Peter Debruge in Variety named The Painted Bird as one of the worst movies of the year. He walked out of it because he couldn't take the brutality. The book it was based on was a literary hoax so you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was fiction.
And there was something Salman Rushdie said on C-Span. He briefly mentioned a short story he read by a Chilean writer about a family that lives through a massive earthquake. The difference between comedy and tragedy is in the pacing. The story was only a couple of pages long but so many horrible things happening to the family were packed into it, it came across as funny.
I did this inadvertently. I wrote a heartfelt essay about looking through my junior high yearbook. I found it depressing because I knew about the horrible things that happened to the kids at my school. One boy's mother died after a long illness then his father committed suicide after her funeral. A boy who drowned himself in the river while fighting drug addiction, one who died of an overdose, one who was homeless and mentally ill and was finally committed to the state hospital after being ruled criminally insane. One whose alcoholic father battered him and his mother, a friendless kid who became more and more angry and would wander through the halls talking to himself, a kid who nobody liked who became a car thief like his older brother, but his brother got probation while he went to prison.
The old people in the writing group thought it was hilarious.
If you could watch the movie in fast motion it might be easier to take.
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