Cinemarch Madness: Intro and Nomination Round
Greetings, friends and cinephiles, and welcome to Cinemarch Madness: the TN bracket that crowns the most heartbreaking film of all time.
The idea began years ago, at a bar that doesn’t exist anymore, with a scribbled napkin list Scrapper and Couch Baron and I could never quite recreate, thanks to a discussion about Breaking the Waves and the idea of those movies that you feel lucky to have survived — the beautiful, awful movies you will never ever watch again. The ones that you love but that leave you drenched. “Difficult,” let’s call them.
Over the years it’s gone through various names and interations. “The No Hope Film Festival”; “The NC Double The Dosage”; “Two Movies Enter, The Will To Live Leaves.”
Enough already. It’s time to pick a “winner.” But we need your help.
Right now, I need your nominations — the films you consider the saddest or bleakest of all time, so I can cross-check it against my list and see if I overlooked any obvious entries. Please keep it to five (5) per comment; it’s more digestible that way. (Yes, you can re-comment.)
“I don’t know where to start/what you’re looking for!” Fair enough. I don’t either, that’s why I’m sending it to committee. Hee. Here’s the “I” entries from the list so far, for context:
Ice Storm, The
Illusionist, The
Incendies
Indian Runner, The
In the Company of Men
Irreversible
Challenging subject matter, an ending (or non-ending) that makes you queasy, an utter lack of faith in humanity, unrequited love, ravages of age…when I say it’s a tough watch, I don’t mean stuff like a seventh Transformers sequel that’s just straight-up bad. This may be a pornography/”I know it when I see it” thing, but that’s why we spitball it now, before finalizing the list.
Foreign-language and docu noms both welcome. We may have to do a separate documentary bracket, but I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.
Feel free to make your case for a non-obvious nomination in the comments. I didn’t think of Vincent and Theo as that dark, but a friend argued it onto the list; he didn’t think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was that bleak, but I insisted. I’ve ixnayed and then re-added Casablanca four times.
Once I have a master list, you’ll have a chance to choose the final 64.
Questions? Ask them. Stalking horses? Nominate them. Want a crack at writing up the match-ups? You got it; when the final bracket is set, I’ll definitely need some help. And by all means forward/RT/solicit suggestions from friends and FB. You’ve got ’til the end of the week. Let’s do this.
Tags: Cinemarch Madness Couch Baron movies
Also nominating Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a beautiful film, but I will never ever watch it again.
I had to watch Polanski’s Tess in college: he dedicates the film to the memory of Sharon Tate and then follows that with the Thomas Hardy plot.
I also once thought it would be a good idea to double-feature Mrs. Brown and Coco avant Chanel. I’m not sure those would be as depressing separately, but they were quite effective together.
Shawshank redemption
Swing Kids
Oh, boy – we just had this discussion on a message board I’m a member of, and in the end, it was a tie between “Dear Zachary” and “Grave of the Fireflies.”
For me it was The Lives of Others
+1 for Schindler’s List.
Also, Underground (the 1995 Serbian one).
My votes are for Dancer in the Dark and Requiem for a Dream.
I second the contest name “March SADness”.
Agree with Atonement.
And this is a movie I loved and would watch again, but Beasts of the Southern Wild left me absolutely drained. Maybe it’s just missing Louisiana, plus being pregnant, but I cried for about an hour after that movie ended.
I blocked Terms of Endearment from my memory; I saw it when I was 13 and it just ripped my heart out. Likewise, Boyz N The Hood just GUTTED me–when they open up Ricky’s SAT scores? Ouch.
In the animation category: most of what Don Bluth did in the late 80s. The Land Before Time (original recipe, not the sequels) and All Dogs Go To Heaven are NOT children’s movies, I don’t care who they’re marketed to. And they’re especially awful if you happen to remember that the little girl who voiced Ducky and Anne-Marie was killed by her dad in a murder-suicide.
This is bringing up all sorts of emotions. In the words of Liz Lemon, I’m going to go have to talk to some food about this.
@Liz C I apologize on behalf of my grandfather for those tears. It was the last thing he wrote before retiring from Disney.
Dead Poets Society – I’m glad I’m not the only one to mention this one. I saw it back in the day in the theater, and then never, ever again. I think it ruined me for adulthood.
In The Bedroom
Monster’s Ball
Mystic River
Million Dollar Baby
I am so cracking up at March Sadness because I’m hearing it as “March SADness” with wah-wah-waaaaah music.
Oh, and in the category of war movies alone, I nominate:
Saving Private Ryan
We Were Soldiers
The Pianist
Speaking of Disney, Lilo and Stitch.
Yes it has a happy ending, but the parts where poor Stitch is wandering around crying “LOST!” and when the older sister is singing to Lilo after hearing she’s going to lose custody? LOST IT. I think I permanently traumatized the kid sitting next to me.
And nthing Iron Giant. Superman.
“She’s So Lovely” with John Travolta, Robin Wright, and Sean Penn was so disturbing to me that I had a panic attack in the parking garage of the movie theater.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120112/
Kids
Hotel Rwanda
Schindler’s List
American History X (I keep thinking I want to see this again, and then I remember the curbing scene and the feeling passes)
Zero Dark Thirty (I sobbed in the theater when they put him in the box – no need to buy that one when it comes out)
And Quiet Flows the Don
I always say that Leaving Las Vegas and Breaking The Waves are the two most savagely depressing movies I’ve ever seen. I mean, come on, Leaving Las Vegas isn’t so much a novel as a two-hundred page suicide note. (But I wonder sometimes if it doesn’t belong more in the straight-up bad category. Simmer down, Cage! God.) And Breaking The Waves might as well be called Emily Watson Will Claw Your Heart Out Of Your Chest and Bust It Into Tiny Fragments, Just ‘Cause She Can. It’s beyond brutal.
The Champ, The Deer Hunter and Sophie’s Choice are all good choices, by which I mean I could never, ever watch them again. The Lives of Others is vivid, expertly realized, I would say, and almost unbearably bleak. The Safety of Objects I found kind of bizarrely cruel to its characters, and kind of fetishistic in its insistence on the meaninglessness of, well, everything ever. I’m not one for nihilism, I suppose.
So many others on the list I haven’t had the nerve to watch yet! Suddenly Last Summer is just plain awful.
-Seconding Out of Africa!!!
-Brian’s Song
-Hotel Rwanda
-Steel Magnolias
-A Single Man
a.k.a “My Mom didn’t listen when I told her not to watch Blue Velvet”
“NO, Mom.” “Well, you won’t like Bobby Darin after this…Bye.”
Or as a buddy proclaimed after Boys Don’t Cry: “Well THAT was the feel-good movie of the year!”
Oh, God, Jacob’s Ladder is my own personal The Shining. I was thirteen!
I’d like to second (third) Atonement and Never Let Me Go. And add The Remains of the Day and… embarrassingly, My Girl.
The Bridge (documentary)
My Girl
Stepmom
Another vote for Life is Beautiful
Another vote for Schindler’s List
“Lord of the Flies”
It’s pretty much a contraceptive all on its own.
There are some movies that gut me but that I would watch over and over because they’re so goddamned beautiful – that’s where Atonement and Legends of the Fall and Brokeback Mountain fall for me.
But I will second Sophie’s Choice, for sure.
Dolphins are my spirit animal, so I’m pretty sure The Cove would make me want to die, so I’m nominating it for this even though I’ll never see it.
Also: I choose to believe that the ending of Mysterious Skin allows for at least the possibility of hope, remote though it may be. Because I, y’know, like to be able to sleep at night.
Oh, my God, The Sweet Hereafter. So good. BUT SO DEPRESSING. I never want to see it again.
Schindler’s List
I’ve Loved You So Long (gah…)
Pretty much any Mike Leigh movie. Because there’s always one performance that’s just cringetastical in its recognizability. (I’m thinking Lesley Manville in “Another Year.” And almost any actor in Leigh’s “All of Nothing.”)
Shanghai Gesture
I’ve excluded all of the movies that I’ll rewatch (Pan’s Labryinth comes to mind), so:
Blindness
Sleepers
Blair Witch (once was more than enough)
Rome, Open City
The Seventh Seal
oh my…there are so many! Ok, these are my last 2….Mean Creek and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
Dead Poets’ Society
Schindler’s List
Closer
Million Dollar Baby (full disclosure: I’ve never actually seen this one, b/c I heard about the ending and just hearing it was enough. I couldn’t bring myself to actually watch it.)
Breaking the Waves
Babel, after which I literally could not leave my seat in the theater for a solid 10 minutes. (Though the fact that I can think of a handful of ways Babel could have been BLEAKER may disqualify it.)
Like Crazy. I spent the first ~30 minutes hating the characters (OK, hating the male lead) and thinking they both seemed young and immature and then suddenly my perspective shifted and I realized, “I am supposed to think they are young and immature. Because I am old. And love is dead.”
Oh, and this is from my childhood in Minneapolis public schools, so I don’t even know if ANYONE else knows this urban kitty-snuff film but they made us watch it EVERY DAMN YEAR.
“J.T.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158681/
Fuck off, Jefferson Elementary!
The Pianist – there is a scene where he is running outside of an abandoned hospital that makes my heart seize.
The Wrestler
Dogville
Seconding the nomination for Miracle Mile.
Also: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and (although it was a made-for-TV movie) Threads.
Oh, my God, @Keckler, J.T.. With the little kitty eyepatch! How to create a roomful of weeping fifth (?) graders! That one and The Things I Cannot Change left marks on my soul, I swear.
http://tinyurl.com/2ahqul6
I know these are long shot nominations but:
The Power of One – This movie ruined me! I’ve seen it a thousand times and it ruins me each time and I’m like, why am I watching this one again? Because the horrible things done to Morgan Freeman is way too much and Sr. John Guilgud is such a quiet powerhouse and GAH! Daniel Craig! Gah! but I will still watch it and cry every single time.
The Mighty – Yes I know it was designed that way, to totally wreck my day, and its schmaltzy as hell and you see that ending telegraphed from 1000 yards, but I do not care.
Piano – The less said about this one the better. Just Gah!
The Suicide Kings – There’s a few movies I’ve watched that I’ve had to rewrite the ending in my head to just not seethe and hate life every time I think of it. This movie is at the top of the list. Shut up Walken.
Also, one point I wanted to add @scout1222 : “When a Man Loves a Woman
I had the messiest sobbing attack AT THE THEATER during that movie, and it continued even after I got home. If you’ve got alcoholism in the family it will probably be too close to home.”
My mom had the same reaction to Prince of Tides. Like she was just a goner for a week after that one. Didn’t see it, but I’m nominating it for her.
So everyone knows where I’M coming from:
Amour
The Brandon Teena Story
Dear Zachary
A Film Unfinished
Grave of the Fireflies
Incendies
Kids
The Parallax View
Red Riding 1974
Stevie
Anything that is sad but ends with a ray of hope has to be out! These have to be movies where you leave feeling that nothing will ever be OK again.
I’ll be one of your classic movie buffs. I second or third In a Lonely Place. In Cold Blood (or its modern surrogate Capote). Double Indemnity.
Brief Encounter is a sad one about a couple who just can’t.be.together.
And A Place in the Sun! Where poor Shelley Winters gets thrown over for Elizabeth Taylor, and then, to add insult to injury, DIES.
Another vote for The Cove. Watched it on an airplane and was a sobbing wreck, I’m still traumatized by it.
Also the documentary Murder on A Sunday Morning, had me horrified at the US justice system.
In The Bedroom.
Second the nominations of Boys Don’t Cry, A Simple Plan and Se7en.
I would also vote for: The Sweet Hereafter (I wasn’t totally wrecked by it but I’m a lawyer and it made me mildly depressed for a few days afterwards.) and Remains of the Day.
Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life don’t affect me that way – I’ll happily re-watch them.
I’m so happy that Keckler also feels about the Fox and the Hound as I do!! But I have to go with
Kids
Gummo (Gummo and Kids make me want to take a Silkwood shower after viewing)
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Naked
The Nines (with Ryan Reynolds… it DESTROYED me)
Oh my GOD, J.T. Sobbing in my 3rd-grade classroom.
GasLand is one of the more depressing documentaries I’ve seen.
I also nominate Into the Wild, which made me *so* angry because it was a true story and that guy’s remarkably piss-poor planning cost him his life.
Million Dollar Baby
The Road (maybe so obvious that everyone has overlooked it!)
I’m going to go ahead and predict right now that Dear Zachary is the hands-down winner of this contest, though, because that film pretty much destroyed my soul for about three days. I was completely zombified. I think the only possible upset is Requiem for a Dream because a lot more people have seen it.
Atonement
Closer
Children of Men
The Man in the Moon – Reese Witherspoon, Jason London, and the first non-animated movie that made me sob. I was 13 or 14 but I’ve never gotten over the violence of that sadness.
I watched Big Fish yesterday and SOBBED. And I’m dead inside!
I have to agree that anyone who has seen Dear Zachary is voting for it, but that that’s not a huge group.
I’ll definitely second Pan’s Labyrinth.
Also, The Man Who Wasn’t There threw me into an existentialist funk for days. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s beautifully filmed and exquisitely acted, but I’d rather lick a subway pole than see either one of them again.