Most Depressing movies you've seen?

[scooter]

My wife says that the movie "Frances Farmer" has to be included on this list.

edit: actually movie title was "Frances".

 

[jamespowers]

I must, respectfully, disagree. I like Cash's version, but I prefer the original. There's just a raw power in that version (which I think partly comes from it being sung my the man who wrote the words) that is outstanding to me.

This piano man stuff?!:
[video=youtube_share;AvJKVKglIRs]http://youtu.be/AvJKVKglIRs[/video]
Reminds me of Billy Joel. lol lol lol

 

[W-D Forties]

The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. An ironic title if ever there was one.

Atonement is depressing, but it is the good, miserable, wallowing kind that you need sometimes!

 

[sheeplady]

Personally, AI gloomed me out. In fact, the whole audience seemed depressed when the lights came up. We're survived by glittery androids?

AI made me so incredibly sad, I think I cried in the theater. Especially the ending where they bring his mother back. At least when she is dead she has a little bit of compassion.

 

[Flicka]

This piano man stuff?!:
Reminds me of Billy Joel. lol lol lol

Sir, you have dared insult my favorite musician in the vilest way. Name your seconds and I shall meet you at dawn near the Bois de Boulogne.

I suggest you put your affairs in order.

Monsieur, je suis &c,

/F

 

[jamespowers]

Sir, you have dared insult my favorite musician in the vilest way. Name your seconds and I shall meet you at dawn near the Bois de Boulogne.

I suggest you put your affairs in order.

Monsieur, je suis &c,

/F

:rofl:

 

[herringbonekid]

...And "Crashing Waves" from the UK, same series.

can't find it. do you mean 'Breaking the Waves' by Lars Von Trier ? it would fit right in to this thread.

 

[jamespowers]

Love Story---if it wasn't just sickening dreck I would be more depressed from watching it but by the end you are kind of rooting for nature to take its course. PU! It stunk.

 

[Worf]

Sir, you have dared insult my favorite musician in the vilest way. Name your seconds and I shall meet you at dawn near the Bois de Boulogne.

I suggest you put your affairs in order.

Monsieur, je suis &c,

/F

SPEW!!!! There goes a good cup of joe! Ha, this is the first time a thread of mine has resulted in a duel! Pistols or swords? Can I bring popcorn? Well played Madam.... well played.

Worf

 

[scottyrocks]

The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. An ironic title if ever there was one.

Atonement is depressing, but it is the good, miserable, wallowing kind that you need sometimes!

Come to think of it, I Am Legend was pretty depressing, too. Apocalypse movies seem to be coming hard and fast thee days.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Love Story---if it wasn't just sickening dreck I would be more depressed from watching it but by the end you are kind of rooting for nature to take its course. PU! It stunk.

That's cause Algore wrote it while taking time off from inventing the internet.

 

[jamespowers]

That's cause Algore wrote it while taking time off from inventing the internet.

That figures.

 

[MisterCairo]

can't find it. do you mean 'Breaking the Waves' by Lars Von Trier ? it would fit right in to this thread.

Yes, that's it. My sub-conscious was obviously in self-preservation mode.....

Quoted first post has since been edited - I'd originally written "Crashing Waves"

 

[Andykev]

Wow. Close to 100 posts here, and no one has mentioned one of the absolutely "MOST DEPRESSING" films ever, ever made.

Angela's Ashes - 1999

"Based on the best selling autobiography by Irish expat Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes follows the experiences of young Frankie and his family as they try against all odds to escape the poverty endemic in the slums of pre-war Limerick."

It is filmed "dark", it rains the whole time, the children die, one after another. Disease, poverty, filth. Depressing.


And Worf, "Mississippi Burning" is a MUST SEE. Gene Hackman, William Dafoe, and Francis McDormand, R. Lee Emery...all give great performances. It is one of my favorite movies. It shows the racism, KKK, and the "code" in 1960's Mississippi...and how the FBI and Justice Department (the Kennedy Boys) come in to find the murdered civil rights workers. In this movie, the "good guys" win one for civil rights. I found it to be accurate as to how things might have been during those horrible, early days. Don't discount seeing it. It is certainly NOT a depressing movie...it shows the fight for justice.

 

[Touchofevil]

"The Road" is pretty bleak.

 

[Corky]

INCHON was The Most Depressing Movie, no question about it. But worse yet...

INCHON was produced by the Reverend Sun Yung Moon to glorify MacArthur's invasion of the same name during the Korean War.

A really awful, mean-spirited, cheap, clunker of a movie imagined and made for all the wrong reasons.

The plot hinges on an actual incident: the Inchon harbor has the highest and most dangerous tides on Earth. To pull off the landing, some poor bastards had to sneak ashore, capture the lighthouse, turn on the light and hold it against all comers for as long as it took to get an invasion force ashore.

This was before the Canonization of Special Forces, so they just picked the six toughest Marines they could find and gave them the pre-war lighthouse keeper and a rubber boat, and told them to take him in. And with a bit of luck, they pulled it off. It remains one of the greatest feats of arms in the long and storied history of the Marine Corps and it deserves a far better movie.

OK, so the Reverend Moon's movie INCHON opens in Century City in Los Angeles, and every member of Moon's Unification Church is beating the bushes to get anybody in the media to attend the premiere.

A pair of brothers who were techies at the game design house where I was working got wind of the event and scored some tickets and asked me if I wanted to come along.

Normally I would have declined, but they were bringing along their Dad, an old Marine Vet from the Korean War...

...AND THEIR DAD WAS ONE OF THOSE SIX MARINES WHO TOOK THE INCHON LIGHTHOUSE.

So we went to the premiere and the lights went down. I looked over and saw my pals' Dad literally beaming. The credits came on and he was undoubtedly expecting something terrific, something along the lines of The Guns of Navarone or The Sands Of Iwo Jima, but alas...

What followed the credits was was one of the worst, if not THE single worst movie ever.

It was unimaginably bad. Worse structurally than Heaven's Gate.

More clueless about a historical war than The Green Berets.

More ineptly made than Howard The Duck.

All I can say is that when we walked out of the theater, my friends' Dad was in a state of shock.

They took the single greatest thing he had ever done and made a movie about it which was truly beneath contempt.

From the IMDB Website:

Inchon! is infamous as the $45m flop movie the Moonies made after their plans to make a musical about the life of Jesus with Elvis Presley fell through after The King ate one cheeseburger too many. To be brutally honest, divorced from the stories of the staggering behind the scenes incompetence, the film isn't the inept laugh-riot you might expect. Indeed, its biggest problem is that it's just so damn mediocre. It even occasionally flirts with competence – there's one scene on a bridge crowded with refugees that has to be destroyed before the communists can take it that's pretty good when the movie stars aren't involved, there's some spectacular footage behind the main titles, Bruce Surtees' cinematography is good, and Jerry Goldsmith's score is very impressive. Its worst crime (aside from the death of an extra in a shot that appears to still be in the film) is that by showing the North Koreans as stereotyped monsters machine-gunning any extra they meet in every scene, it does tend to trivialize the very real atrocities committed by both sides during the Korean War: Tae Guk Gi it ain't.

It's when the stars and story are in the foreground that the problems really start: nobody's here for anything more than a paycheck, and the script – from the author of The Green Berets and The Happy Hooker - wouldn't pass muster in the 50s. Ben Gazzara walks through it like a man who can't believe he's being paid this much for this s*** ("I'm a Marine – that's a special kind of cat"), Jacqueline Bisset gives the worst performance of her career ("I'm just a woman with five orphaned children in the middle of a war"), Toshiro Mifune proves once again he can't act in English, David Janssen seems to be there simply to fill in chunks of MacArthur's backstory that the writers couldn't work in any other way, Rex Reed once again shows that for a movie critic he really has lousy taste in movies to appear in, and Richard Roundtree's just there to chauffeur the white folks from setpiece to setpiece. This being a Terence Young film, there are also a handful of badly dubbed Bond movie veterans among the smaller parts – Anthony Dawson, Peter Burton (the original Q) and Gabriele Ferzetti among them. There is also some perverse satisfaction to be had from spotting blacklisted Mickey Knox turning up as an American admiral in such an unashamedly anti-communist film.

That said, the three hour cut unveiled at Cannes WAS much funnier, especially in the notorious scene where Jesus appeared in the clouds to persuade a reluctant pilot to bomb the Commies (no, seriously), which was removed when the film was cut down to a 141-minute version that premiered in 1981 two years after shooting finished before being immediately shelved (though it has subsequently had a few screenings on an obscure Christian TV channel). That itself is longer than the eventual 105-minute theatrical version from 1982 that cut all of David Janssen's exposition-heavy part and luckily took all of Rex Reed's scenes (as an airsick music critic covering the war!) with them.

The one area where the movie DOES deliver comedy gold – and how – is any scene with Laurence Olivier as MacArthur. Made up to look like a wax museum model of a freshly embalmed Skeletor with a badly dyed comb over and for some reason using an accent that sounds like Rod Steiger doing W.C. Fields, it's a staggering display of bad acting, eye-rolling and scenery chewing: Variety may have found his performance convincing, but his briefing on the landing alone could be used as a masterclass for ham actors. For real kitsch value, you need only to look at Olivier's tender scenes with Mrs MacArthur – "I'm off to save this world. Well –" "I know – you will return. But in time for dinner!" – or his faithful puppy dog Al Haig, played with boyishly enthusiastic incompetence by John Pochna. Despite being very dead for a very long time, MacArthur himself reportedly told them to cast Olivier via a psychic, but it's rather easier to imagine Dugout Doug repeatedly beating Olivier's head against the pearly gates to this very day for making him look such a buffoon.

 

[Corky]

Andykev, on the accuracy of "Mississippi Burning"...

Andykev states:

And Worf, "Mississippi Burning" is a MUST SEE. Gene Hackman, William Dafoe, and Francis McDormand, R. Lee Emery...all give great performances. It is one of my favorite movies. It shows the racism, KKK, and the "code" in 1960's Mississippi...and how the FBI and Justice Department (the Kennedy Boys) come in to find the murdered civil rights workers. In this movie, the "good guys" win one for civil rights. I found it to be accurate as to how things might have been during those horrible, early days. Don't discount seeing it. It is certainly NOT a depressing movie...it shows the fight for justice.

​

Sorry to disagree, but I find your take on the accuracy of "Mississippi Burning" more than a bit depressing.

My opinion is supported by the quote below from the Wikipedia article on the film:

..The film has been criticized by many, including historian Howard Zinn, for its alleged fictionalization of history. Parker defended his film by reminding critics that it was a dramatization, not a documentary. However, critics complained about the film as though it were purporting to be a historical reconstruction rather than a work of drama broadly inspired by events.

According to Zinn: While FBI agents are portrayed as heroes who descend upon the town by the hundreds, in reality the FBI and the Justice Department only reluctantly protected civil rights workers and protesters and reportedly witnessed beatings without intervening. It was also criticized due to its portrayal of southern African Americans as passive victims. The image of African Americans as passive also shapes the film's reenactment of the assassinations; New York Times film reviewer wrote that the film's alleged distortions amounted to a "cinematic lynching" of history.


According to the testimony of Colombo crime family contract killer Gregory S. Scarpa Jr., the cinematic version may have come closer to the truth than the official FBI story out of Washington, D.C. His story has been supported in several news accounts by unnamed FBI agents purported to have worked on the MIBURN case, as well as Scarpa's own FD-209 reports, which were released and made public after his death. Gregory S. Scarpa Jr. has said that his father, Colombo crime family capo and Top Echelon FBI informant Gregory Scarpa Sr., offered his services in the case to his FBI handler, Anthony Villano. He made a three-day trip to Mississippi where, posing as a member of the national Ku Klux Klan himself, he and an FBI helper kidnapped a local appliance salesman and Ku Klux Klan member who was viewed by the FBI as a potential weak link in the case. They took the man to a remote location, tied him to a chair, and interrogated him. The first two times he told the story, the agent and Scarpa believed that the man was lying. On the third try, Scarpa pulled his gun on the suspect. "He said he took a gun and put in the guy's mouth and said: For the last time, where are the bodies or I'll blow your head off", Gregory S. Scarpa Jr. testified. Events similar to Scarpa Jr.'s story are reenacted in the film. The KKK member finally confessed to the location of the bodies, Scarpa Jr. said.


One such report, written in January 1966, states that Scarpa was later used as a "special" — the FBI term for a nonagent working for the Bureau in the murder of Vernon Dahmer, the head of the NAACP office in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dahmer's house was torched by the Ku Klux Klan, and the memo states that Scarpa Sr. was sent to Hattiesburg to work on the case. However, evidence from journalist Jerry Mitchell and Illinois high school teacher Barry Bradford contradicts this account. They claim that the informant who revealed the location of the bodies was highway patrolman Maynard King, who gave the information willingly to FBI agent Joseph Sullivan.[SUP]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Burning#cite_note-The_Story_Of_The_Real_Mr._X-0[/SUP] The similarity between Scarpa's account and the film may be best explained by the fact that Scarpa's testimony was recorded some years after the film was released. Both the Justice Department and the FBI have officially declined to comment on any role Gregory Scarpa Sr. may have played in the MIBURN. In Cartha DeLoach's account of the MIBURN case in his memoir, Hoover's FBI, he does not mention Scarpa. It does say that a squad of COINTELPRO agents were sent to interview members of the Ku Klux Klan and that "many of them were big, bruising men, highly trained in the tactics of interrogation."


Cartha "Deke" DeLoach's official version is that the FBI paid for its first big break in the case, which was the location of the bodies. In his memoirs, he describes the men only as "a minister and a member of the highway patrol." DeLoach does not say how the two men knew that the three civil rights workers had been buried under twelve feet of dirt in an earthen dam on a large farm a few miles outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, but he did say that the FBI paid $30,000 for the piece of crucial information.


The statement made by "Mayor Tilman" to the FBI agents is paraphrased from a quote by U.S. Senator James Eastland, who reportedly said that when the three civil rights workers (Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman) went missing in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, "the incident is a hoax and there is no Ku Klux Klan in the state; the three have gone to Chicago," and that it was staged by the three young men to call attention to their cause. J. Edgar Hoover, who was being pressured by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was determined to break the case. He flew to Mississippi just before the first anniversary of the disappearance, which was officially regarded as a "kidnapping" to justify the FBI's involvement...

 

[Andykev]

Corky...wow. That was a lot of cut and pasting.

The movie "Mississippi Burning" was based on a historical event during the civil rights turmoil of the era. I DID NOT say the movie was factual.

Re-read my post, Sir, and you will see that I said "...how the FBI and Justice Department (the Kennedy Boys) come in to find the murdered civil rights workers. In this movie, the "good guys" win one for civil rights. I found it to be accurate as to how things might have been during those horrible, early days.

Everyone knows the movie was fictionalized. But I found it enjoyable, well acted, and like I said, "how things MIGHT have been". Never said that is HOW it was, literally, in the movie.

But..this thread is about "The Most Depressing Movie You've Seen", so did this film count as that Corky?

 

[Corky]

Andykev:

You are correct. "Mississippi Burning" did show "how things MIGHT have been",

For the record, as stated in the above post, my "Most Depressing Movie" experience was definitely INCHON.

Best regards

 

[Andykev]

Actually, another movie that I found to be depressing....in HOW it was filmed, the special effects, the cinematography.

That film (just in time for Easter week) was the "Passion of the Christ", 2005, directed by Mel Gibson.
Won the Academy award for Best Cinematography, Makeup, and Music.

A lot of controversy (what religious topic, film, story..isn't?) and discussion on this one.

The VIOLENCE (the beating of Jesus) was so brilliantly filmed, I wanted to yell "STOP BEATING HIM"! Many scenes had a very dark tone to them. But this movie was about the execution of a person deemed to be a threat to the state.

If you haven't seen it...you are missing out. I would NOT recommend this film for small(er) children. It is not the typical religious film (like "The Greatest Story Ever Told"). This film, The Passion...is very depressingly violent and graphic.