I LOVE mind-fuck movies. My mind absolutely loves it when it gets bent over a public restroom sink and taken by force. Or when it gets lured into an old conversion van with no windows by the promise of a bike and/or candy, then gets driven out to the woods, raped, and chopped into seven different garbage bags and scattered across the county. (I was gonna make a Casey Anthony joke here, but I figured this paragraph already went far enough.)
I realize this isn't the case for everyone- just recently my roommate and I watched Vanilla Sky, one of my all-time favourite (do you ever just want to start spelling like a Canadian? Sometimes I do) mind-fuckers, and as the credits rolled, she announced simply "That might have been the worst movie I've ever seen in my life" and then walked out of the room. Also, even though this movie technically isn't a mind-fucker, when we got to the part in No Country for Old Men when there's the flash forward and Josh Brolin's character is dead (spoiler alert!) my dad threw a five-minute tirade about how movies can't just follow a character around for 90 minutes, then suddenly kill him off with no explanation, and goddammit Jim, you and your bullshit movie suggestions sometimes!
But for me, they're the best. Half the fun is watching the movie once, being confused as hell, sprinting to the internet (figuratively) and reading various explanations and interpretations, watching it again, letting it marinate in my brain, then watching it another handful of times over the next few months.
My favourite mind-fuck movies, in no particular order:
The aforementioned Vanilla Sky- I don't understand why that movie got terrible reviews. I thought it was fantastic. Suck one, Siskel & Ebert.
Inception- the most recent addition to the list. Not as difficult to understand as some of the other movies on this list, but the different theories and hidden secrets I've read about online make it more interesting every time I watch it. This might go in my top 10 favourite movies of all-time. The Departed, Shutter Island, now this one.....Leo is pretty awesome when he's not sketching pictures of a naked chick on a sinking ship.
Donnie Darko- very underrated-- unless you've seen it, in which case it's overrated, because everyone who sees it hypes it up too much, myself included.
2001: A Space Odyssey- I wasn't smart enough to have anywhere near a clue what that movie meant until I read the book. Now I think it's awesome, lack of dialogue and all.
Mulholland Drive- representing all the David Lynch movies on this list, just so I don't have to list them all, and because this is the best one of the bunch. This movie took over my brain like no other movie before or since. I still pick up more clues towards the prevailing theory every time I watch it. David Lynch is the Dude.
And now I can add Primer to the list. I just watched it for the first time and did a quick read-through on Wikipedia, and my head is swimming. It was made on something like a $7,000 budget, and deals with the ethics of time travel (like Back to the Future) and the consequences of having other versions of yourself running around (like Back to the Future) but NOT trying to get your parents back together at the 'Enchantment Under the Sea' Dance or getting rich off of a Sports Almanac or trying to claim you invented Rock 'n' Roll (unlike Back to the Future.) Also, there's this. So it's pretty awesome. The whole thing is on youtube; here's the link to part 1.
If anybody has suggestions of movies of this nature, I'm all ears. I'll just need a few weeks to figure out Primer first though.
