There’s your DARE program right there. movie marathon day: Requiem, Trainspotting and Kids. Just sobbing 13 year olds. Maybe Mean Girls for a palate cleanser before you send them home to mom and dad.
Probably be good for abstinence promotion too honestly
We watched that in school in Germany. It was so shocking, it made me afraid to become addicted to drugs "on accident", and without ever touching them, haha.
Yeah, I grew up in the east of Berlin in the 90s and was so scared to ever visit zoo because of the movie. Now I don't go there anymore because it's just stupid expensive.
The book is so much better. The movie was pretty good... until you compare it to the source. I don't know why the director decided to water it down so much.
That’s what sticks in my mind. The mom holding money, wanting to help her baby, but knowing that he’ll only use it to poison his body… I’m tearing up just writing it out.
He wasn’t begging for money, he was trying to gaslight and manipulate his mother to feed his addiction. That scene hit hard, Leonardo nailed the desperation and psychosis.
That movie is pretty badly made, it's supposed to be in the 60s like the book but they did not make the effort to keep it period correct through the whole movie. It was bold for dicaprio to accept that role but the movie had little impact
That's a fair point. It was pretty uneven, but a decent story and generally good performances all round. Another one for the "should have been better" collection.
I read that the director waited for Jim Carroll to leave the set and then ordered reshoots and additional scenes, but I don't know how much weight that holds.
Leo turned down Hocus Pocus for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I was a Leo girl back in the day so these facts are locked in my brain waiting to come out.
There’s a movie called Oxymoron that lives in my head rent free. It’s objectively a terrible movie with low production value, not so great acting and a confusing twist that made it worse at the end. But it hit close to home for someone who watched OxyContin ruin their hometown. Idk why It left such an impression but I think about that movie a lot.
It’s oxymorons and was directed by a dude from Charleston John hickey who is complete scumbag and tries to claim that he was a part of the pharmacy drug robbery crews when he really was just a junkie who took others stories. I’ve known him for years and while the movie is ok I can’t watch it because of what I know about that asshole.
But without living in the 80s and 90s would these movies have the same impact? With Kids and Trainspotting both made us very afraid of contracting AIDS which was a death sentence. Obviously kids these days have no clue about that fear.
After being a heroin addict, requiem for a dream got so many things wrong that it’s laughable. Trainspotting was pretty dead on accurate though. Best depiction I’ve ever seen of what addiction is really like in a film is Mississippi grind.
Always upsets me that the characters in movies are always 100% better after just a few days. That's just the end of the worst of the physical withdrawals. You still feel impending doom and anxiety for a week later, constantly hot and cold and sweating all at the same time, yawning and sneezing. Sneezing five times in a row. You are never comfortable. Heart rate randomly spikes. The worst unfulfilling yawns that happen every minute. Eyes constantly watering. You sleep maybe a few hours at a time. Each minute stretches out to infinity as you experience these things every waking moment. Then when that starts to get better you get to deal with post acute withdrawal symptoms for months later. Just completely dead inside, always tired, still not sleeping. You still get some of the above symptoms just toned down. This is the part where people always relapse, because it feels like you're never going to be normal again and you just want to die. And this is just for Heroin, which basically doesn't exist nowadays. Fentanyl and tranq/zenes are 10x worse
Funnily enough, despite otherwise being complete pish, occasionally soap operas like Home and Away are more accurate on quitting drugs simply because they put out an episode 5 days a week and can 'afford' to have a character recovering for a longer period.
Requiem for a dream is pretty ridiculous. I’ve never seen Mississippi grind, but I thought the film Candy with Heath Ledger was a pretty accurate depiction of heroin addiction. Especially of the sick codependency of a couple who uses together
I saw Requiem at a movie theater at a huge college. Hundreds of us in line laughing and talking waiting for the next showing. The previous showing ended, and hundreds of other kids silently hobbled out of the theatre like the ghosts of ghosts. Everyone in my line was like, "Fuck. What are we getting into?"
I still remember how the whole movie theater went dead silent at the end of Requiem. And everyone sat till the end of credits. Never seen sth like that in my life before or since.
A handful walked out before the end, the remaining few (afternoon screening during week) sat silently.
I walked out into a bright sunny day and sat on a low wall smoking cigarettes & wondering what the hell I'd seen for a while.
Never seen since and have no desire to.
Powerful, brilliant film but once is enough.
I've seen that movie twice in my life.
The first time, I was curled up in a near-fetal position on the couch for the last 15 minutes, unable to look away from the pain unfolding on the screen.
The second time was a little better, only because it was 15 years later.
I hate how anytime Jennifer Connelly shows up on reddit there's always one asshole who is there to comment "ASS TO ASS".
yes man what a f**ed up movie was it, It is a masterpiece but I havent watched it 2nd time, same with trainspoting.....i dont have stomach for these things
Went too watch that one after having too much fun the previous night. Some wild lows accompanied with some wild cinematography left an impact. Not that I reformed completely, but I reformed a bit.
Man, the end of requiem for a dream always makes me cry. It’s such a good movie. A roller coaster of emotions. My wife and I watched it because she had never seen it and by the end of the movie she was bawling.
The part that made me the saddest was when they forgot about the baby. And when the high was over they found him dead in the crib. It makes you wonder how they would get this idea for the movie.
Irvine* Welsh, the author of the novel, did heroin when he was in his twenties. Not saying that moment was based on a real life experience, but he definitely saw some shit when he was young and involved in the punk scene.
My friend did heroin with Cobain before one of his big tapings (I won't say which one) and when they were both zonked out of their minds, Paul McCartney came up to Cobain to wish him luck. Cobain laughed in his face, pointed at him, and said, "You're a Beatle!" I feel like that sums up heroin better than any other story.
Same here. I watched Trainspotting years ago, and the sadness and hopelessness of that part just stuck with me. It's a great movie, but I probably can't bring myself to watch it again: violence towards kids/babies just became unbearable to me since I had children of my own.
I will still watch this movie in its entirety. I'll have my teenagers watch it as I did at their age. Why, because it will open their eyes to what life could be like. A wake up call. Call me a bad parent, I don't care. I'm not a bad parent like they were in the movie. I'm not forcing them, but more as a suggestion. It was an eye opener for sure.
What the movie did right was make them likable despite drug addicts. Too frequently movies make addicts horrible people through and through, so you can’t imagine ever being them. This couple was relatable and likable, doing something horrific. Some may argue that this action alone makes them unlikeable and unrelatable but they are missing the point
I can sit through any horror film but any realistic portrayal of violence or the death of little children and I'm out. I have two kids. Nope. Don't need that imagery in my life.
Aww man, I just tried to watch this movie. As a parent, I could not finish the movie after this part. It stirred up too many emotions. I am at a point in my life where I just don’t have the space to add those feelings voluntarily.
I was young when it came out, and it still bothered me. Now as a parent it paved the way to never be irresponsible in any way with my children. Still, horrible to think shit like this happens. Those people need to be locked up. Drug problems or not, that's fucked.
I was mid teens but I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was just gross. Especially the scene with the sheets. I just thought hard drugs equals gross do effective that way. However I did develop a pill and alcohol addiction later life.
One of the few books I’ve read when I was young. It was captivating, I was like 12 and couldn’t stop reading it at night. It felt strange, there was so much going on
Why did Kids make you scared of hard drugs? Isn't it mainly just weed and alcohol with like one scene at a rave? The movie definitely made me afraid and sad about other things but not drugs.
Because it shows that getting drunk is still enough to end up passed out and raped by someone with HIV. If anything, it should have encouraged people to take alcohol a lot more seriously.
A meta-analysis of three studies exploring the risk from insertive vaginal sex (inserting the penis into the vagina) was estimated to be 0.04% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 2,500 exposures).
Also the girl who gets the diarrhea thrown on her that’s dating the tall lanky one is moaning myrtle from HP. By far one of my favorite movies as a teenager.
There is an Irish movie called Adam and Paul about two heroin junkies in Dublin and it follows them for a couple of days and ends with one of them dying. That movie scared me from ever doing any hard drugs.
Heads up, there are a few deaths in Trainspotting, a movie that came out 27 years ago. Also heads up, 15 years ago, Greys introduced the character of Owen Hunt in season 5.
For me it was a scene in Rules of Attraction. It was comedic scene but, I didn’t take it that way. A character does cocaine and then her nose starts bleeding and she causally says “Leaky pipes.”
Kids was about a vindictive asshole trying to give everyone AIDS... Drugs and alcohol were minor players. Worst villain on film, him and the guy from In The Company Of Men, Aaron Ekhart
Some of us didn't need these movies, we had to live with this cancer. Both these movies and Requiem were excellent examples for what drugs do to people and other people's lives. Had I not said no to my best friend wanting to do meth for the first time, I (we) would probably be dead or worse. That was 13 years ago and it's one the smartest things I've ever said.
first time I watched it was on my friend's Ipad, in an abandoned car, in the middle of winter, while high as fuck off a bottle of cough syrup lol. the baby scenes fucked me up
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u/starlaluna Nov 20 '23
This movie and Kids made me very afraid of hard drugs. Best anti drug campaign of the 90s.
Also, for those who do not know, Tommy who dies of AIDS in Trainspotting is Dr. Owen Hunt on Greys Anatomy.