Tag Archives: disturbing content

We are never, ever, ever getting back together.

Some movies you could watch a million times, quote every line, and never get enough.

Other movies, you regret seeing even the once.

Somewhere in between is a movie that you’re glad you watched, but that you know you’ll never revisit. These are mine:

Monster – Stupidly, I bought this one. Does anyone need a copy of Monster? I won’t be using it. Based on the real monster life events of Aileen Wuornos, who Charlize Theron plays to perfection. Maybe a little too perfectly? This woman was convicted of murdering 6 men, but that’s not the worst of it. Aileen is a prostitute who gets beaten and raped by a client. She wants to quit the life but can’t find any legitimate work and her girlfriend wants to be supported in the matter to which she’s become accustomed. Going back to prostitution, she can’t control her anxiety and believes that every john is out to hurt her – so, she kills them first, and takes their money. It’s never easy to see ruthless murder on film, but it’s so much worse when you’ve seen the back story and understand where all the pain and fear is coming from – and it infects you too.

Inglorious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino presents us with an alternate history where Jewish-American soldiers assassinate N deliverance4 azi political leadership and brutally murder German soldiers. We went to see this in the theatre, and thing about Tarantino is, there’s no way you’re getting off easy. I was prepared for blood and guts. What I can’t shake is the sound the knife makes as it carves a swastika into victims’ foreheads.

Deliverance – Four friends go out into the woods to have themselves a little male bonding time in nature. Unfortunately, they happen upon some hillbillies who take some of the friends hostage, and force Ned Beatty onto his knees, bidding him to “squeal like a pig” as he is forcefully raped. It’s harsh and humiliating and just about as degrading as it gets – for him, and for us.

Antichrist – Should I even write this? If you’re a nice person, please turn away now. Do not read on. For the rest of you: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a grieving couple who have recently lost a child. To cope with their pain, they retreat to a cabin in the woods whee he has crazy visions and she exhibits increasingly violent sexual behaviour, culminating in (last chance! turn away!) her snipping off her clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors after a pretty punishing round of frantic, joyless masturbation. Do I really need to explain why I’ll never watch this again?

Man Bites Dog – A mockumentary that’s anything but funny. A film crew follows around a charismatic serial killer. The murders get increasingly graphic and horrible. The rapes are just fucking brutal. But the haunting thing is that the film crew goes all Stockholm Syndrome and pretty soon they’re willing accomplices. Fucking harsh, man.

Anything Michael Haneke – This guy loves to make unwatchable films. Matt bravely made his way through Funny Games while I bore The White Ribbon, but not happily, I tell you. Not happily.

Anything with eyes – I have a super duper eye phobia and despise any movie with extreme close-ups with eyes. Worse still: blood shot eyes. Worse still: eyes being forcibly held open. A Clockwork Orange being the worst possible case.

Anything with shaving – Mostly just men shaving their necks. 99% of times it’s just shaving, but I am literally hiding behind my own fingers, certain that at any moment a major artery is about to be opened, accidentally, on purpose, I don’t care, I just can’t take the anxiety leading up to it. And then mostly they just wipe the shaving cream off and continue on with their days, but me? My blood pressure’s through the roof.

Anything where the dog dies. I can’t take dead dogs, whether or not they go to heaven.

So which movies can you never revisit – and why?

Movie Masturbation Scenes to Get You Going Every Time

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The truth is, most masturbation in movies isn’t sexy at all. Awkward for sure. Embarrassing at times. Shameful. Painful. Or just downright scary. And that’s why I’ve decided to celebrate them with this post!

The Squid and The Whale – Owen Kline plays the younger of two kids belonging to Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, who go through a rather stuffy and bitter divorce. Owen finds lots of ways to cope, but none creepier than when squid he uses a crinkled piece of porn to rub himself off against a book case in his school library, defiling some nearby books with his teenaged cum. You can’t help but see the symbolism as his parents are both bookish (a professor and a writer), a rejection of them and an assertion of himself. Oh Noah Baumach, there are some things we just can’t unsee you know.

American Beauty – There are many great components to this movie, and we’ve talked many of them to death, but I think that until now we’ve avoided the most telling and depressing scene of the movie. Our introduction to Kevin Spacey is when he’s alone in the shower, jerking himself off rather sadly and routinely, though describing these few moments as “the high point” of his day. Later we catch him masturbating yet again, fantasizing about his daughter’s teenage girlfriend, and unashamedly waking his wife in the process. They fight, of course, and the act feels really hostile, contemptuous of her, but at least he’s not hiding in the shower anymore. Spacey says “It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.”

Bad Lieutenant – There are many reasons why I’ll never really recover from watching this movie, but Harvey Keitel’s masturbation scene is still ranked really high on that list. A corrupt cop pulls over two teenage girls who are using their father’s car without his permission. Keitel forces one of the girls to strip while the other must simulate fellation while he masturbates. There is nothing arousing or hot about this scene. He’s not getting off on the girls, he’s getting off on his power. It’s repulsive, and on some level, even he knows it.

Little Children – In a nice side story to the prominent Kate Winslet one, a pedophile’s just been released from prison and his mama thinks he can turn his life around if only he could just meet the right woman. Cue the blind date, which seems to be going surprisingly well until he wordlessly pulls the car over at the end of the night, and starts masturbating while she’s trapped in the front seat with him…and they just happen to be parked right outside a playground. No word yet on date number two.

So what’s your favourite movie masturbation?

The White Ribbon

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A brutal black and white film by Michael Haneke about the shame of masturbation, animal mutilation, incest and the symbolism of pierced ears, torturing the retarded, bleak and swift suicide, a meditation on sin,ritualized punishment, cruelty and the hardness of hearts, guilt and innocence, apathy and revenge. So many crazy events occur in this little German village on the eve of WWI that pretty soon the villagers are looking around at each other with very suspicious eyes – and so are we. The children seem to be at the heart of this mystery and I can’t help but think that they’re exactly the generation who would become Nazis. The children, whether or not they’re responsible for the mysterious atrocities, have no escape from their relentlessly punitive lives, and for nearly two and a half hours, neither do we.

Whose job is it to prevent evil? Why do we strive to puzzle out random acts? Are we willing to surrender freedom to mitigate danger? Heneke hints at a lot of uncomfortable questions and if you dare to watch, you’ll find it’s not just a question of whodunnit, and even if you ask the right questions, there’s no telling if you’ll ever find the answers.

Polytechnique

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I cringed my way through this movie – impossible not to if you know what’s coming, and what Canadian doesn’t?

This movie revisits one of the saddest days in our country’s recent history. On December 6, 1989, a man armed himself with a riffle and showed up to Ecole Polytechnique to hunt women – feminists, he called them. He shot 28 people and killed 14 women, targeting them specifically and even excusing the men from classrooms.

In order to preserve the dignity of the victims of this tragedy, director Denis Villeneuve makes them into fictitious composites, but their truths still ring out. They are students. Their only crime is pursuing education in a field (engineering, mostly) that their shooter deemed “for men.”

Villeneuve shoots his movie in black and white. I discussed this choice before: Villeneuve seemed to want to minimize the impact of the blood, allowing the audience to think about the killing spree in perhaps a slightly more transcendental way. The film rises above the tragedy and is quite cool in its presentation, some might even call it dispassionate.

But is it right to be dispassionate about so sore a subject? Rewatching it, I’m feeling the director’s passivity in the first half, the deaths seeming abstract as they happen off-screen. Later, a pile of bodies is shown out of focus Most of the horror is kept from us, the worst of it coming from the startle of gunfire as it rips through particularly quiet moments in the film. Perhaps we are meant to take it in without tears or judgement, and simply ruminate on what happened, and why. It certainly feels as though Villeneuve has gone to great lengths to give us plenty of room to do just that.

Mysterious Skin

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In the early 1980s, two 8 year-old boys are molested by their baseball coach. They react to the trauma in very different ways. Neil, who had been abused by his coach repeatedly, grows up identifying with his abuser, carrying around some secret pride that he was coach’s favorite. At the age of 15 (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he starts working as a prostitute. Brian, on the other hand, a quieter and shyer kid than Neil, grows up having no memory of his abuse and, as a teenager (played by Brady Corbet), has spent years fascinated by stories of alien abductions, convinced that he himself had been abducted. Searching for answers, he tries to track down Neil hoping he can explain the gaps in his memory.

Mysterious Skin is not for everyone. Many will be turned off just by the quick synopsis that I offered in the first paragraph. It deals unflinchingly with subject matter (child abuse, prostitution, and rape) that most of us don’t want to think about in such graphic detail.

Many of us can forgive a mediocre action movie or convenient twists and lazy writing as long as they keep us entertained. For most people, though, if we’re going to sit through a movie with subject matter like this, it had better be GREAT. Which this isn’t. Not everything works, Corbet’s performance as Brian rings true but a subplot involving an alliance with 24‘s Chloe, who plays a reclusive 32 year-old with an alien abduction of her own, is particularly unconvincing.

But director Gregg Araki gets most of the details right. This film is refreshingly, even brutally, honest about the traumatic impact of childhood sexual abuse. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s half of the film is particularly convincing. JGL has made a career of playing tortured young men and he’s at his best here. Neil is charming but unreliable, constantly letting down and pushing away the people that care about him. He seems to have a bit of a death engaging in increasingly risky and unsafe sex. We see a gentler, more compassionate side to him though when he finally reconnects with Brian, leaving us with a glimmer of hope that maybe there’s hope for these two characters after all, quite a feat for a film that is a mostly bleak and punishing experience.

Killer Joe

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I’m so shell-shocked from this movie I’m having trouble writing about it.

When Chris, a not so great guy from a not so great family ( Emile Hirsch) has a stash of drugs stolen from him by his mom, he has to come up with cash quick, or he’s dead. He and his father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church) hatch a plan to kill the mom and collect on her life insurance policy. And Chris knows just the guy to do the job – Killer Joe, a Dallas detective who happens to be a hit-man on the side. Too bad they can’t afford to pay his retainer…until Joe spots Chris’s sweet little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) and decides that sexual collateral will do just the trick.

This film is trash. Trash trash, not trailer trash. Don’t be fooled by the actual trailer park. These people aren’t just hicks, they’re actual filthy, morally bankrupt people. This fact is established very very quickly – it’s immediately vulgar, over-the-top vulgar, and that’s before the beaver gets flashed in your face. Chris’s stepmom (Gina Gershon) has no boundaries and apparently no pants. Letts, the playwright, is adept with fucked up families (think August: Osage County) but this one takes the cake.

So I was repulsed by this movie, and this from the girl who didn’t blink once while watching Sin City a few weeks ago. My revulsion was knee-jerk and I went straight for the “bad movie” label – bad, bad movie. But I didn’t turn it off. And as I watched more, I realized that the badness is on purpose. It’s the point. You’re not supposed to like these people. This film is showing us a very dirty, seedy class of people. The badness is actually pretty expertly done, which doesn’t mean it’s easy to watch.

Enter Matthew McConaughey, a southern gentleman and a breath of fresh air. His demeanor is calm, his drawl is polite. He injects the movie with a much-need hit of stillness that lets us catch our breath after all the frenetic coarseness. The audience wants to eat him up which is a very effective device because it turns out he’s just as morally reprehensible and probably the most soulless character yet. He just has a more polished facade.

There’s so much tension in this movie that occasionally a giggle will bubble up, guiltily, without relieving even an ounce of the tension. This movie will make your jaw ache. It’s brutal. It’s sadistic. There so much fetishistic sexual cruelty that you won’t know where to look. If you’re comfortable exploring dark, nasty, demented sides of people without every really scratching the surface, then by all means, you won’t do better than this movie. I sort of hesitate to call it exploitation cinema, but isn’t that what it means? To be a voyeur in this condemnable underworld and enjoy watching the bloody violence and perversion vicariously? But Killer Joe has the capacity to really catch people off guard, and not in a good way. (You won’t ever eat fried chicken again.) It’s provocative but doesn’t really attempt to teach us anything. The characters are not remotely redeemable, but neither is the movie. Galling, outrageous, and ultimately superficial. And as polarizing as the movie is, just wait til you get to the end.

(And if by chance you’ve landed on this site just needing to talk about what you’ve seen, then please take the chance to do so in the comments. Assholes Watching Movies is providing a public service: vent, ask questions. Others be forewarned that there may be spoilers.)