Raging Bull

[roryk]

I just watched the movie 'Raging Bull' with Adam and Kelly-- it is a good, well-directed, moving movie, but it is also an extremely depressing and distressing movie. The central theme of the movie is regret, which is an emotion I have always felt more powerfully than others. The climax of the movie is when the regret finally strikes. The

Comments

[tommut]

I would have been better off paying someone $7.50 to punch me in the face a couple of times.

I'll do it for $5.

Free

[adamfletcher]

I'll do it for free.

[nuzz]

Added it to my netflix :\

I think the amazing part of this is that some how the creation of someone's imagination displayed in visual form could affect you that deeply. Astonishing isn't it.

[easy_wind]

It is hard enough to go through life maintaining a motivated, happy, positive outlook without voluntarily subjecting yourself to artificial difficulties and obstacles.

Pain and suffering are an integral part of the human experience - they simply cannot be ignored. Art often explores these feelings and emotions.

after the movie I felt unmotivated, depressed and hopelessPerhaps this is the way you felt immediately after the movie. But the next day (or day after that), did you feel different at all? Did you feel inspired to avoid the fate that the protagonist encountered? Did you feel touched by the manner in which someone who loved the protagonist may have reached out to him before his eventual collapse

[roryk]

Death is an integral part of the human experience as well, but it would be idiotic to go seek it out-- it will come eventually. Pain and suffering will come in your life without having to go out and voluntarily subject yourself to them as well.

[easy_wind]

we agree that pain and suffering are an inevitability of life.

i have found that creative expressions (film, literature, music...) that address this inevitability have helped me cope with these undesirable situations and events when they've occurred.

even if it is just as simple as the comfort of knowing that someone else has felt this pain before - that it is not just unique to me.

just my 2 cents. my apologies if you feel like i'm polluting your journal.

-marc

[roryk]

Movies can be sad and also you can get something out of them. But there are some movies, like "Raging Bull", where the movie's point is to watch someone go through a bunch of misery and then die or otherwise be defeated. There are plenty of 'sad' movies which, at the end, have some nugget of wisdom or uplifting message or something that make it worth sitting through the misery. I'm talking about avoiding movies where you leave the movie theatre depressed and unhappy, having gained nothing from the experience

[anonymous]

"The central theme of the movie is regret, which is an emotion I have always felt more powerfully than others."

"I think I am going to avoid watching depressing movies-- what is the purpose?"

Consider it therapy. The movie affected you so deeply *because* you feel such strong regret. I'd work on the regret before working on the movie.

-eric

[roryk]

Voluntarily subjecting yourself to misery is not therapy.

[aelphaba]

After watching movies in that Leaving Las Vegas vein. I think these movies are made by people who feel that the base human experiance of suffering isnt fully relized in other films. I think that all expericance has a need to be cataloged and this is their attempt at that scope. So I think if you watch from the point of amazement that someone could, and does, capture human loss so well that it makes your empathy kick in than you are watching something quite wonderful.

But I only say this because of the nature of me. Breaking down human emotions and rebuliding them in someone else artifically is what I do.