think that’s partly why I came here, because I no longer had that. It does create a refrain of “They would have thought xyz, but Run came out too late for them to see it.”

Anyway, I don’t think what people usually say in such cases is worth ****, so I’ll just say I hope you keep going.

You didn't, and the issue may be the opposite : i've lost a lot of sensitivity, have become a bit of a galaxy quest rock monster, so i'm in danger to getting too harsh myself. Which i dislike (especially as this process horrifies me in other people). A bit of nostalgia for my humanity and fear to lose my convenient moral high ground.

I’ve had that a lot after trauma. But then, I’m generally an uncaring person, I say that as rationally as possible. Inasmuch as I’ve tried to “fix” my mother’s mood, that was mainly for my own comfort and benefit.

In general, I find it incredibly difficult to have any kind of contact or interaction with human beings when it’s not to do with film/books. But I remember periods of time when I was totally desensitised to everything. I used to like it, actually, really wish it came back. But it’s out of your hands.

I don’t know, what scares me a bit is I’m not exactly looking forward to the future. That’s the sort of understatement I’d make. I’m not suicidal, if anything, I find myself thinking a lot that I’m afraid of dying, but overall, I kind of don’t want to wake up in a sense.

I just changed jobs, I have an unbelievable salary that I haggled for, rationally speaking, I should be fine, but it’s getting worse. I don’t know what I’ll do with any of it in future, even the savings in my bank account scare me. I’m thinking of investing it all, which I do anyway, but in reasonable monthly amounts. I’m also very aware I’m not in the right headspace to make that kind of decision.

And yeah, I just feel an immense amount of resentment at the idea that it’ll only get worse with both her and myself, seeing as this stuff tends to be hereditary.