I was going to make a 28 Days Later joke here, but it turns out I’ve never seen it, so…
So, they wait until near the end to make me write about a film that makes me uncomfortable, trying to see if I’ll crack. You won’t get me, 30 Day Film Challenge gods! I shall overcome!
Even as I type this, I’m not 100% sure which movie I’m going to pick. I have a few choices in my head, but there’s a difference between a film that makes me uncomfortable and one that is just plain bad. For example, I was going to pick Leaving Las Vegas, the film that actually earned Nicholas Cage an Oscar for Best Actor, which I feel like the Academy kind of wishes they could take back at this point. But I can’t really say that the film makes me uncomfortable because I only saw it once, and all it made me feel was annoyed. I remember kind of rooting for the alcohol.
That’s kind of another issue, really. Does a film “make” me uncomfortable if I saw it once and never really thought about it ever again? I guess that’s semantics. I should look at the prompt in the spirit it was intended, right? I need to pick an “uncomfortable” film. Not any recent Tom Cruise movie simply because he makes me uncomfortable. And I hear what everyone says about how great all the recent Mission Impossible movies are, but the dude is whacked and I just can’t look at his stupid, de-aged face anymore. It can also be said that, yeah, we found out that Kevin Spacey is a creep, but I still can watch his movies and enjoy them without thinking about that. I mean, it would seriously take Spacey murdering my whole family to make me stop watching The Usual Suspects.
The other issue that I have with picking an “uncomfortable” movie is that, for the last twenty years or so, I have kind of avoided movies like that. Maybe I saw enough of them in the 90’s, or I got too into comic book movies and couldn’t go back, but whatever the reason, these kinds of weird, art-house flicks just don’t do it for me anymore. I guess that’s why I never did anything with my film degree.
The good thing is, wannabe auteurs made enough of them back in the day to tide me over. Since I was a film student in the 90’s, I wanted to further my education by seeing these gritty, dark art house movies. And out of all those, the one that made me really uncomfortable was Kids
I was certainly what you could call a late-bloomer, so watching these teenagers romp around New York, doing drugs and deflowering virgins was bad enough. When the main “kid,” Telly, contracts AIDS, but continues to have unprotected sex with people, that just ramps up the tension. When he has unprotected and unsolicited sex with Chloe Sevigny, who had been the “good girl” who was trying to abstain from all of the horrible things these guys were doing, including sex, but passed out at a party, well, that just put me over the top. And when these little bastards start beating people up with their skateboards? I’m not generally upset by violence in movies, but, good lord.
I don’t really have much good to say about this movie, in retrospect. It’s well-made, and introduced the world to both Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, so that’s cool. I have no real desire to watch it again, but I will say that of all those uncomfortable movies I watched from the mid-90’s to the early 2000’s, while I was “educating” myself, this is the only that I still think about often and cringe. So that’s why I had to pick it.
Come back tomorrow for the pen-ultimate post! And go to my linktree. Please.
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