Sleuth (1972)
That (the original) was a great movie, but I’ll do you one better and say Gaslight (the ‘remake’ from '44 with Ingrid Bergman).
I always wonder how many people know where the term comes from. IME a lot of people that say it don’t even know what it means.
Another one, The Third Man.
And, as I always tell people “before you ask, the answer is a zither”. Everyone asks the same question, and the answer is ‘a zither’.
How To Get Ahead In Advertising is a favorite of mine.
Rubber, about a tire that murders people by psychically exploding them, is another favorite.
And I can’t forget The Monkees’ Head which, like the other two, is not only clever- it’s brilliant.
Boyhood - fantastic movie. Ethan Hawke is a very creative and cool guy. I met him a few years ago at a friend’s summer house in Nova Scotia. He was super cool. I actually wasn’t sure who he was when he walked up, he looked scruffy and non-celebrity-like, I actually had to be told who he was. I still wasn’t 100% sure who he was though. I swear to God I almost said “you were great in Memento” before I remembered that it was a different guy in that movie.
Whatever you think of Richard Linklater, he had a really cool and ambitious idea with that movie. Waking Life is also cool but Boyhood has to be one of the most innovative movie concepts ever.
It’s not clear exactly what is meant by “clever”. I’m assuming it’s not simply “twist ending” films, but has to do with some clever idea in the making of the film, or embedded in its structure that you don’t notice until later.
So , although I love the 1972 version of Sleuth, I wouldn’t put that in this category. It’s a “twist ending” (and “twist middle”) film. Nor would I put inception in here. At best, it’s examining an interesting notion (although I actually don’t like Inception very much)
What would I consider?
Prospero’s Books – mentioned before. Wonderful inside–out telling of Shakespeare’s Tempest, with sort of animated borders. It’s wonderfully complex film. The naked people are just an interesting extra. I can’t recall any other film done in anything like the same way
The Atomic Café – A film made from documentaries, TV footage, and newsreels with absolutely no narration – only a couple of explanatory notes at the beginning. Otherwise, it simply lets the original footage – and some very clever editing – tell the whole story.
Incubus – and entire movie filmed in Esperanto, a language not native to anywhere. Starring William Shatner, no less (Mel Gibson gets honorable mention for filming Passion of the Christ entirely in Aramaic and Latin)
Dr. Jeckyll and My. Hyde – Rouben Mamoulian’s version starring Fredric March (much better known at the time for light comedies) has some of the cleverest shot set-ups I’ve ever seen, and is very unconventional in its story telling.
The TV series MAS*H did some clever experimental things in its long run:
— “Life Time” eighthth season episode from 1979 in which they have a limited amount of time to finish an operation or a patient will be paralyzed. To emphasize this, they put a clock in one corner of the screen, counting down the time left. What I loved was that the clock kept “running” during the commercials, so when you came back after the break there were a couple of minutes missing from the clock.
—“Point of View” Seventh season episode shot entirely from the point of vie of one of the patients.
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick is both incredibly popular among filmmakers, yet difficult to film. This adaptation solved the problem of accurately depicting the story while showing things difficult to put up on screen by doing the whole thing in rotoscoped animationthat pretty closely matched real life.
Le Dernier Combat – Luc Besson’s first science fiction film is intriguing in that it a.) is shot entirely in black and white; b.) has not a single line of dialogue.
Good one!
Mr. Arkadin. And here’s something weird. I couldn’t recall the name but knew it starred Orson Welles, but couldn’t find it in his filmography. But when I remembered the name, the film itself is listed (and on Amazon Prime right now). Welles’ character is a wealthy amnesiac that hires someone to discover who he is. Has one of my favorite lines: “After 20,000 years, murder as a business is still in the hands of amateurs.”
Similar to Memento, Pulp Fiction was a great movie, but even better by being chopped up and told in different sequence.
And I don’t care what anyone says, I’ve never seen verifiable evidence that there is a DVD option to see Memento in the correct sequence! (LOL, this might end up in Great Debates!)
The original Blues Brothers movie was done extremely cleverly. How does one tie together an ex-jailbird, a Catholic school, a batshit ex-girlfriend, Illinois Nazis, some amazing singers and musicians, a country western bar, and “the best blues players in the world?”
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead.
The Stunt Man
More recently, I thought The Death of Stalin was a clever conceit carried through brilliantly.
Citizen Kane, of course.
For TV, the first couple of seasons of Hu$tle were brilliantly constructed plots.
And, of course, the first two seasons of Misfits.
I think there are different types of ‘clever’ films.
One like Inception shows you early on that things may not be what they seem i.e. layers of dreams.
But I think films like The Usual Suspects are even better - because you have no idea there’s a twist until you see it. (And then you start remembering all the tiny clues that were cunningly placed earlier.)
I own such a DVD.
ETA: and to add to the thread, I’ll toss out Matrix. It has become cliche now and many don’t like 2 and 3 but when it was released it was very clever - even though its core concept wasn’t.
Sorry for the double post, but I just thought of another one. Triangle, a time travel movie. By definition TT movies must be clever to be good but this is one of my favorites.
The Last Action Hero for all the ways it plays with action-movie tropes.
Before I opened the thread I read the title and thought Memento.
I thought Looper did a better job with time-travel paradoxes than most.
I’m a big fan of con artist movies, and my favorite is Nine Queens. It’s an Argentinian movie about two con artists who decide to work together to pull off a major heist, and it’s lovely, everything I like about the genre.
Being John Malkovich
Galaxy Quest. A perfect parody of Star Trek fandom.
This is a spoiler but one of the Final Destination Sequels ends up secretly being a Prequel and you learn that only at the very end when the characters get on a plane that was the plane that crashed in the first movie. It was really well set up and it made me enjoy the movie like ten times more than a sequel in a cheezy franchise deserves to be liked.