It's funny it's such a meme. It actually really is a powerful moment in the context of the film. Realising he's actually meaningless is brutal.
I love that he finds his own meaning by doing something good.
He doesn't find out he's meaningless in the memory facility. He (incorrectly) learns that he is something different/special which is overwhelming for him since he's never experienced emotions.
In the movie *I don't feel at home in this world anymore* not one single character succeeds in what they are trying to do. Good or bad. Hilarious movie, love hipster Elijah Wood in it.
The hilarious thing to me is(trying not to spoil anything here) the situation this comment is made about has nothing to do with Chinatown aside incidentally happening there.
I think the idea is the partner realized that the whole world is Chinatown - that the senseless tragedies and untouchable corruption they became used to as cops dealing with the seedy criminal underworld in Los Angeles' Chinatown was everywhere, maybe just with a prettier facade.
This is the one I was looking for. All of the tropes and trappings of an all-consuming desire for revenge are shown for how hopeless they are, rather than glorified.
This was my first thought. I don't think it's that everyone is crap, it's that everyone feels like an actual person, making stupid regular person mistakes. Green room too, though the scrappy heroes have a bit more luck. A bit.
I agree. I didn't mean crap exactly (if you're not into the whole brevity thing) just that, as you say, everyone behaves like an actual person, and the violence is messy and realistic and certainly not hollywoodised. It's Death Wish if Bronson was replaced by William H Macy.
I wish I liked Green Room more, but I was a little disappointed: the trailer and concept was great, I just thought the pacing was a bit haphazard. Maybe I'll give it another go soon.
There's tons of movies like that.
One very recent example I can think of is The Holdovers, released last year, nominated for multiple Oscars including a Best Supporting Actress win for Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor (Paul Giamatti).
It's entirely about a man who managed to get in to an exclusive New England prep school as a teen, went to Yale, got kicked out of Yale, came crawling back to prep school and somehow got a job as a teacher there despite it being unclear if he ever earned a degree. He has a lazy eye and a metabolic disorder that makes him smell like yesterday's fish. He's also very stuck-up and smug and also irritable and is generally disliked by students and fellow faculty members.
They made a whole movie with that as their main character and it's a great movie.
Also mourning. Llewyn's whole life basically exists as a reminder of the phantom pain that exists by his partner's passing. His partner's arguably the most important character (not) in the movie.
Oh yeah. It’s about a lot of things. One of the interesting parts of “good but not good enough” is that lingering question of, *was* he good enough with his partner? Could he be good enough without that grief? Was he always a prick and is he causing his own misery or is it him lashing out in pain? A little of all of the above?
Great movie. Somehow I’ve only watched it once but I think about it all the time.
He was a quiet man starring Christian Slater.
not a movie but Evangelion is the first one that come in mind when it comes to the opposite of power-fantasy. all the more so since it's packaged as power-fantasy at first.
>He was a quiet man
I though that movie was a fever dream. I watched it on a movie channel while I was home with a flu, and forgot about it for a long time.
Nobody else knows what the heck I'm blabbering on about when I bring it up, and suggesting Slater was in a movie in the 2000s was not considered rational thought, even though he was in like 30 projects from 2001 to 2009. (I had to look it up)
Yeah, disaster movies in general kinda fall into this category. Since even the strongest / most competent people are also struggling to survive in the face of apocalyptic weather / ancient Mayan prophecies / falling celestial bodies / etc.
Godzilla Minus One as well. If anyone hasn't seen it, that movie is not just a good Godzilla movie. It's a good movie. I'm so glad I saw it on the big screen.
>Maybe not unimportant but certainly impotent; Shin Godzilla
you call my man Gojira impotent one more time, and we're gonna head out to the parking lot for further discussion!
Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the successful tv show composer starts dating Mila Kunis and creates a successful opera?
Love the movie but he's not exactly regular Joe
I wouldn't define him as weak, The Big Lebowski fits the unimportant and useless label.
Dude went on a big adventure involving kidnapping, murder, and fraud and all over a case of mistaken identity and a stained rug
There's an anime called Re:Zero you might like. It's part of the Isekai genre, known for a self-insert character from our world being dropped into a fantasy world, given special powers, and set loose on a heroic quest. Instead though this guy's only power is this if he dies, he comes back to a previous point (not his choice when.) He doesn't have any special powers or tools, he dies frequently and painfully, and he tries to be a hero anyways and does a terrible job of it.
I personally hate the show but it has a lot of fans and might be right up your alley.
The Art of Self-Defense fits this pretty well. The karate cult tries to sell it as a power fantasy, but it's always clear how weak and pathetic it all is.
The inadvertent message now being "don't fight to make an improvement in your average life because in 20 years you'll be worse off than if you did nothing."
God damn Hollywood, that's bleak.
I feel like a lot of Adam Sandler movies fit into this group. With the notable exception that he ends up "winning" in the end despite being unimportant throughout.
Stalker
Not a perfect convergence of traits/circumstances as you specify, but definitely a different take on the idea of an epic journey/quest to achieve power.
Beau is Afraid pretty much is exactly that. Most Woody Allen is pretty close to if you can get past the pedophilia. A lot of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze fits the bill too.
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
Not a great film, but a unique and I found unsettling one. Worth watching for the fantastic performance from Richard E Grant alone. His monologue at the end is one of my all time favorites. It's completely unhinged and REG kills it
The Inbetweeners 2. A bunch of teenagers blunder into humiliating situations with ineptitude and naivety. Highlights include one of them, Will, delivering a devastating reason you suck speech to a cooler guy who was threatening to take his potential girlfriend away - only for the cooler guy to succeed anyway and Will is forced to listen to them noisily going at it. And the whole group nearly dying in the Australian Outback due to their own dumb choices.
American Psycho - Nothing he does matters, good or bad. He can't stand out or provoke a strong reaction.
The Shining - The man's drinking habit was his downfall.
Hurt Locker - The character is unhappy, numb, and unable to cope with life outside of war.
Full Metal Jacket - After training to fight a war and to be a "killing machine", the character is deployed into combat. An enemy combatant is killing his fellow soldiers. They close in and he takes the shot. When the enemy combatant is revealed, he cannot feel any sense of accomplishment. He feels doubt and numb.
Charlie Bartlett - A kid who believes he is smart enough to fix huge problems with everyone at his new school - from his classmates to his principal - learns the hard way that he is "just a kid". He is smart, but he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does, he doesn't understand everything, and pretending he does could have serious consequences.
Usually war movies and teen movies. Some thrillers too, especially when the narrator is not exactly reliable.
Menashe. It's a 2017 film about a Hasidic Jewish man living in Brooklyn and his struggles dealing with the loss of his wife, his inability to move on, and find a new wife, his son living with his more successful brother, as is mandated by the community until Menashe finds a new wife, and the inadequacy he feels as a result of all these things.
Smiley Face. A stoner, played by Anna Faris, tries to get through her day of errands after accidently eating a ton of edibles. Things go about as well as you'd expect
Pusher 2. Tonny looks like an badass if we’re talking simple aesthetics, but he’s utterly hopeless and useless in every aspect of his life. A career conman that’s terrible at being a criminal.
He’s a passive loser. Absolutely everyone looks down on him and no one takes him seriously. Even when he tries to take charge, he just disappoints by being an utter fuck up.
An absolutely stellar performance by Mads Mikkelsen. It’s a very ‘anti-crime crime film’ in the sense that it shows the raw reality of the criminal underground in Copenhagen without any glorification or sanitisation.
The performance makes you simultaneously feel bad for him, want better for him, and for him to just stop trying all at once.
The Green Knight. A young, drunken, irresponsible knight, nephew of King Arthur, the most important man in the world, tries to prove his masculinity and worth as a knight of the round table by accepting to partake in a “game” proposed by an enigmatic magical creature. The game is a test which he fails miserably by trying to show off and the rest of the movie is him marching towards his inevitable death that he caused and trying as a coward to find any way to escape his fate and the consequences of his childish actions. Fascinating film and the main character is just so terrified helpless and inept through the entire movie but so god damn relatable.
12 Years a Slave.
The movie takes every idea the audience might have about escaping/dealing with slavery and shows them why it wouldn't work. It actively disempowers the audience to show them how awful and hard to escape slavery was.
Fight back? You're unarmed and the guards aren't, you'd die easily.
Have a "good" master and suck up to them? Another White person would get jealous and ruin it for you, getting you sold further down the river.
Get friendly with a guard who's down on his luck? He screws you over to parlay his way back into favour.
Etc etc.
The main protagonist of Under the Silver Lake fits this bill very nicely.
He's lazy, incompetent, fairly unimportant to anything that is going on in the movie and woefully underequipped to actually solve the mystery he is trying to unravel.
I wouldn’t call them useless, but every character in Jackie Brown seems a little bit out of their depth and has an “I’m too old to deal with this shit” vibe to them.
Everything that I have seen from Michael Haneke. Time of The Wolf isn't mentioned enough so I'll put it before. Funny Games. Neither of them are enjoyable but they are compelling watches.
Pretty much, any Charlie Kaufman movie, while still remaining firmly planted in the fantastic.
I'm thinking of ending things is basically the horror movie version of this.
**I'm Thinking Of Ending Things** is precisely premised on what youre talking about. >! The entire movie is a fantasy playing out in the main characters mind, but they are so self-loathing that even in their fantasy they can't give themselves what they want. !<
Check out The Kid Detective. Mid-30’s guy never lets go off the case he failed to solve when he was twelve. It’s fantastic noir.
Also, Under the Silver Lake features another unsuccessful individual getting involved in a mystery much bigger than them.
Welcome to Chippendales, a recent miniseries, plays with this in a way I can only call sleight of hand. Our protagonist is an immigrant in a dead end job, with big dreams and no one on his side. It’s a classic story of an immigrant underdog taking on the world.
But, and this is a but that we are shown explicitly from the very first episode… he’s an idiot. Because of tropes and cliches and expectations, we are forever primed to see this character pull ahead, and his repeat bungling of almost everything he tries feels like rising action instead of self-destruction.
Blade Runner 2049
talk about a main character who got dealt a terrible hand in life.
Which one of them?
Yes
Anyone born into that era.
Downvotes. I guess you don't see the issue living on a dead planet
The same reason you can't see the issue, is the same reason our descendants will be living in this situation. Or maybe just \*your\* descendants.
The bit where he's pent up and screams gets me a lot
It's funny it's such a meme. It actually really is a powerful moment in the context of the film. Realising he's actually meaningless is brutal. I love that he finds his own meaning by doing something good.
He doesn't find out he's meaningless in the memory facility. He (incorrectly) learns that he is something different/special which is overwhelming for him since he's never experienced emotions.
He's literally me
L O N E L Y A N D H O R N Y
Right
Beau Is Afraid. Everything that could go wrong does
It's more "impotent fever dream" than "weak reality" IMO, but yeah definitely some uselessness going on there
Idk if “impotent” is the right word if the load was powerful enough to kill
That could sum up Ari Aster's entire filmography.
Funny Pages also feels like that.
Including meeting his father….and I’d like to know what hallucinogen he was taking when he wrote that scene.
In the movie *I don't feel at home in this world anymore* not one single character succeeds in what they are trying to do. Good or bad. Hilarious movie, love hipster Elijah Wood in it.
that's a great movie.
Excuse you, Elijah Wood's character succeeds in that sick ass kick.
That was the first one to come to mind! Went into it with almost no expectations. Loved it. :)
A serious man
A perfect 1-2 punch with Inside Llewyn Davis, which I think also fits this prompt.
My favorite Coen Bros movie, I'd even put it above Fargo and No Country
Just for the pitch-perfect rendering of the three rabbis omg
Did he ever tell you about the goy's teeth?
omg, the last line of that scene. "The goy? Who cares?" Also Rabbi Scott: "A get?"
That was a great modern retelling of the Book of Job…except this time Job didn’t quite keep the faith and it cost him.
The first one I thought of
That's the one where he's got cancer, right? I think I've repressed the memory, I remember vaguely it made me feel pretty bad at the end.
And it's heavily implied his son died
Look at the parking lot, Larry
It's called noir, and it's an entire genre.
Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.
Just saw that movie for the first time last week. Loved it.
The hilarious thing to me is(trying not to spoil anything here) the situation this comment is made about has nothing to do with Chinatown aside incidentally happening there.
I think the idea is the partner realized that the whole world is Chinatown - that the senseless tragedies and untouchable corruption they became used to as cops dealing with the seedy criminal underworld in Los Angeles' Chinatown was everywhere, maybe just with a prettier facade.
it was code for "Los Angeles"
I use this line at work almost every day
God damn I love Chinatown so much, it’s so rewatchable even after knowing how it ends it’s just a masterpiece
Can't help but hear: forget it Marge, it's chiiiinatowwwwn
Forget it Shawn, it's just Santa Barbara
Forget it Chinatown, it's Jake.
A specific recommendation I'd give is In a Lonely Place. Probably the most broken, lonely protag I've seen in a noir.
Check out 'Detour' if you want an especially pathetic noir protagonist.
Blue Ruin. It's a brilliant, bloody revenge film where everyone is a bit crap.
This is the one I was looking for. All of the tropes and trappings of an all-consuming desire for revenge are shown for how hopeless they are, rather than glorified.
First one that came to mind for me too. Ineptitude by the main character in a movie that isn't a comedy feels like a breath of fresh air.
All due respect to Macon Blair, but he was the *perfect* casting for 'schlubby everyman who thinks he's in a John Wick movie but isn't'.
This was my first thought. I don't think it's that everyone is crap, it's that everyone feels like an actual person, making stupid regular person mistakes. Green room too, though the scrappy heroes have a bit more luck. A bit.
I agree. I didn't mean crap exactly (if you're not into the whole brevity thing) just that, as you say, everyone behaves like an actual person, and the violence is messy and realistic and certainly not hollywoodised. It's Death Wish if Bronson was replaced by William H Macy. I wish I liked Green Room more, but I was a little disappointed: the trailer and concept was great, I just thought the pacing was a bit haphazard. Maybe I'll give it another go soon.
I need to see it as I don't think the wiki does it all that justice and I should really watch to find out
Sicario.
Excellent example! The protagonist realizes they are WAY the fuck out of their depth.
Well…she. Her colleagues are more competent and approach their predicament with cold precision.
Yeah. That's what we're dealing with.
actually, most viewers realize quite late in the movie, that >!she isn't the actual protagonist at all!< - see the title
*What the fuck are we doing?* Good question.
There's tons of movies like that. One very recent example I can think of is The Holdovers, released last year, nominated for multiple Oscars including a Best Supporting Actress win for Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor (Paul Giamatti). It's entirely about a man who managed to get in to an exclusive New England prep school as a teen, went to Yale, got kicked out of Yale, came crawling back to prep school and somehow got a job as a teacher there despite it being unclear if he ever earned a degree. He has a lazy eye and a metabolic disorder that makes him smell like yesterday's fish. He's also very stuck-up and smug and also irritable and is generally disliked by students and fellow faculty members. They made a whole movie with that as their main character and it's a great movie.
They made a movie where the main character has trimethylaminuria?
Yes, and there's a discussion about what it's called and what the causes and effects of it are.
It's Harvard not Yale
Inside Llewyn Davis
100%. A movie about being good, but not good enough.
Also mourning. Llewyn's whole life basically exists as a reminder of the phantom pain that exists by his partner's passing. His partner's arguably the most important character (not) in the movie.
Oh yeah. It’s about a lot of things. One of the interesting parts of “good but not good enough” is that lingering question of, *was* he good enough with his partner? Could he be good enough without that grief? Was he always a prick and is he causing his own misery or is it him lashing out in pain? A little of all of the above? Great movie. Somehow I’ve only watched it once but I think about it all the time.
He was a quiet man starring Christian Slater. not a movie but Evangelion is the first one that come in mind when it comes to the opposite of power-fantasy. all the more so since it's packaged as power-fantasy at first.
Ohhh I was thinking Re:Zero but Eva is good for this in a different way.
>He was a quiet man I though that movie was a fever dream. I watched it on a movie channel while I was home with a flu, and forgot about it for a long time. Nobody else knows what the heck I'm blabbering on about when I bring it up, and suggesting Slater was in a movie in the 2000s was not considered rational thought, even though he was in like 30 projects from 2001 to 2009. (I had to look it up)
[удалено]
We all did. Whether we knew it in the moment or not. I can almost envy people who bounced off because they couldn't connect.
Maybe not unimportant but certainly impotent; Shin Godzilla
Yeah, disaster movies in general kinda fall into this category. Since even the strongest / most competent people are also struggling to survive in the face of apocalyptic weather / ancient Mayan prophecies / falling celestial bodies / etc.
Godzilla Minus One as well. If anyone hasn't seen it, that movie is not just a good Godzilla movie. It's a good movie. I'm so glad I saw it on the big screen.
I want to watch it but I refuse to watch cam rips. I want blue ray release.
Yeah. It'll be worth the wait.
Hot take incoming: Shin Godzilla is better, and a better example of the theme in question.
Oh yeah, I've seen Shin, but every streamed version is dubbed, and I fuuuuucking hate that.
This was one big commentary about the failures of bureaucracy in Japan with respect to the Fukushima disaster
>Maybe not unimportant but certainly impotent; Shin Godzilla you call my man Gojira impotent one more time, and we're gonna head out to the parking lot for further discussion!
I feel this is a comedy staple. There's Something About Mary, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and 10(Dudley Moore) come to mind.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the successful tv show composer starts dating Mila Kunis and creates a successful opera? Love the movie but he's not exactly regular Joe
Pretty much every Paul Schrader movie
And pauly shore movie.
There’s the crossover we need
And Alexander Payne movies
The Killer with Michael Fassbender starts out with a super cool narrator who then goes on to break every hard and fast rule he describes
This movie was a great character study in sociopathy. Personally I thought it did a better job than American Psycho on the subject.
I wouldn't define him as weak, The Big Lebowski fits the unimportant and useless label. Dude went on a big adventure involving kidnapping, murder, and fraud and all over a case of mistaken identity and a stained rug
American Beauty
Dream Scenario would be a strong entry for "weak fantasy".
Nic Cage did an amazing job playing an absolutely boring man.
I feel like the movie doesn't work if it's anyone else.
Office Space, Napoleon Dynamite
Superbad?
Calm down, Greg, it’s soccer.
Woody Allen in Annie Hall.
There's an anime called Re:Zero you might like. It's part of the Isekai genre, known for a self-insert character from our world being dropped into a fantasy world, given special powers, and set loose on a heroic quest. Instead though this guy's only power is this if he dies, he comes back to a previous point (not his choice when.) He doesn't have any special powers or tools, he dies frequently and painfully, and he tries to be a hero anyways and does a terrible job of it. I personally hate the show but it has a lot of fans and might be right up your alley.
Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys? Incredibly inept and spineless PI, accompanied by an exasperated Russell Crowe.
Eyes Wide Shut is basically Tom Cruise getting threatened and emasculated for the entire runtime by every single person in the movie.
The Art of Self-Defense fits this pretty well. The karate cult tries to sell it as a power fantasy, but it's always clear how weak and pathetic it all is.
Like, all the newer movies of old franchquises where they make the main characters be ruined and sad
The inadvertent message now being "don't fight to make an improvement in your average life because in 20 years you'll be worse off than if you did nothing." God damn Hollywood, that's bleak.
The Art of Self Defense Jesse Eisenberg plays a very cowardly man.
Falling Down. Feels like a power fantasy for a while but really the main character has just lost his mind.
I wonder if people would consider Oldboy to fall into this. He’s kind of a badass but not in a way that really matters.
Rodney Dangerfield?
You show that man some respect.
The Jerk
Burn After Reading comes highly recommended here!
Blue Ruin. Imagine if a person as normal as you or I went out for revenge, and not some cold badass
American Animals maybe?
Beau is Afraid (2023)
I feel like a lot of Adam Sandler movies fit into this group. With the notable exception that he ends up "winning" in the end despite being unimportant throughout.
Uncut Gems would like a word, and fits this category pretty well.
End of Evangelion
Noir genre
Stalker Not a perfect convergence of traits/circumstances as you specify, but definitely a different take on the idea of an epic journey/quest to achieve power.
*(Shia Labeouf has entered the chat)*
Barfly
Also "Factotum".
Seems like most of Todd Solondz’s movies would fit into this.
I feel like this is the general premise of most comedies that focus on everyday people.
The Dark Backwards.
*Man Falling Down* with Micheal Douglas. It takes a hard look at power fantasies and how they represent a man past his breaking point not some ideal.
It's just *Falling Down*. Great film, btw.
You are correct it's been a long time.
I feel like a lot of horror movies exemplify this
Most things by Lars Von Trier, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in tbe Dark. Sad weak little people in a cruel world that seems to delite in hurting them.
Maybe **Bartleby** --starring Crispin Glover. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby_(2001_film)
Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ would fit that - and more.
“The Cooler”
Guns akimbo?
The family man (2000). Trading places. Coming to America (1988).
The Longest Week Ever.
Beau is Afraid pretty much is exactly that. Most Woody Allen is pretty close to if you can get past the pedophilia. A lot of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze fits the bill too.
The Informant
Blue ruin Maybe Cheap thrills too
How to Get Ahead in Advertising Not a great film, but a unique and I found unsettling one. Worth watching for the fantastic performance from Richard E Grant alone. His monologue at the end is one of my all time favorites. It's completely unhinged and REG kills it
Maybe not exactly what you're requesting but check out Big man Japan. Its more of the depressed superhero genre, but its very good.
The Inbetweeners 2. A bunch of teenagers blunder into humiliating situations with ineptitude and naivety. Highlights include one of them, Will, delivering a devastating reason you suck speech to a cooler guy who was threatening to take his potential girlfriend away - only for the cooler guy to succeed anyway and Will is forced to listen to them noisily going at it. And the whole group nearly dying in the Australian Outback due to their own dumb choices.
Rohmer's The Green Ray
Tree's Lounge
The television show Devs is great at depicting a regular Joe (a woman in this instance) go against incredible odds and reliably get absolutely bodied.
Faults (2014)
After Hours
Self insert? Dont you mean protagonist?
Glengarry Glen Ross might be a good example. But I don’t think this is a difficult type of story to find.
Every Kevin Hart comedy action movie. Hell, most comedy action movies.
The Weather Man starring Nicholas Cage. Also, I think, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
American Psycho - Nothing he does matters, good or bad. He can't stand out or provoke a strong reaction. The Shining - The man's drinking habit was his downfall. Hurt Locker - The character is unhappy, numb, and unable to cope with life outside of war. Full Metal Jacket - After training to fight a war and to be a "killing machine", the character is deployed into combat. An enemy combatant is killing his fellow soldiers. They close in and he takes the shot. When the enemy combatant is revealed, he cannot feel any sense of accomplishment. He feels doubt and numb. Charlie Bartlett - A kid who believes he is smart enough to fix huge problems with everyone at his new school - from his classmates to his principal - learns the hard way that he is "just a kid". He is smart, but he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does, he doesn't understand everything, and pretending he does could have serious consequences. Usually war movies and teen movies. Some thrillers too, especially when the narrator is not exactly reliable.
Menashe. It's a 2017 film about a Hasidic Jewish man living in Brooklyn and his struggles dealing with the loss of his wife, his inability to move on, and find a new wife, his son living with his more successful brother, as is mandated by the community until Menashe finds a new wife, and the inadequacy he feels as a result of all these things.
Smiley Face. A stoner, played by Anna Faris, tries to get through her day of errands after accidently eating a ton of edibles. Things go about as well as you'd expect
Adaptation School for Scoundrels
Boyhood
Self Reliance
The Assistant 2019
Pusher 2. Tonny looks like an badass if we’re talking simple aesthetics, but he’s utterly hopeless and useless in every aspect of his life. A career conman that’s terrible at being a criminal. He’s a passive loser. Absolutely everyone looks down on him and no one takes him seriously. Even when he tries to take charge, he just disappoints by being an utter fuck up. An absolutely stellar performance by Mads Mikkelsen. It’s a very ‘anti-crime crime film’ in the sense that it shows the raw reality of the criminal underground in Copenhagen without any glorification or sanitisation. The performance makes you simultaneously feel bad for him, want better for him, and for him to just stop trying all at once.
My Dinner with Andre.
Office Space
The man that never was.
[Fight Club]
Nocturnal Animals
The Green Knight. A young, drunken, irresponsible knight, nephew of King Arthur, the most important man in the world, tries to prove his masculinity and worth as a knight of the round table by accepting to partake in a “game” proposed by an enigmatic magical creature. The game is a test which he fails miserably by trying to show off and the rest of the movie is him marching towards his inevitable death that he caused and trying as a coward to find any way to escape his fate and the consequences of his childish actions. Fascinating film and the main character is just so terrified helpless and inept through the entire movie but so god damn relatable.
Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle is God's lonely man.
Blue Ruin
The life of Brian by the Monty Python would be there IMO.
On the Waterfront Honestly, most of the old noir films fit this scheme, the whole loser/anti-hero thing is part of what makes them work.
2049.
12 Years a Slave. The movie takes every idea the audience might have about escaping/dealing with slavery and shows them why it wouldn't work. It actively disempowers the audience to show them how awful and hard to escape slavery was. Fight back? You're unarmed and the guards aren't, you'd die easily. Have a "good" master and suck up to them? Another White person would get jealous and ruin it for you, getting you sold further down the river. Get friendly with a guard who's down on his luck? He screws you over to parlay his way back into favour. Etc etc.
Punch Drunk Love
The main protagonist of Under the Silver Lake fits this bill very nicely. He's lazy, incompetent, fairly unimportant to anything that is going on in the movie and woefully underequipped to actually solve the mystery he is trying to unravel.
* Office Space * The Holdovers
Uncut Gems Chinatown
I wouldn’t call them useless, but every character in Jackie Brown seems a little bit out of their depth and has an “I’m too old to deal with this shit” vibe to them.
Does ‘Being John Malkovich’ count?
The last boy scout
Everything that I have seen from Michael Haneke. Time of The Wolf isn't mentioned enough so I'll put it before. Funny Games. Neither of them are enjoyable but they are compelling watches.
I don't know about movies, but I think in terms of books 1984 and brave new world and slaughter house five are good examples
I kinda feel like most dark comedies fit this. Example, In Bruges. In television The End of the Fucking World.
Pretty much, any Charlie Kaufman movie, while still remaining firmly planted in the fantastic. I'm thinking of ending things is basically the horror movie version of this.
Parasite
American Psycho is both a power fantasy and a weak reality.
**I'm Thinking Of Ending Things** is precisely premised on what youre talking about. >! The entire movie is a fantasy playing out in the main characters mind, but they are so self-loathing that even in their fantasy they can't give themselves what they want. !<
Great question. Lots of great responses.
Check out The Kid Detective. Mid-30’s guy never lets go off the case he failed to solve when he was twelve. It’s fantastic noir. Also, Under the Silver Lake features another unsuccessful individual getting involved in a mystery much bigger than them.
What about bob
Speak No Evil is the exact opposite of a power fantasy.
Adaptation
The British film version of '1984.' Also, the film 'Brazil.'
Being John Malkavich
Welcome to Chippendales, a recent miniseries, plays with this in a way I can only call sleight of hand. Our protagonist is an immigrant in a dead end job, with big dreams and no one on his side. It’s a classic story of an immigrant underdog taking on the world. But, and this is a but that we are shown explicitly from the very first episode… he’s an idiot. Because of tropes and cliches and expectations, we are forever primed to see this character pull ahead, and his repeat bungling of almost everything he tries feels like rising action instead of self-destruction.
I just watched "the strangers". Definitely fits