
Mindfuck Movies - chrisconley
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/mindfuck_movies.php
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marksutherland
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.

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unalone
Seconded. Lynch's every movie is pretty twisted. Even Twin Peaks was bizarre.

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limmeau
Except for the Straight Story, obviously.

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nreece
Highly recommended mindfuck films from across the globe:

El Método/The Method (Spain): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427582/>

15 Park Avenue (India): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449159/>

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi/Spirited Away (Japan/Animation):
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/>

Moustache, La (France): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428856/>

Monday (Japan): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239655/>

Shutter (Thai/Horror): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0440803/>

Gaau ji/Dumplings (Hong Kong): <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472458/>

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yargseiks
Spirited Away wasn't really a mindfuck, actually; it was a lovely, fairly
straightforward fantasy/coming-of-age story. Highly recommended nonetheless.

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DanielBMarkham
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.

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Retric
He mentions both of them:

    
    
      (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?"

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unalone
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.

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Angostura
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 liked Dark City a lot.

~~~
unalone
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.

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tortilla
Good list. I'd add Oldboy (Korean) to that list.

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jacquesm
does 'the usual suspects' count or is that too mainstream ? Brazil ?

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swivelmaster
Brazil! Brazil!!!!!

One of my favorite movies.

And a serious mindfuck.

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unalone
That final sequence is one of my all-time favorite. Gilliam at his best,
directing-wise.

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Angostura
I loved Brazil, but I still have a soft spot for 12 Monkeys.

I also like the fact that both films feature tiny parts for Simon Jones, the
original Arthur Dent.

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unalone
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.)

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
almost
There was a new series to the radio play fairly recently. Just for anyone who
missed that.

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wallflower
"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."

~~~
unalone
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.

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electromagnetic
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.

~~~
unalone
I was expecting a genuinely good movie. I got a shamble of a tale with pretty
much nothing going for it.

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billturner
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.

~~~
brl
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.

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spyrosk
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..

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gruseom
I'd add The Thirteenth Floor for anyone who likes Dark City, Abre los Ojos, or
The Matrix.

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areaMan
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.

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EvilTrout
A very good list. For me I was disappointed because I'd seen virtually all of
them already.

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zerokoder
Disappointed that Lost Highway didn't make it..

Check out Charlie Kaufman's "Adaptation".. brain bending on a different
level..

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lazyant
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.

~~~
pi3832
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.

[http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4218389/Jacobs_Ladder_(1990)...](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4218389/Jacobs_Ladder_\(1990\)_%5BDVDRip%5D_By_%5BKooKoo%5D_%5Bh33t%5D)

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sdragon
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.

~~~
zandorg
And blatant Vannevar Bush, Xanadu and Ted Nelson references!

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paraschopra
Anybody here seen Waking Life? I loved it!

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nazgulnarsil
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.

~~~
chime
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.

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lionhearted
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.

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johnlongawa
Thanks for the list.

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).

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zupatol
Some films by Alain Resnais deserve to be on this list:

Je t'aime, je t'aime: a time machine experiment gone wrong.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063152/>

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/>

Other films that come to mind:

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys , by Michael Haneke.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216625/>

Akira has an ending just about as powerful as the ending of 2001.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/>

Beyond a reasonable doubt (Fritz Lang) <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049006/>

(but why am I writing this on hacker news?) Vertigo (Hitchcock)
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/>

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bd
There are many more mentioned in two related MetaFilter threads:

 _Mindf_ _k movies_

<http://www.metafilter.com/79096/Mindfk-Movies>

 _Help us rally around a common weirdness_

[http://ask.metafilter.com/109842/Help-us-rally-around-a-
comm...](http://ask.metafilter.com/109842/Help-us-rally-around-a-common-
weirdness)

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AndrewO
After watching Le Jetée, I kinda want to watch 12 Monkeys again.

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ojbyrne
The original version of Sleuth (Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier) should
be on the list.

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ewiethoff
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.

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jamesbritt
Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête), and Orpheus.

Try the version of Beauty and the Beast with the Phillip Glass soundtrack
(basically turning the film into an opera).

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mand0
Mind Game is a good one.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Game_(film)>

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csuper
requiem for a dream?

~~~
csuper
&pi

~~~
freakball
&the fountain

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wheels
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.

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markessien
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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antidaily
I'll add 'I Heart Huckabees'.

~~~
unalone
That's not really a mindfuck: it's straightforward and consistent according to
its deranged world.

Fun movie, though. The soundtrack is incredible.

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joe_bleau
The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel, 1962. I still don't get it.

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nandemo
I don't think this fits the "mindfuck" label. It's not hard to understand,
it's simply absurd.

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Ras_
The Crying Game, Soylent Green, Requiem For A Dream, Misery

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mixmax
What's this doing on the frontpage?

Am I missing something obvious?

~~~
mhartl
Mindfuck movies have the hacker nature.

Also, from <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>:

 _Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can
flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users
will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please
don't also comment that you did._

~~~
mixmax
Sory, I didn't mean to be obnoxious. Just wondering.

~~~
mhartl
No worries. I may have pulled the trigger too fast on the HN guidelines
smackdown. Sorry about that.

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senthil_rajasek
waiting for the "Life of Pi" as a movie. Night supposedly (rumor ??) has the
rights to make a movie, would be an awesome one...

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rogercosseboom
Wow, I'm so glad Primer is on this list!

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edw519
Could have been named, "Enterprise".

All time sequences reversed?

No short term memory?

Memento

What?

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pi3832
Lists like this should really contain links to torrents of the films.

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preavy
Belle du Jour

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limmeau
Don't know. Where's the "mind" in that?

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kubrick
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?)

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dood
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>]

~~~
kubrick
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.)

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Allocator2008
U-Turn belongs there too.

