Maybe I’m wrong, but all the characters I remember who flew around had at least some training or knowledge of Wu-Tan. I assumed it was one of the perks of that school.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Munch *
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I suppose it makes more sense than swimming to an oil slick but not much more. Another thing about Gattaca: Why did the wheelchair-bound Jude Law live upstairs? If I remember correctly he had to negotiate a spiral staircase to get to his room.
I think he lived downstairs. He had to climb upstairs to pretend to be Ethan Hawke’s character. Although the front door seems to have been on the top floor, so I’m not sure how much sense that makes.
[hijak] Tim Curry played Darkness, not the devil. [/hijak]
As for Gattaca, I thought they were swimming against each other, not to anything. It was an endurance test and also a gut check, to see how willing one or the other of them was to swim to or past the point where they wouldn’t have the strength to make it back to shore.
I hardly ever watch a movie more than once. In all honesty I have seen less than five movies a second time in my entire life. I think I’ll re-rent Gattaca though. Or, better still it might turn up on television in the near future. Incidentally, I can’t understand people who collect movies (other than porn) to watch again and again. And a whole lot of people must have invested huge amounts of money in video collections only to have the format superseded by DVD.
Bicentennial Man deserves a little prize for cinematic absurdity. In the future certifiably human androids will co-exist with sports jackets and Zimbabwe? Certifiably human male androids can attack female androids with screwdrivers and it’s just kidding around? Well, they drink coffee out of real coffee cups on the Enterprise, I suppose.
Merryl Streep, and I think Sam Neil, in a movie called…
The French Lietenant’s Wife
He’s missing in the war, and she’s nuts. She holds onto his
cufflinks in her pocketbook (not somewhere safe in her room).
When he finds his way back, the meeting is anti-climatic:
no joyous reunion. Like he’s been there all the time.
One thing in the movie which struck me as absurd…
In her most aristocratic british accent, she say something like “Would you like to get high? I have some EXCELLENT
grass.”
That would be The French Lieutenant’s Woman I believe.
And Jermey Irons, not Sam Neil. Please don’t confuse them One is …er… and the other one is …well…
Dusk Till Dawn is a great movie.
RedNEck Zombies definately qualifies, it involves man eating readnecks and nuclear waste
Many of the movies listed aren’t incomprehensible (difficult to understand) so much as implausible (difficult to accept or believe). And some people seem to be listing movies they just didn’t like. There was a thread like this before, something like “Movies I just don’t get”. People turned that one into “Movies I just don’t like.”
CTHD: First, they don’t really fly (which is a convention of wuxia movies), so much as jump really well, but that’s beside the point. It is explained, and several times. First, during the first fight between Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, Yeoh comments that Zhang “trained at Wudan”. Chow Yun Fat is a Wudan master. Yeoh learned it at the Wudan Temple, though not as a formal student. Jade Fox and Jen learned from the Wudan manual that Jade Fox stole. The extraordinary leaping ability (flying if you choose) is an ability attained at relatively high levels of Wudan mastery.
SPOILER: She’s a master thief. He’s a master thief working undercover for the FBI. He catches her, which leads us to the final scene. He lets her go (with the billion dollars) because he’s in love with her. She jumps trains and comes back because A: she knew the cops would be waiting for her at the next station, and B: She’s in love with him. This ending is actually foreshadowed by twice showing that the Jones character is an athlete with amazing gymnastic ability.
This one is also quite easy to explain. First, they don’t “turn into vampires”, they already were vampires. The boys happen to have stumbled into a vampire night club. Implausible, not incomprehensible. I love George Clooney’s speech about facing the reality of the situation, and that they instantly accept that they are trapped in a night club full of vampires. In most movies, the victims would spend a third of the movie denying the obvious.
If you want movies that are incomprehensible as opposed to implausible, you’re actually better off looking abroad. Hong Kong wuxia (roughly “martial arts fantasy”) movies are notorious for having some seriously convoluted plots. I love Swordsman 2, and I’ve seen it several times, but I would still be hard pressed to summarize the plot.
Last Year At Marienbad is a great French movie about a clandestine affair two people may have had, but because they remember it differently from each other, and remember it differently at different times in the movie, it is very difficult to understand what happened, or even who believes what about what happened. And that explanation makes more sense than the plot of the movie.
For American Movies: The Big Sleep A truly great movie, yet one key murder in the film is never explained.
[hijack]Summer session ends tomorrow. Woo Hoo! Thirty day weekend.[/hijack]
I may be disrespecting the spirit of the OP, but I draw a distinction between incomprehensible and absurd. “Double Jeopardy” = absurd. As for incomprehensible, I would have to vote for “Lost Highway” and “Head”. Has anyone else seen “head”? It had the Monkee’s in it. It was the most incredibly fucked up film I have ever seen in my entire life. If you’ve seen it and have any clue what it is about, please tell me. For the love of Mike.
Ben
As I was writing my post, Number Six stole my thunder. Damn
I new I should have sprung for that DSL.
I can’t do anything about your crush on Mike Naismith, but I’ll have a bash at explaining Head, with the caveat that it’s been about ten years since I’ve seen it.
The Monkees wrote Head near the end of their existence as a band, at a point in which they were all pretty much chafing at the lack of creative control they had and the limitations their TV personnae were putting on them as people and performers. They wanted to write and perform their own songs (which they didn’t do originally, apart from the singing), but were constantly fighting with TV and record company execs over it.
So the whole movie is essentially a rant on this, portrayed in late '60’s psychedelic symbolism. The big box they keep getting trapped in is the TV (their show or their TV personnae), the Big Victor is a controlling executive, and there are various bits where they refuse to play along with the unreal sets and scenarios (remember Teri Garr dying of poison arrows, only to have Mike Naismith refuse to play along and wander off, or Peter Torke’s “I’m the dummy” speech?).
In addition to all that, there are a lot of bits thrown in either to allow them to perform their own music or just for comic relief (I particularly liked the bit with Mickey, the tank, and the Coke machine).
I’m not saying it was a particularly good film, and yes, it was absurd (often intentionally so), but if you understand that it was a prolonged rant over creative issues it makes much more sense. And IMHO “The Porpoise Song” which opens the film is probably one of their best works as a group.
Okay?
Oh, and yes, that was Frank Zappa with the cow. 
enolancooper,
Your description of the plot of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is completely screwed up, even aside from the fact that you’ve got the title and the name of the lead actor wrong. It’s not that great a film, but it’s not incomprehensible. Watch it again, and this time notice that there are two plots going on in interweaved sequences. One is a film that’s set in 19th century England, and the other (set in the present) is about an affair between the lead actor and actress for that film.
Thanks 8. I grasped most of that originally, but some of the more specific points i hadn’t picked up on until now. You’re right though, several of the songs were very good. Especially for them.
I thought Head wasn’t supposed to make any sense; that it was nothing more than a trippy film for people to watch while they were high. I could be wrong, though. But it’s easier to watch with that in mind than to try to find any kind of theme in it.
DO NOT KNOCK RED DAWN.
Don’t talk of the holy word like that! I figure it has inspired the most anti-communist rednecks to hole up in the Rockies than any other movie. It seems a lot like a school shooting movie to me. Very strange.
Have to also mention The English Patient.
I’m uncertain whether it qualifies as incomprehensible or not because I’ve never been able to stay awake through enough of it to determine if there really is a plot.
Others have already explained the amazing leaps in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but I just wanted to add that in China there is a longstanding belief (although few modern people take it seriously) that highly trained masters of the martial arts are capable of supernatural feats. A Chinese viewer would not consider this something that demanded special explanation in a movie. Simply establishing that the characters are martial arts experts is enough.
I almost hate to bring a movie this stupid into a conversation but…
GET CARTER. This is a Stalone action shoot 'em up bomb that I accidently watched at my in-laws house. I can’t recall any film that made less of an effort to have a comprehendable plot…evil internet pornographers, who evidently are used to killing, have killed Stalone’s brother because they made a movie of his daughter and he is going to expose them…somehow, a young internet billionare played by Alan Cummings is tied into it…and inexplicably, mobsters from Las Vegas are also trying to kill Stalone. It made Judge Dred look like Hamlet.
Any yet, it was still not as stupid as RED DAWN.