Can anyone help me finish solving the most complicated movie in history?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Dissidence, Mar 27, 2021.

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  1. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    I'm going to have to try to watch Upstream Color again. I've never been able to get through it. I LOVE Primer though.

    Takashi Miike can be a mind-effing director like in Visitor Q but not in the sense of "what the eff is this" kind of thing. More like OMG that is intense/bizarre or even gross. My fave movies by him are Audition (I have to look away from the screen in a part of that movie but the sound is so intense I want to cover my ears too) and Ichi The Killer (that is probably close to a mind-eff movie, the ending took some digesting/pondering). He does make some real bizarre flicks too that might be considered mind-eff (I 4get the titles). I'm not a fan of VQ but I think Audition and Ichi are brilliant film experiences if you can stomach them. I think he intenionally likes to eff with his audience & get them to react btw.
     
  2. agentalbert

    agentalbert Senior Member

    Location:
    San Antonio, TX
    Glad I saw this thread today. I'd seen everything on the list but Triangle and Coherence. Found both stream for free on Vudu right now, so I'm going to watch.
     
  3. RexKramer

    RexKramer Senior Member

    Location:
    Outside of Philly

    Miike is all over the place and I love him for it. Unfortunately he's past the 100 film-as-director mark and when there's a clunker - there's many - it falls real flat. I love Audition and enjoyed Ichi, that's a film I should revisit. 13 Assassins might be his most accessible, he still has touches of his sensibilities but it's far more restrained and very well done. Gozu is another one of my favorites of his - it's very Lynchian in tone and surrealism. The most "OMG that's gross" I've seen him at is his Masters of Horror contribution, Imprint. NOT for the faint of heart - and it doesn't have enough of the humor which is balances his other films to lighten the darkness.
     
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  4. Geithals

    Geithals Forum Resident

    Location:
    Reykjavik
    A very interesting thread topic.
    Most of thee films mentioned already could be figured out by the end, even if one had been taken in eg Jacobs Ladder,
    My single vote goes to Michael Haneke's "Cache" (Hidden) a French film with Dan Auteuil and Juliette Binoche , a 10/10 thriller which is thoroughly gripping on first viewing but probably needs another 2 viewings to figure it out, just who was behind the stationary camera, eg at Majid's apartment.
     
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  5. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    Yeah, I agree with everything yer saying. I think he makes like 100 films A DAY! I can't keep up. Many many misses. The hits are pretty wild and mindblowing though. Gozu is very weird to say the least.

    His remake of samurai classics 13 Assassins and Hara Kiri surprised me, he played it straight and made normal movies without swimming pools of blood (like Ichi). He makes up for that with Sukiyaki Western Django though, a kind of Japanese western tribute mishmash that is rather amusingly other the top violent.

    I think the last Miike movie I saw was As the Gods Will. That doesn't qualify as something complicated but I guess it could be a mind-eff movie. Bizarre does not begin to cover it.

    [​IMG]

    As The Gods Will (2014) - Goofy gore - Nuclearblend


    I need to catch up with what he's been doing lately. Chances are in the past 5 years he may have made at least one movie I'd like....
     
  6. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    That's a good one to mention! Wasn't there going to be a Hollywood remake of that? Or maybe I am confusing it with Haneke's Funny Games which I did see his original and the remake.
     
  7. RexKramer

    RexKramer Senior Member

    Location:
    Outside of Philly
    A few years ago in Montreal at the Fantasia Film Fest Miike was there for this film's premiere and a Q&A. He said this was his "family film" and was upset that it wasn't deemed child-friendly. Ha! It was a great showing, though - at one point the audience started clapping along to a song in the film and Miike said that had never happened to him before at a screening and he was touched.
     
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  8. agentalbert

    agentalbert Senior Member

    Location:
    San Antonio, TX
    Watched both Triangle and Coherence yesterday. Enjoyed both, I think I favor Triangle a bit more. I watched it twice. Thought Melissa George did a very good job portraying the mindset of the different Jess's at various stages of awareness.
     
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  9. Has anyone seen Enter The Void? That one sounded intriguing to me. Have not watched it.
     
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  10. agentalbert

    agentalbert Senior Member

    Location:
    San Antonio, TX
    Yes. It's a a head trip. The weird first person POV will make some nauseous, I've heard. I'm not sensitive to that, myself. I liked it, or more appreciate it, though its not one I feel like sitting through again. Some very memorable sequences. The final seconds are as bleak (or as comforting, depending on your point of view) as anything I can think of.

    Doesn't really go along with the movies on the list as its not hard to fathom what is happening in Into The Void at all.
     
  11. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    Saw it a long time ago. Semi-interesting intrigue but with no actual answer so felt unfulfilled and bored at the end.
     
  12. I daresay Michael Haneke is highly...overrated.
     
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  13. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    Yes, I've seen it. I thought it was interesting/original. Not a complicated/confusing or mind-eff movie but without giving anything away I'd doubt you've seen anything like it already.
     
  14. Geithals

    Geithals Forum Resident

    Location:
    Reykjavik
    I doubt that Cache (Hidden) would be remade in the USA unless it was dramatically watered down and with Haneke in his grave. Maybe Amour, a gem of a film, could be remade considering the universality of the theme.
     
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  15. Scowl

    Scowl Forum Resident

    Location:
    ?
    Thanks for recommending Triangle. I've only seen it once so far so I can't assist you yet.

    It was nice to see that Melissa George learned to do an American accent after they had to write around her R.P. British/Australian accent in the season of Alias she was in.
     
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  16. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    Thx to this thread I forced myself to watch Upstream Color all the way through. Have never been able to get through it b4 (always fell asleep). The style of the film is linking together a bunch of mostly short snippets that move at basically a snail's pace with all kinds of bizarre imagery and little dialog, and what dialog there is hard to follow and makes little sense at first. I could follow the story & got all the way through somehow and give credit to Carruth for making such an "experimental" film but can't recommend it, just not for me. I think if this story was shot more traditionally it could be a cool scifi thriller but that is missing the point I guess.
     
  17. unclefred

    unclefred Coastie with the Moastie

    Location:
    Oregon Coast
    I've seen most of those and I feel Aronofsky's The Fountain should be near the top of the list. There's a lot to argue about in there and which way you want to interpret the ending/message/story(s).
     
  18. PH416156

    PH416156 Alea Iacta Est

    Location:
    Europe
    I had no problems understanding all the films mentioned in this thread and that I saw.

    Heck, I was more confused about "Dark City"

    when it was revealed they were inside a giant space station floating in space. I thought the aliens arrived on earth and the whole movie took plane on our planet
     
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  19. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    Watched TRIANGLE this evening. A new favorite. Thanks!
     
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  20. happysunshine

    happysunshine Tillverkningen av Salubrin startades 1893

    Location:
    Earth
    ”Groundhog Day” + ”Death Ship” + **** CGI seagulls = ”Triangle”. I might be too dumb for the plot, but what’s the mystery? That things are in a loop?
     
  21. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    And I've become obsessed enough with the movie that I ordered some rare Blu-ray just to own the film on my terms. When we watched it last week, it was on IMDb-TV which had commercials in it. I want to watch it again without interruptions. So I bit the bullet and found an out-of-print US Blu-ray.

    [​IMG]
     
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  22. Solaris

    Solaris a bullet in flight

    Location:
    New Orleans, LA
    You're not the only one. That kind of style is good for a 30 second tv commercial, but stretched to feature length in service of a circular plot was insufferable. Although I did like Primer to a point, I thought Upstream Color showed a director too enamored of his own perceived cleverness.
     
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  23. slipkid

    slipkid Senior Member

    I'm watching this show now (a mini-series called Devs) and finding the theoretical physics tied together with a super-duper computer to be pretty interesting & head scratching. Might appeal to some in this thread. I haven't finished it yet and how it ends is probably going to decide whether I give it two thumbs or not but the free will vs determinism wrapped up in what that computer is doing is fascinating to me to say the least.

    Devs - Wikipedia

    The writer/director (Alex Garland) of this also is responsible for movies Ex Machina and Annihilation, both of which I recommend if you like scifi that may leave you with some head scratching, Annihilation especially.
     
  24. Pizza

    Pizza With extra pepperoni

    Location:
    USA
    It is a bummer that it’s out of print here. I hit that same wall about two years ago after streaming it and being blown away. I couldn’t believe it was OOP. I ended up importing it from Amazon.uk where it was dirt cheap and pre-pandemic shipping prices so I could have a copy. It’s region coded (I have an all region player) but if it’s ever re-released in the US I’ll gladly rebuy it.
     
  25. will_b_free

    will_b_free Forum Resident

    Location:
    Boulder, CO
    Triangle was good. Seems to be no way to get the commentary track in the US, which is too bad.
     
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