The Lighthouse. I still don’t know what the hell happened.
Zardoz. The gaint floating head with the crazy man inside shouting “the gun is good, the penis is bad,” Sean Connery in a WAY too revealing outfit, the bizarre, apathetic, immortal poeple, and wierd pyramid magic.
It was hands down the most strange, unfathomable film I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched The Dancing Outlaw.
You know, Sean Connery took that role and produced that movie (yeah, he fully embraced it) because he wanted to do something original. But I mean, as weird as it is, and as original it is as that, it is some serious Sci-Fi movie full of social commentary.
Every time I hear or think about Zardoz, I think “this will probably be the last time I think about Zardoz.” It’s been almost a decade since I first had that thought.
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The book is better IMO (other than no Portman :-) and one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read. Highly recommended.
Did you read all three books? Got real WTF in book 2 and 3.
Yes, I read them all the same week (bad weather kept me inside). Yesterday I read the Silo Stories (3?) in his Machine Learning anthology. I liked the first book and the short stories the best.
It’s probably my favorite scifi movie that made me really feel something. I think you can find a lot to relate to, grief, depression, loss. I really think the main theme is self destruction, specifically resulting from some kind of trauma. Everyone had their own issues and they were all basically destroying themselves and finding solace in the shimmer.
Quite literally self ‘Annihilation’, I think the shimmer itself is more analogous to cancer (continuously expanding, with random distorted outcomes, most of which are agressive towards anything untainted by the shimmer), but fundamentally each of the characters are there for their own different reasons for self-destruction with the hopes that it benefits others, as they effectively know it’s a suicide mission).
The bit that I cannot recall if it was explained is why did the special ops guy go if he had a loving wife at home; what was his reason for self destruction?
The bit that I cannot recall if it was explained is why did the special ops guy go if he had a loving wife at home; what was his reason for self destruction?
I don’t remember an explanation for it aside from it was just his mission as part of being in the military. But he didn’t really have a “loving” wife at home. She cheated on him. Maybe he knew and volunteered for the mission because his marriage was over.
The movie was about cancer? Where did you read that?! The movie is the closest movie approximation of the book Alex Garland could make, considering how dense and intertwined the whole Southern Reach Trilogy is.
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Sorry if my question sounded like an attack 😬 Vandermeer’s writing style deliberately opens his work to different interpretations and it’s rather interesting to see the same happening with this movie adaptation. Another interesting angle I’ve read is environmental: either in a way that Area X is return to nature (purification) or it’s the opposite (our own destruction of the planet) Getting ready to re-read the whole trilogy, will definitely include this guy’s cancer perspective as I am going through to see how it fits.
My favourite film analysis of this is by Dan Olson of Folding Ideas: https://youtu.be/URo66iLNEZw
It’s a great breakdown and also criticises those “ending explained” videos as well.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/URo66iLNEZw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot, thank you.
Sausage party.
That final scene… Lol
the part when eveyone is having a gangbang still haunt me
Mulholland Drive.
Trust me on this…just put all technology away when you watch this and give it your 100% attention. One of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen.
David Lynch made a lot more stuff that falls into this category - Check out Lost Highway too some time.
Mulholland Drive has some kind of plot that can be deciphered. Watch Inland Empire if you want to watch a David Lynch movie that makes Mulholland Drive look normal.
Primer. This has to be one of my favorite WTF movies I have watched. Required multiple watches to understand.
I just watched Neon Genesis Evangellion. WTF at the end of the series. Then saw there was a later movie with the “real” end. Which was also WTF.
Literally the first thing on my mind when I saw this thread! I needed some time to process what happened after seeing End of Evangelion.
I was looking for this reply. Seconded lmao
The Room (2003) is without exaggeration the worst movie ever made. It’s so bad that you can’t even enjoy it ironically. Someone else made a much better movie (The Disaster Artist) about how The Room ever got made in the first place. Because that will be the first question on your mind after watching it.
Hbomberguy made a great argument (in the middle of a video about CTRL+ALT+DELETE, weirdly enough) for one reason to… find value in The Room. Not like it necessarily, but maybe come away from it having learned something. The Room is almost definitely a twisted reproduction of a real relationship that Tommy Wiseau actually had, and therefore you can watch the movie from the angle of “how terrible people like Tommy Wiseau twist the stories of past relationships to fit their narrative”. Of course, you also have to parse through Tommy’s absolute insanity to get to the message he’s accidentally making about himself, but still.
And yet, there are entire crowds of spoon-throwing and football-tossing fans who gather at showings of the film regularly.
It’s not the first bad movie to attain cult status. It’s just the worst.
I’ve seen it about 10 times. It keeps getting worse, lol.
EXistenZ - The final question “Are we still in the game?” really summarized the first watch experience. You have no clue what’s going on anymore by that point. Same goes for Total Recall by the way - that movie also has you guessing what’s real and what isn’t throughout 90% of the runtime.
I can’t remember when, but I know I saw EXistenZ on HBO somewhere. I first saw it from the middle of the movie and thought “If I watch this from the beginning I might understand it.” Turns out watching it again didn’t help, but I watched it again anyway. It was sort of like a fascinating disaster.
Kudos to the creators of that film. I don’t think I could have come up with that primis.
I watched it twice in a row the first time I watched it too. I think it helped, but it’s still had to watch it a third time.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion. It was a one weird rollercoaster ride. I still can’t understand the movie too.
All I know about EoE:
Top tier soundtrack
“Disgusting”
“We’ll do the rest later”
“I’m so fucked up”
Birds are metal
Giant eyepussy
Tang
Your mom protected you by hanging a doll she thought was you.
Domestic violence
Delete world to hit one last time
Did I miss anything?
“Get in the fucking robot Shinji” is yet again a major plot point.
Black mirror.
Seriously. That’s a show where I could only do one or two at a time.
I dropped it after 3rd Episode.
Third episode of which season?
Season 1
You missed out on some good episodes. They don’t all relate to each other either, it’s like the Twilight zone you can pick up and just watch one.
I recently watched Pee-wee’s Big Adventure for the first time since God knows how long and it feels like a little bit of a drug trip at times with the sometimes sporadic pacing and just how it is as a movie.
Tell’em Large Marge sent ya.
The Lobster was pretty out there.
I tried explaining this movie to someone recently, and it didn’t go well…such a great, weird, movie though.
I absolutely love Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies. Killing of a Sacred Deer is probably my favorite. His movies just have this uneasyness that really makes you feel…off watching them.
I remember once when I was a teenager turning on the TV at like 2 in the morning on a Saturday and being treated to Adult Swim’s Sealab 2021 for the first time. Along with the rest of their line up around 1999-2003. It was fucking weird as shit. But hilarious.
Adult Swims programming from the exact same time you mentioned helped shape me into who I am now, lmao. What an awesome time for TV. I can remember sneaking downstairs to the TV to put on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I didn’t “get it” but I was very aware that I liked that type of dry humor.
Space Ghost is also how I discovered Triumph the Wonder Dog.
“If by ‘worked with’ you mean ‘banged up the ass’ then, yes, I worked with Lassie.”
“You can say that? Huh. Well, I too, once banged a dog up the a-”
“How was I supposed to know we’d be taken off the air?!”
Didn’t Space Ghost Coast to Coast predate Adult Swim?
The Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta had me wondering what the hell was going on in a hilarious way even though the episode was creepy.