I’m a total movie fan; I don’t want to say that I’m a movie buff, ‘cause that conjures a more specific image. There are just so many great movies, and so many days where getting lost in someone else’s plights and plots just feels so cathartic.

My roommates and I have probably watched five movies a day since 2009 begun, and we’ve noticed a distinct trend in my DVD collection: I like dark, depressing, heavy movies. Even my “happy movies” are less than truly comedic — Garden State, Meet Joe Black, Shop Girl, Amélie and anything by Wes Anderson, for example. At the other extreme, movies like Atonement, American Psycho, The English Patient, Dogville, Closer, The Hours and The Fountain abound in their unhappy beauty and cinematographic emotion.

After the first semi-wretched week of this year, a couple of the housemates and I needed film distractions to occupy our time. As it turns out, sitting down and watching a combination of cruddy, free On Demand flicks and picks from my gloomy film collection did little to help.

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (incidentally, more funny than its predecessor), followed by Cruel Intentions, Death Becomes Her, Requiem for a Dream and then the first DVD of the BBC Pride and Prejudice makes for a strange and unsettling evening.

The next day, I suggested we play a board game or cards or go on a walk — but we ended up watching Roman Holiday, The Fountain, Y Tu Mama Tambien, the first 20 minutes of To Catch a Yeti on fast forward and something called Park.

Park was atrocious. It was like a cross between various indie films; Wristcutters: A Love Story, Short Bus and Crash, to be exact. We found it in the comedy section of the free On Demand movies (we keep going there recently because nobody will watch American Beauty again, and Requiem for a Dream destroys the emotional stability of everyone, apparently, but me.

Anyway, the summary said that the movie was about a park just outside Los Angeles where various people go and have various misadventures.

If by “park” they meant “wasted scrubland of despair” and by misadventures they meant “prolonged, failed suicide attempts, adultery, prostitution, nudism, forcing co-workers out of the closet on their lunch break, Billy Baldwin’s hirsute posterior in transparent lingerie, and pseudo and actual lesbian housewives bent on revenge and conquest of Latin lovers,” then this movie is exactly what it claimed to be.

The most shocking part, though, is difficult to pinpoint.

Was it the dreadful quartet of coed coworkers who learned a lot about sexuality, nudism, themselves and each other amid an awkward nude sushi-feast-orgy-argument? Perhaps it was the numerous ways a hysterical but adorable VW Beetle owner tried to kill herself before drinking flea dip with the driver of a puppy-bathing service vehicle, who is besotted with his partner, who is actually a prostitute, who has sex in the Baldwin’s overcompensating SUV while dressed as a French maid, reading aloud the car’s manual while his wife and his wife’s friend plot acts of terrorism upon the amorous adulterers.

If you’ve watched the movie, though, you might understand our inability to turn it off and pop in Dancer in the Dark. But make sure you’re bored of movies like A Very Long Engagement before you move on to Park. If that was a comedy, it made me appreciate the melancholy a little bit more.

Reach columnist Matt Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.