Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
I LOVE the theme for this week: Once Was Enough (Movies You Don't Want to Watch Again). I thought of a bunch of great movies that I don't ever want to watch again, so many good ones that it was actually a bit hard to pare it down. At any rate, I highly recommend these movies, but after watching them, you may also decide that you never want to see them again.
Saw (James Wan, 2004) It's not that it's too scary, it's that it's too gross. And I'm not just talking about the mise-en-scène. Nor am I just talking about the sickly green color palette they've chosen to wash all the cinematography in. I'm mostly talking about the film's main thesis statement, which got even more problematic when a fandom sprung up around the character of Jigsaw, a serial killer who designs elaborate death traps for people that are really morality tests, or something, revering him as a character who speaks truth and someone who is somehow morally complex and might actually have a point after all... and made a whole goddamn series of ever-more confounding sequels. The morass of murky (a)morality makes me so sick for humanity that I not only can't bring myself to watch this again, but have been actively rooting for every subsequent Saw film's failure. And I NEVER want to actively root for a film to fail.
Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) If this movie was shown to every high schooler in America, we would have a lot less teenage drug addicts, I guarantee it. Aronofsky's film is so bruising, depressing, and disturbing that I can't watch it again. Part of the brilliance is how he uses lenses, music, film speed, and editing to put us completely in the heads of these characters, played with go-for-broke brilliance by Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and the Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn.
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Yes, I have sat through all nine and a half hours of this brutal documentary about the Holocaust. Yes, it is beyond brilliant how Lanzmann paints a full picture of the Holocaust, its build-up, and its aftermath without using a single frame of archival footage. Yes, it is beyond devastating. Yes, I'm glad I watched it. No, I do not ever need to watch it again.
