Ouch! This Movie Hurts

The Onion AV Club is out with another one of its always-fun pop culture list, but this one is conspicuously not-fun:

Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice

As the DVD era has marched on and film collecting has gotten easier and cheaper, this has become a real quandary for movie geeks. You catch a great film, you cry, you're changed, you want to share it with a friend, maybe. And then you see it on the DVD rack at Positively Records or CD Cellar or California Video and you twitch. "Do I really want to sit through that scene again?"

The AV Club's list breaks down into two categories: Films that are physically disgusting or films which are emotionally unbearable. Some, like the 1997 sadomasochist documentary Sick, are terrifying for their entire runtime. Fifteen minutes in you know you'll never want to visit these scenes again. Some, like 2002's Irreversible, are generally disturbing all the way through but have a last-minute twist that render what you've just seen 100 times more disturbing. (It's an old movie so I'll spoil it: In an opening scene we see an angry man ask a man in a suit where to find the man who raped his wife, and the man in the suit points out a guy whom the angry mean murders with a fire extinguisher. An hour later we find that it was the man in the suit who committed the rape, and we suddenly remember his smirking face watching an innocent man get murdered as he walks away from his crime, forever.)

All the movies on this list have something in common: Bold directors who get a thrill from making you upset. But some flicks with "happy" endings, meant to soothe us after the horror we've just witnessed, don't quite get there. Take Saving Private Ryan (1998), a much-loved film that I've never wanted to own because of this scene:



Anyway, here's the question: Is a great film that makes you uncomfortable, makes you not want to watch it twice, immediately more powerful than a great film that makes you happy?