Friday, August 12, 2011

15 Of The Most Confusing Films Ever Made

From popcrunch, Most films are pretty linear and easy to follow in their story telling. Others are muddled, but make sense when you think about them — like Memento. But some, some are designed to bewilder, obfuscate, and confuse. These 15 films are all varying degrees of head-scratchers. Some you can pick apart with a bit of work, some you are deliberately impossible to understand, but all are worth the effort of the attempt. Oh yeah, spoilers.

#6 Mulholland Drive

Pretty much any film by David Lynch belongs on this list, but lets bundle most of them up in with Mulholland Drive, which is possibly his most acclaimed work. Lets face it, barring maybe Elephant Man and Dune, Lynch’s work is uniquely surrealist, and hard to follow regardless of how well you understand his corpus of productions. Lynch has specifically avoided offering explanations of the goings on in Mulholland Drive, instead intentionally wanting viewers and critics to create their own opinions. Non-linear, bewildering, and inter-cut with seemingly unrelated chunks, it’s hard to follow even at the best of times, yet remains a powerful and influential film.

See the full list here

2 comments:

Octopunk said...

Hmm. The Mulholland Drive entry lost me for two reasons: calling it "possibly [Lynch's] most acclaimed work" (no way!), and including it on this list but not including Lost Highway, which makes far less sense. I have a workable theoretical decoding of Mulholland Drive that I thought of as I was leaving the theater, whereas I don't know where to start with Lost Highway.

There's a lot of these I haven't seen. Now I have to watch them and dare them to confuse me.

Johnny Sweatpants said...

I can't access the webpage at work but I was going to express the same sentiment Octo just did about Mulholland Drive vs. Lost Highway.

JPX gave me a copy of Inland Empire a couple of years ago but I can't bring myself to watch it as I'm intimidated by the possibility of 3+ hours of incoherency.

Also I'm slightly annoyed that the writer didn't mention Straight Story which one of his most critically acclaimed and coherent films.

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