Movie Subject Matter You Almost Can't Handle

[[Kira Must Die]]

Sentimental films. I've never been one to get into films that intentionally try to make you cry, nor have I've ever been like "Man, I'm in the mood to cry right now." I've teared up in some movies and anime, but it was usually when I don't expect them or if they offer me something other than pure sadness.

Other than that, I can't handle violence against children, or any movie that depicts the suffering of especially young children, toddlers, and infants. I've seen some films that I enjoy that has that, like Lady Vengeance, but that stuff is still hard to watch for me, and it especially hurts when said children are crying (If it's one of those movies where the child is just standing there with a blank face, I won't give a shit, because I fucking hate that.) It's the main reason why, out of principle, I refuse to watch A Serbian Film.

I'm fine with violence against teenagers, though... in movies and TV shows, of course.

 

[LostCrusader]

I can't stand movies that try to use awkwardness as comedy. It just ends up making me really uncomfortable to the point that I either stop watching or stop paying attention if it goes on too long. It also means I either can't or won't watch about half of all comedy movies that get made no matter how good people say they are.

And then I also noticed that I hold my breath during scenes where characters are under water.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I can't stand movies that try to use awkwardness as comedy. It just ends up making me really uncomfortable to the point that I either stop watching or stop paying attention if it goes on too long. It also means I either can't or won't watch about half of all comedy movies that get made no matter how good people say they are.

Oh yeah, any time someone has to hide some magicky secret from someone who knows something odd is going on, and played for laughs...no.

And then I also noticed that I hold my breath during scenes where characters are under water.

Heh, I do that all the time. This is just me trying to see if they should have run into trouble by now, though, and it's not very scientific.

 

[JoJo]

Torture and children being hurt makes me uncomfortable but I can live with those. What I really can't stand is disembodied internal organs, which I really can't understand because I'm fine with blood and anything else but a kidney or heart on it's own... I'm feeling light-headed just thinking about it. I felt sick for most of the new RoboCop movie after they showed him without his robotic body parts, as a heart and lungs with a head attached. Damn, that scene felt like it went on forever.

 

[Verlander]

Gonna take it in a different direction here, but American evangelical films. Luckily they don't make it over to the UK very often, but occasionally I've accidentally watched one. It's worth noting that I'm not a hardline atheist or something, far from it, but I find them so insincere. The feeling is a step beyond cringey, and I feel the same watching anything that's pandering to a political or ideological point to the extent that it significantly impacts quality - see pretty much every adaption of Ayn Rand works.

Full disclosure, I would probably dislike most things that had a point I didn't agree with, unless the quality exceeded the message (see South Park), but the religious stuff... I can't watch it.

 

[FootloosePhoenix]

Throat-slitting. Definitely throat-slitting. Seeing someone getting choked kinda makes me cringe too, but it's still nowhere near as bad as the former. Naturally, I had to look away from Breaking Bad at least once; I'm sure everyone who's seen the show knows what I'm talking about. It helps that my boyfriend had warned me about it beforehand, so I knew it was coming.

But I will add that violence in films tends to bother me a lot more than in video games. I stayed far away from any violent-looking R-rated movies for a long time because of that and it's only been during the last couple years I've loosened up on that. I still get cold-footed when I think about seeing certain movies that, while they look great, they also have a reputation for being quite gory. A lot of times I'll end up seeing it and going "Oh, that wasn't so bad," but the mentality is hard to shake. Conversely, I'll play whatever M-rated video game and be completely nonplussed, unless there's a very serious context behind it. For that reason I can only think of one scene in a game that made me feel a bit sick and that was

Spoiler: Telltale's The Walking Dead (Season 1)

when Lily's dad gets his head smushed in by a salt block.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I haven't seen Grave of the Fireflies, but I know what happens at the end of it. I will watch it some day, but right now the idea of a hopeless and tragic movie where

Spoiler: Grievous spoiler for the end of Grave of the Fireflies

at the end a little girl dies of starvation with her older brother soon following

is enough to turn all my warning lights on and make me go "Nope!"

We watched This is the End the day it came out on PPV, but I still pass over Grave of the Fireflies every time I see it at the library.

It's really not that good anyway. I know that saying this is seen as blasphemy because 'Oh, the tragedy', but that's literally all it is; just a bunch of extreme misery with nothing left to ponder. I don't mind very bad or sad things in a movie, but if that's all it's serving it's basically just misery porn. And this seems to be a recurring thing for the author who wrote the book that the movie was based on. Now and Then, Here and There is cut from the same cloth. I mean, I know the guy went through some traumatizing shit during WW2, but these stories are just unbearable in the amount of misery it forces onto you.

 

[McElroy]

Bad comedy is something I almost can't handle but might depending on the mood and situation. However, if there are other people in the room/wherever watching this bad comedy AND laughing at all the stupid jokes, I will surely leave the premises.

 

[vid87]

A)I'm fairly ok with death scenes since I have in mind that they're fake and all, but oddly things like vaporization or disintegration - Darkest Hour, War of the Worlds, even Captain America - creep me out.

B)A lot of modern humor that revolves around awkward embarrassment where someone is outlandish to the point of being psychotic just make others uncomfortable; also, witty one-liners and name-calling that have no point other than to fill space.

C)Idiot Guy gets with Buzzkill Gal. He's whiny, annoying, and dumb as a brick; she's a professional and often far more qualified to be the protagonist. Guy gets in trouble, movie says it's up to him to solve everything and she has to teach him how instead of just doing it herself and saving everyone 70 minutes. They fall for each despite little to no real chemistry. His quirkiness softens her heart because, as a woman, being a professional means she's a mean robot and their relationship absolutely will survive past 2 weeks.

D)Movie that DOES have female protagonist usually features men who are either Idiot Guy from previous point or The Worst Person Ever, usually a villain but sometimes just an annoying and often wildly sexist jackass. Overall theme usually culminates not with men and women seeing eye to eye but that men should just disappear altogether.


These were really off the top of my head and I realize the last 2 sound a bit bitter and more specific in my dislikes. Apologies, but I guess the summary for both latter points is that we're still trying to figure out the modern dynamic of the sexes working together and that so far the main attempts are either "try to appear progressive but bend over backwards to make the man the hero because patriarchy" or "swing the pendulum in to the other extreme to make up for the past." I just don't feel like either are really the solution but that the real, artistically interesting one can still happen.

 

[Thaluikhain]

C)Idiot Guy gets with Buzzkill Gal. He's whiny, annoying, and dumb as a brick; she's a professional and often far more qualified to be the protagonist. Guy gets in trouble, movie says it's up to him to solve everything and she has to teach him how instead of just doing it herself and saving everyone 70 minutes. They fall for each despite little to no real chemistry. His quirkiness softens her heart because, as a woman, being a professional means she's a mean robot and their relationship absolutely will survive past 2 weeks.

D)Movie that DOES have female protagonist usually features men who are either Idiot Guy from previous point or The Worst Person Ever, usually a villain but sometimes just an annoying and often wildly sexist jackass. Overall theme usually culminates not with men and women seeing eye to eye but that men should just disappear altogether.


These were really off the top of my head and I realize the last 2 sound a bit bitter and more specific in my dislikes. Apologies, but I guess the summary for both latter points is that we're still trying to figure out the modern dynamic of the sexes working together and that so far the main attempts are either "try to appear progressive but bend over backwards to make the man the hero because patriarchy" or "swing the pendulum in to the other extreme to make up for the past." I just don't feel like either are really the solution but that the real, artistically interesting one can still happen.

Oh yeah, can sympathise with those.

I don't think it's so much making up for the past, as not following the stereotype. If you are sick of having women as being damsels in distress, you want to have a really angry woman that goes round punching people in the face for no reason. That's much better.

[small]People that do this sort of thing often also have her be the only women to do this, the other women remains damsels...so it's not "women are equal to men" it's "this one-off woman is equal to men"[/small]

 

[jdogtwodolla]

Awkward guy socializes for X reason.

I just watched Neighbors and I had to leave the room several times or cover my face and ears with a pillow. If you had been in the theater with me for I love you Man, you would've absolutely hated the shit out of me by the credits.

They make me squirm. I've never been able to watch people make asses out of themselves in an awkward way.

 

[happyninja42]

I hate things happening to people's eyes. It freaks me out and makes my eyes and eyebrows twinge in phantom pain. Like needles going towards an eyeball, or someone being strapped down with his eyelids forced open? *shudders* fuck that.

I also don't like seeing cruelty to animals, or animals dying.


Mostly though, I can't stand movies that try to rationalize or justify religious views, and use obscenely strawman arguments, or depict groups like atheists and such in a way that is so inaccurate as to almost be comical, if it wasn't so insulting to me on a moral level.

 

[RiseUp]

As for the people that take issue with harm to animals in movies, does that include The Thing, where an alien assumes the image of a dog? If so I feel you're missing out, it's personally my favorite horror movie. Then again, seeing as it eats several actual dogs, I get why that might upset you.

As for me, I've never understood the appeal of torture porn or shock for its own sake. Simply being as repulsive as possible (along the lines of The Human Centipede 2 or the later Saw movies) without dramatic tension or any real point to make is the equivalent of a child eating his own snot to get his fellows to look at him.

I'm also not a big fan of setting scenes in a movie around historic landmarks unless these are absolutely integral to the plot. It just comes across as insulting that a screenwriter feels that their audience wouldn't be engaged if that big moment took place ANYWHERE but a location they were already somewhat familiar with. For examples, see any movie set in New York and the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty, the Transformers movies' love of re-purposing landmarks as either Transformer constructs or government conspiracy hives, or the "Monumental Damage" trope in general.

If I had to pick another, it would be the "love isn't something solely reserved for soulmates, it's when you put someone else before yourself" thing that Disney has done recently. It worked in Frozen, because it was a nice way to amend their legacy of "love at first sight" stories, but when they did it again in Maleficent it left me hating the movie. It seems like just recently Disney feels like it has to make a point regarding something that everyone else has understood for a while, and where in Frozen it came across as a bold change for the company, in Maleficent it just seemed self-conscious.

And don't even get me started on the methods in which Young Adult fiction panders to its target audience...

 

[the December King]

I can't stand seeing animals injured or killed in movies. The only reason that I remember that "The Butterfly Effect" exists is because of the scene where the kid sets a dog on fire. Scenes like that get burned into my mind because of how horrible they are.

I absolutely don't mind seeing people mutilated in the most horrible ways possible in a movie, but the moment it's an animal (specifically animals that haven't attacked or hurt anyone) I have trouble looking at the screen until the scene is over.

Same here. I'm a huge fan of horror, but when there is a staple of having animals tortured and killed to prove how dark or serious things are in the film, it can really be hard to get past... and, rarely, outright impossible.

 

[the December King]

As for the people that take issue with harm to animals in movies, does that include The Thing, where an alien assumes the image of a dog? If so I feel you're missing out, it's personally my favorite horror movie. Then again, seeing as it eats several actual dogs, I get why that might upset you.

The Thing happens to be my favourite film, horror or otherwise, and yep, for me, it was difficult to watch, at least at first. It often boils down to accepting or appreciating it's effects, and that even if it is disturbing, that animals are not allowed to be hurt during a production, at least in the west, at least not in modern cinema.

 

[RiseUp]

As for the people that take issue with harm to animals in movies, does that include The Thing, where an alien assumes the image of a dog? If so I feel you're missing out, it's personally my favorite horror movie. Then again, seeing as it eats several actual dogs, I get why that might upset you.

The Thing happens to be my favourite film, horror or otherwise, and yep, for me, it was difficult to watch, at least at first. It often boils down to accepting or appreciating it's effects, and that even if it is disturbing, that animals are not allowed to be hurt during a production, at least in the west, at least not in modern cinema.

Is there any civilized country that even allows harm to animals for film production? It seems like the possibility that real animals were harmed in production is what turns a lot of people away from the concept of violence against animals in film, but I don't know of anywhere that's actually legal.

Captcha: "red tape"
How fitting.

 

[ObserverStatus]

Things like violence against children and animals, sexual assault, and excessive blood, gore, and violence can annoy me when I feel that the film makers are trying too hard to be edgy, but they don't really get to me on a subconscious level. Only thing that really makes my skin crawl in movies is depictions of people living with truly disgusting diseases. You know those zombie movies where people start transforming while still lucid, and while they try to get on with their lives big chunks of necrotic skin start falling off? Ew.

 

[the December King]

As for the people that take issue with harm to animals in movies, does that include The Thing, where an alien assumes the image of a dog? If so I feel you're missing out, it's personally my favorite horror movie. Then again, seeing as it eats several actual dogs, I get why that might upset you.

The Thing happens to be my favourite film, horror or otherwise, and yep, for me, it was difficult to watch, at least at first. It often boils down to accepting or appreciating it's effects, and that even if it is disturbing, that animals are not allowed to be hurt during a production, at least in the west, at least not in modern cinema.

Is there any civilized country that even allows harm to animals for film production? It seems like the possibility that real animals were harmed in production is what turns a lot of people away from the concept of violence against animals in film, but I don't know of anywhere that's actually legal.

Captcha: "red tape"
How fitting.

To be honest, I have no idea- I was under the impression that it's illegal in general, but I don't know that for sure.

I'm normally fairly confident that when I'm watching a flick, that involves an animal being harmed, that it's FX. But the thought of the animal being hurt/killed, even just in the narrative, is often enough to bother me which, I admit, is often the desired effect.