Since this is fast turning into a list of good mind-bending movies, I'm going to put a shout out for eXistenZ, as it always seems to be slightly overlooked.
Also, most of Lynch's non-Dune stuff would fit in this category.
Lynch's Dune doesn't belong in the 'mindfuck' category, but perhaps it needs a category of it's own. Something like 'Random nonsense about leather boys and sand worms interspersed with recognizable incidents from science fiction novel of same name'.
There are few recent popular flicks that I think are worthy of consideration -- or at least honorable mention.
I'd add The Matrix. Although it's not great, it did have the most impact on the most people.
I'd add The Sixth Sense for the same reason. When you "get it" then you are almost forced to rewatch the movie to make sure it still all adds up. It does. It was a great work by M. Night, who (to me) is really not doing as well as he used to.
(Bruce Willis was balding the whole time?!)
I love The Matrix. But
However, I think both movies where actually vary straightforward. I suspect they where popular in large part because they felt like mind bending movies, but most people never felt lost. The Usual Suspects is another great example of this. "Wait that was BS?"
I can't judge on The Sixth Sense, because I saw it knowing the ending and so nothing seemed too surprising. The Matrix is incredibly straightforward: the plot is rehashed philosophy mixed with a pretty simplistic story that allows for lots of fighting. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you watch it and it all makes sense in a cool "What if?" way. That opposed to, say, Eraserhead, where you finish the movie feeling like you've had your mind scrubbed hard with steel wool. Again, not necessarily a bad thing.
The thing that annoyed me about The Matrix is that I didn't think it was nearly as clever as it clearly thought it is. It had a pervasive smell of intellectual smugness. I much prefer movies that present themselves as rollicking good fun, but include some nice little bits of brain-fodder.
I like The Matrix as a guilty pleasure: it's so fun listening to the pontificating. I haven't seen Dark City either - looks like I have a lot of watching ahead of me.
That's a good point on both the Matrix and The Sixth Sense, but more so on The Matrix. I think the first one was very well done and while not an entirely original idea, it bent your mind just enough. Sadly, for me anyway, they ruined the whole thing with the sequels.
Awesome, awesome movie. Not for the faint of heart, though.
Let's hope that Will Smith and Steven Spielberg don't actually go ahead with remaking it (http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0615340/). What a travesty that would be.
One question though, if the Korean movie did in fact 'cause' the Virginia Tech shooting, like I've heard before (I like that IMDB plays it light), then what happens when this movie is recreated in English and thousands of emotionally unstable white kids gets a hold of this?
Man, now I absolutely have to see the original HGTTG. Was that the radio one or the TV bit?
I also haven't seen 12 Monkeys, unfortunately. My experience with movies is sadly lacking, and the sheer number makes picking a good starting point paralyzing. (I still haven't seen Citizen Kane, which has been on my computer forever.)
The original hitch hikers guide to the galaxy is the radio series as broadcast by the bbc on radio 4 in 1978, after that there were the books starting in 1979, the tv series in 1981, and finally the movie in 2005.
Not merely "for its time" (as though films have improved dramatically over time, like computers and womens bathing suits), and I'm stunned that anyone who likes movies doesn't like Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is a great film, and an enjoyable film...watching it is not like doing homework, and there are only a handful of movies that I've found more enjoyable or satisfying.
Let me ask you: why do you make your text fixed-width? It's got to be a conscious effort because you do it repeatedly, and it makes the rest of us cranky.
I haven't seen the movie yet, and for the record? "Just like films" means nothing. Unless you're fascinated in the art of filmmaking - if you're a "buff" - it doesn't count. I have friends who "just like films" who watch The Notebook and American Beauty and cite those as "incredible films", and that just doesn't count. The people who really like films are the ones who get deep into them.
But I haven't seen Citizen Kane, so I'll withhold judgement.
The usual suspects counts more as a movie where you have the OH THAT MAKES SENSE feeling at the end of the movie rather than pure mindfuck.
While you will have to rethink the whole movie once you've reached the end, you are left with some sort of answer. Some of these movies on the other hand, like Memento, will make you wonder WTH really happened for hours and days after actually watching it.
"I originally omitted Donnie Darko from this list but then I realized I would get hate mail if I omitted Donnie Darko from this list so I put Donnie Darko on this list."
Donnie Darko is such a terrible movie. It's utterly lacking in craft and expertise. People like it because - despite claims - it's easy to comprehend and simplistic in moral, but it's plain bad.
I liked the movie, however it didn't need comprehension. If I was reviewing at the time this move came out, this is what I'd likely say: I thought the plot was simplistic and prayed on a naive thoughtless audience, it didn't explore any truly remarkable metaphysical ideas that hasn't been thought by teenagers watching too much TV with poorly defined goals.
Honestly, I don't think I'll ever need to see the movie again in my life because it didn't take a single iota of thought to connect the plot elements.
A movie is good based on certain various aspects. There's the directorial technique. There's the cinematography. There's plot, there's acting. Donnie Darko had almost nothing.
The plot is extremely basic. The only reason people call it deep and confusing is because the director was absolutely shitty. It was his first time ever with a camera, and so the guy had no sense of timing and placement. The cuts are awful: I'm not a huge film buff but they made me cringe. The writing is thoroughly terrible. Donnie is a Mary Sue: hot, people like him (or, the right people do), he's very smart. Look at how he cuts down that strawman presenter at the start of the movie! Never mind that the arguments he makes are extraordinarily basic, or that this is a supposed professional he's arguing against. When I was 14, I had these same fantasies as myself as somebody who could say basic stuff and get away with its seeming clever. The problem is, by the time I was 15 I'd realized the valuable lesson that people tend to be smarter than you assume at first, and that they can respond to dumb stuff like that.
Other people my age didn't get that lesson, and as a result became unpopular, developed lots of weird obsessions, and left school with fantasies of themselves as supersmart supermen. Richard Kelly, the director of this movie, absolutely seems like one of these people.
In an interview I saw of Kelly, he says that the movie's not at all deep or complex. In his mind it's a straightforward movie. That shows the utter incompetence of the guy. He wasn't out to make something complex, and he made the movie so poorly that people decided it had to be complex and brooding.
Look, for instance, at the movie's much-lauded connection with the Reagan era. Once you've been told it's there, yeah, it's obvious. Beyond that? It's not a consistent theme. There are two or three moments where it's over-the-top blatant in your face, and beyond that it's completely abandoned and ignored.
The fact that you can't understand the movie without reading an external web site is a flaw. If you make the movie well, the entire thing is internal and consistent.
Acting-wise: yech. Nobody does a good job. It must have been because of the directing intent, because Jake Gyllenhall is a good actor when he's with a good director. In this he had about one tone of voice overall.
A good friend of mine who's a film buff once said of Donnie Darko and Moulin Rouge: they're the two tests of what kind of a movie person you are. If you like them, you're saying that you're willing to ignore a lot of flaws in a movie's conception for the sake of its glitzier sides. I agree with that statement, particularly about Donnie Darko.
There's always bound to be something you think needs to be on these kinds of lists. Personally, I'm disappointed there are no Alejandro Jodorowsky films on the list. I certainly think those qualify.
Santa Sangre is my favorite movie of all time. I've probably seen it about 25 times since I always make other people watch it and end up watching it with them. It still gets better every new time I see it.
I think this is the only Jodorowsky film that qualifies for the 'mindfuck' category (the others are more just surreal and weird), but it really is mind-blowing once you understand it.
First of all due to this thread I think that I won't be going out for at least a month. Thank you HN.. :P
I'd like to make my own contribution to this thread since it hasn't been mentioned.
It's "The man from earth".
Not exactly mindfuck material, since it lacks that "surreal" element, but at least on my case, each time I finish it I can't help but just sit silent and think about the claims it poses, from a philosophical point of view.
In that sense it could be in the mindflirt-romantic-dinner-with-potential category..
Anybody having any views on Primer? I watched it after reading about it on Kottke. Around the sametime a few days earlier I had watched Memento. And the contrast was as clear as heaven and earth.
Memento was v.intellectually stimulating and if you watched it closely (maybe twice) everything was there in the movie itself to figure out the 'mindfuck' elements. The very minute details which you may still miss were clearly explained in some article online, so all in all it was a comprehensive experience. It made you feel good at the end of it because everything had an explanation.
Whereas Primer just seemed like a bad movie and maybe partially because it was low budget. Throughout the movie I just thought I couldn't clearly see what was there in the scene. Many scenes felt like there was no proper light or sound.(youtubeish). And the storyline seemed so out of whack, and I remember watching it thrice, and lurking on the official movie forums trying to figure out the timeline and 'mindfuck'ness of the movie, but it just seemed like the whole movie could sort of come together only if you could imagine that half the movie was not shown. There were so many timelines in forums, and all of them seemed to miss out on major plotlines, which they would explain with a handwave as "director is v.smart and intended it to be so and you could feel that's what he wanted to portray... it was just not shown on screen...blah blah". The director himself lurked out on forums and gave conflicting and deliberately confusing interviews at the time on indie media sites and honestly he never seemed to explain wtf was going on.
In the end instead of a real mindfuck movie (like Memento), to me it just felt like a bad movie, where nothing could be explained and everything was left half-finished. I am still open to be convinced otherwise though it seems unlikely.
Jacob's Ladder is one of my favorite movies and for me the most mind-blowing ending ever. More recently we've had many movies that somehow had the same idea for an ending (don't want to mention them so not to spoil Jacob's Ladder) but AFAIK this was the first time that it was used.
I love Jacob's Ladder to death, despite the fact that it once gave me vivid nightmares. Or maybe because of that.
But the ending really sucks. The last minute of the film just fucks the whole thing up by being so simplistic--in a sense it makes the whole movie easy to dismiss. It should just end at the stairway.
I haven't seen it since it was in the cinemas but I remember at the time it made a big impact on me. For some reason, I always link it with Angel Heart, in terms of that impact.
Serial Experiment Lain. You probably haven't heard of it, and you had to be introduced first to the anime subculture, then be not frightened away by the number of bad releases in that genre, then adjust to the japan mentality, take into consideration the fact, that it was basically pre-matrix (1998), watch the movie in a one night marathon, then start reading the mentioned, and omitted literature.
However, the sheer amount of mindfuck going on in each, and every episode vastly outnumbers every single movie mentioned above, and this makes it very worthwhile.
Waking Life is a perfect example of something that sends out all the right signals for being artsy and deep to activate the GoodThink centers of your brain without having any actual substance. That movie made me want to punch the director.
I guess it's ironic that I've tried to watch "Waking Life" three different times and fell asleep midway each and every time. I still haven't fully watched it but I'm keeping it as my personal antidote for insomnia.
I'll check some of these I haven't seen out. He's got a Hitchcock and Kurosawa film on there, and they're two of the finest directors of all time. Rashomon is actually one of my least favorite Kurosawa films, but it's still great - I just much more greatly like Ran (English: "Chaos", his best film), Ikiru ("Life", it drags towards the middle but the government council scene at the end is incredible), Kagemusha ("Shadow", wow what an incredible premise - really an overlooked masterpiece when looking at his career), and of course Seven Samurai. Then you've got Yojimbo which is an interesting story but kind of campy, and Rashomon which is a great piece of storytelling and a great piece of directing, but just isn't as satisfying of an experience as Ran, Ikiru, Kagemusha, or Seven Samurai. If I was recommending Kurosawa to a new viewer, I'd say watch them in that order, and then perhaps Rashomon.
I haven't seen all of Hitchcock's films, but it's something I've been meaning to do. The thing both of these directors (Kurosawa and Hitchcock) have in common - they're both absolutely obsessed with presentation. They don't waste a single scene in their movies. In their better films, Kurosawa and Hitchcock don't even waste a single shot - everything is perfectly constructed for a very specific reason. Really incredible experiences to watch them, and highly recommended for people who love movies, stories, or simply just art.
The Machinist is up there with Memento and Vanilla Sky.
The Butterfly Effect might be in that league (directors cut only - different ending than the theatrical release).
Providence: a story told while it's being written. Sometimes the writer changes his mind, sometimes his imagination takes him where he doesn't want to go. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076574/
Smoking / No Smoking: two films that explore different possible 'forks' of the same story. The first fork is the decision by one character to smoke a cigarette. In the first film she does, in the second she doesn't. There are three or four forks in each film which all completely change the fate of the characters. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108167/
As Rod Serling would say, "Submitted for your approval":
Eraserhead
Forbidden Zone
Gaslight
Invaders from Mars
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Laura
Minority Report
Mirage
Rebecca
Suddenly, Last Summer
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Devil's Advocate
The Wizard of Oz
Total Recall
Vanilla Sky
Some are better than others, of course. And some fit the mindf definition better than others. Oh, well. These are some films that popped into my head.
Hmm, I find the list kind of "meh". There are some good films on there, but a lot of them I don't consider adventurous enough to be on among The Truly Strange. Lynch's stuff fits that bill well, but doesn't belong on the same page as e.g. Donnie Darko. A lot of these are really just witty.
If you really want a good time along the same vein, then watch "Let the right one in". BUT! You have to watch it without reading about it, or watching the preview. Just watch it without preconceptions.
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Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Unless there's something I'm completely missing I don't see how this submission falls into the above category.
edit:
The question is partly serious: I've never owned a television, and haven't seen a movie for more than two years, so there could easily be something I'm totally oblivious to. It just seems like a post that would belong on Reddit.
To me, this list doesn't seem out of place here. Here's my stab at why:
I've seen a few of these movies, and if the rest of them are in the same vein: they make you work to figure out what's happening in the film; and they sometimes mess with your perception of the world around you afterward. They are intellectually gratifying to watch.
Fun list! He's got some facts wrong (e.g. 2001 was not made as a companion piece to the novel, which came later), and he apparently never understood Jacob's Ladder (think Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge as a full-length movie). But who knew you could watch all of La Jetée (inspiration for 12 Monkeys) on Youtube?!! (Speaking of 12 Monkeys, why isn't that on the list?)
I think the article is pretty much right about 2001: the book and film were both developed by both Clarke and Kubrick at the same time, though the book was released later [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)#Writing]
It's a technicality. I did a thesis on the movie, and that's why I suppose I'm picking on a nit. Clarke wrote the novel later, but he and Kubrick wrote the screenplay together over the course of maybe three years. Clarke did always intend to novelize it, but a simultaneous release wasn't planned. (But I admit I'm totally picking nits.)
Also, most of Lynch's non-Dune stuff would fit in this category.