{"id":3698,"date":"2009-02-12T08:57:51","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T15:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/?p=3698"},"modified":"2009-02-12T08:57:51","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T15:57:51","slug":"mindfuck-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/2009\/02\/12\/mindfuck-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Mindfuck Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Morning News today I quantify and enumerate my favorite brand of film: movies during which you have no freakin’ idea what the hell is going on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pretty much any list of this sort is going to provoke violent “this list is worthless without ______?!” reactions. (Ha! Halfway through writing that sentence someone IM’d me the link to this Metafilter thread<\/a>). The last minute addition of Donnie Darko<\/em> to the list was an acknowledgment of this fact, but I had to draw the line somewhere.<\/p>\n

I decided early to not include more than one film per director. Scanners<\/a> and eXistenZ<\/a> and absent because Videodrome<\/em> is there; Mulholland Dr.<\/em> precluded Eraserhead<\/a> and Lost Highway<\/a>; and so forth.<\/p>\n

There were a fair number of other movies that I skipped because of the “premillennium problem”–that is, the huge spate of remarkably similar films released just prior to the year 2000 (e.g., The Thirteenth Floor<\/a>) Given that, you may wonder how The Game<\/em> got on there. Well, first of all, it perfectly fit the criteria I set out in the introduction, so it wins on a technicality. And I quite enjoyed it. It’s also significant because it sort of forecasts the rise of ARGs<\/a>, but I somehow neglected to mention that in my review.<\/p>\n

Here’s some others I considered adding to the article … and that you<\/em> should consider adding to your Netflix queue:<\/p>\n