Most depressing movie ever!! =(

Watch House of Sand and Fog. Then read the book. Both are exceptional.

more depressing? I'd go with Requiem for a Dream

Mr. Teal
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#11

"Depressing"- 21 Grams is not meant to be viewed as a piece of cultural pornography, like the usual pap that Hollywood or broadcast TV offer us. 21 Grams may be preaching the concepts of "feeling" and being human toward others, but it is certainly not intended to make us "feel" good or bad like a drug. It presents its viewers with real life situations, death in particular, that are randomly thrust upon each and everyone of us. How are we going to react when the unpleasant, life-altering occurrences that fate or "God" thrusts upon us? Remember what the wife tells Jack when she visits him in jail? "Life has to go on, Jack. With or without God." What I think the movie is getting at is how are we going to "live" or "die" in the presence of death? We seem to forget in our culture that life is accompanied by death; some of us can handle life, but how are we going to handle death? Sure, alot of us struggle with it physically(drugs) like the housewife, and some struggle with it spiritually(questioning blind-faith) like the husband and father. Personally, I think the Prof handles it the best; he understands the complexities of "existence" and is not "beaten" in anyway by the bad- hand he's been dealt. He tries to live an "authentic" and "generous", full life while the other two just mull and suffer... But then again how well is the Prof handling his brush with death, continually chain-smoking and showing no sympathy for a man who is broken and cast of from society? They all fail one way or another, shouldn't we learn from their mistakes? Not perfect, but just a few thoughts I've been kicking around.

But there's still hope, in the end. Jack goes back to his family. Christina can finally deal with the dead of her loved ones and has something to look forward to. And Paul knows that he did something good with his final months(?).

If you really want to see something depressing:
Requiem for a Dream
Babel
Dogville

Greatest thing achievable; understanding between people. Sadly IMDb is not the place to find it.

Sure there's a even more depressing movie: Did you ever see 1984 with William Hurt?
There you go :D

Opinions are like *beep* everybody has one.

It was SAD, mot DEPRESSING.

The difference? With sad films/stories, you really feel for the characters and you're sad for them. With depressing films/stories, you don't feel deeply enough for the characters to warrant the overload of misery.

With that in mind, I'd put "The English Patient" at the top of my depressing list, followed closely by "From Here to Eternity".

Alfonso-lover
Don't judge a movie by its rating.
"What is **nt?" --Lady Chatterley

dude... i just saw the movie for the first time on encore...

and when the credits started rolling the only thing I could say was "that was the most depressing movie i've ever seen"...

my god...

very good, though.

Yeah, it’s depressing, WAY more depressing than Amores Perros (and I didn’t think Babel was actually depressing)…(and that signature music at the end makes you just want to kill yourself!) but I didn’t come away feeling depressed at the end. Initially, I wanted to knock it and say that it made me feel nothing, that it fell flat, was cut short. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel that there was a lot more meaning than I was giving it credit for. While I wouldn’t compare it to Amores Perros, I think there’s a lot to be said for the way Innaritu follows his characters to the end of their choices, not judging or manipulating them, but letting us think about them ourselves.

I feel like I did come away with something, a kind of subtle theme, that I do feel is powerful enough to keep this story from being as nihilistic as some make it out to be. Basically, it’s kind of a negative argument for the life-giving power of forgiveness or grace (two things that are insanely hard to give others or ourselves). As in, without forgiveness, life sucks, and sucks royally and destructively. As in, without grace, there’s no more life. Cristina tells her sister she’s not going to press charges because there’s nothing she can do to bring her family back, and yet later (and understandably so), she wants to take Jack’s life for taking their lives—and it doesn’t make things better, but ends up taking the life of someone she might have found hope to live for, someone who might have found reason to live in her.

Jack is devastated, disillusioned with God, whom he thinks has done all this to him, and thinks he has to pay for what he’s done with his own life. But even before that, he didn’t believe there was any grace for himself (or others—be it that kid at the church center or his own kids). His faith was pretty much about doing all the “right” things, following the rules, so when following the rules didn’t get him anywhere, he figured God was punishing him. He would quote scriptures at others and himself out of context to fit his own ideas of paying, trying harder, paying. (No wonder his wife said “I liked you better before [you were into the God stuff].”) Reminded me of Robert DeNiro’s character in The Mission trying to do penance for killing his brother…or Hazel in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood trying to pay, pay, pay for his “sins.” While I hated the long scene of Jack slitting his arm through his cross tat (it seemed melodramatic), the more I think about it, the more meaningful it is…it seemed like an visual picture of his own personal religion. He’s making himself bleed, trying to crucify himself while also saying that he’s totally disillusioned with God. Yet the irony is that the actual significance of the cross in the Christian faith is supposed to be unmerited forgiveness that you don’t have to pay for; death exchanged for life. Almost like he’s saying, forgiveness isn’t an option for me or anyone else. It was like he wanted to be a martyr and just keep paying and paying (and making others pay, too—like his family), and then when the truth keeps that from happening (when they won’t let him pin Paul’s death on himself), it’s like his penance is taken away from him and there are no more rules to follow. (Hence, the cutting.)

While I felt that there was so much more room in the film for something redemptive to make the story worth telling happen (and never quite panned out), I do think the ending kind of hinted at possible redemption. I wish there had been a lot more than like 5.5 frames, but it was there. The thought that, even though something even worse than the nightmare that’s already taken place has just happened and someone else has died, it doesn’t have to be the end of life for those who still are living. It’s as though their power of choice is made clearer to them, when before, they were just surviving, existing, making choices and calling it fate. Anyway, sorry if that sounds like moralizing, but I just felt I had to prove to myself why this film wasn’t as depressing it might initially have seemed!