“Head” now being within my comprehension, who can help me decipher “Lost Highway”? I actually like the film, although I have no idea what the hell it was about. I have a theory, however, that the Mercedes was a time machine.
A while back I saw a freaky movie from the 1960s that IIRC was called “Hair.” (Actually, I was sort of invited/forced by my dad to watch it…)
Basically, a bunch of hippies go around singing songs, freaking out squares, for about the first 60 minutes. Then one of them gets drafted to Viet Nam, and while another one temporarily sneaks in to take his place so that the first guy can go party and smoke marijuana with all his friends, he accidentally gets sent off to war. Then he dies. The last scene is all of his friends singing and dancing around his tombstone…or something. To this day, I have no idea what it’s supposed to be about, other than stirring up controversy back in the day.
KJ: That was a good summary of the plot of Hair. You obviously understood the plot very well. The point that you were searching for is that the hippie who went to Vietnam was willing to sacrifice his life for his friend. But this was a musical, and the real point was to have just enough plot to string together some pretty cool music.
Armageddon : the nuclear bomb is supposed to blow the asteroid in 2 perfect halves so that their trajectories are changed and they miss the earth - luckily all the fragments are vapourised by the atmosphere and why did they have to take so many of the crew up anyway…?
Also - any movie where kids save the world or baby geniuses etc.
If you really think about the timeline thing in ‘The Terminator’ you get horribly confused because it just does not make sense.
The Mira Sorvino movie ‘Relic’ about huge insects that have developed lungs and look like humans contradicts almost every thing we know about physiology.
KJ writes:
> A while back I saw a freaky movie from the 1960s [. . .]
Well, actually you saw a film made in 1979 based on a musical that opened in 1969. The film and the musical don’t say precisely when the action is set, but I would guess somewhere between 1967 and 1969. The film was already a period piece by the time it was released. It’s hard to remember that now, since it’s already been twice as long since the movie came out as it was between the time the play opened and the time the movie finally came out. Reviews of the film Hair back when it came out remarked on how distant all the happenings and attitudes of the film seemed.
Armageddon was a horrible movie. The bomb is sunk 800m deep on an asteroid “the size of Texas”. At most, it would have blown a few chunks off the surface, and probably not even that. Underground nuclear tests didn’t put the bombs that deep. But it did make sense to send up two separate teams, just in case one got lost or destroyed in the attempt. It’s called a redundant backup.
The timeline in “The Terminator” is actually pretty solid. It’s when you add in “Terminator 2” that things get complicated. The chip that led to the neural net processor came from the first terminator. The neural net processor is what made building terminators (and Skynet) possible. So we have a closed time loop–one in which there is no external cause. This of course, is impossible, but writers love putting these “self existent” devices into their movies. The same thing happens with Captain Kirk’s antique glasses in Star Trek 4.
Mimic: The premise is that the engineered bugs have the ability to “mimic” other organisms and take on their characteristics. As a gerneral rule, you have to grant the movie its premise. We accept FTL travel in sf, even though it’s well established as impossible. We accept it because, without it, there is no story.
Mimic – This movie is actually based on a pretty decent science fictions shortstory. I’v often sai that what Hollywood shold do is not try to film an entire novel (Dune, say), but to tak a short story and flesh it out slightly. Mimic offers proof that Hollywood can screw it up even so. They padded the basic premise out absurdly. No genetically-modified bugs in the original story.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn’t really understand the deep inner meaning. Also I missed a few mins midway when I got up to use the little Zoggie’s room. Who was the guy who stole the girl’s comb…or something. I don’t know. And the ending was too strange. What exactly did they do?
He was the bandit chief who later became her lover. FWIW, her seemingly irrational obsession with retrieving her comb makes a lot more sense if you realize that a Chinese woman’s comb wasn’t just something she stuck in her hair. It was a uniquely carved and very personal item. You might recall that later in the film the older heroine gave the young woman her own comb to show as proof that she was running an errand for her.
The reason why From Dusk Till Dawn (I can never remember if it’s 'til or till or some hybrid, but I don’t care enough to look it up right now) turned insane and ridiculous when everyone in the club turned to vampires is simple: Quentin Tarantino stopped directing, and the horrible (IMO) Robert Rodriguez took over.
As for an incomprehensible movie plot, I nominate Velvet Goldmine. I was thoroughly enjoying it until the ending came along. It makes absolutely no sense. I watched it again the next day, paying strict attention to minor details, and was still unable to understand what happened at the end. Man… could have been a great movie. If anyone understood the ending, enlighten me, please.
The Virgin Suicides is…well…in accordance with the title of the thread 
Its about five teenage girls, who commit suicide, and the five teenage boys obsessed with them.
This one had my two freinds, my parents, and I rather confuddled at the end.
Fight Club. I mean, I kinda liked the first 3/4 of the film, but the STUNNINGLY STUPID premise that was eventually dumped on us was so outrageous I wanted to punch somebody! Was there any way the idea made sense?
I’m assured that Memento made sense… IF you watched it 47 times while keeping copious notes.
I tend to agree with the earlier comment about The Cell, but it’s unfair to art everywhere for this piece of pretentious dreck to be included under that term. Yet it certainly was mostly incomprehensible.
But such a discussion can’t fail to mention David Lynch. I am completely confident that his prequel to Twin Peaks, Fire, Walk with Me, didn’t even make any sense to Lynch!
Did anyone see the truly awful and mind-numbingly boring and confusing Nightfall (1988), ludicrously claimed to be based on Asimov’s short story of the same name? I enjoyed Asimov’s story, but this?? Let me just mention that it “starred” David Birney to give you an idea of the new agey CRAP that was dribbled out vacuously by the understandably suicidal cast. I don’t think even two consecutive sentences made any sense together!
Then there was the malodorous Sphere, with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson in the most despicable movie they were ever contractually obligated to make in their entire careers. I don’t understand why they didn’t sue to remove their names from that disaster.
I don’t want to shoot fish in a barrel, so I’ll only mention one film from the MST3K files. Without a doubt one of the most brain-dead movies ever made – and one that scored one of the highest “Huh?'s” per minute : Overdrawn at the Memory Bank SHEESH! Poor Rual Julia!
Pi pretended to make sense, but it didn’t.
Finally, I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Eraserhead.
First, Tarantino wrote the script, Rodriguez directed. What evidence do you have that Tarantino directed the first section?
Second, as I said before, the people in the nightclub do not “turn into vampires”, they already were vampires. A group of fugitives tries to hide out in a vampire nightclub, and don’t realize what they’ve gotten themselves into until after dusk. They then have to survive until dawn, hence the title. It isn’t a difficult movie to understand.
I saw this when they broadcast it on PBS. As in the case of Mimic, they took a good SF short story and, instead of developing it into a good movie, they switched it around and padded it absurdly. “Overdrawn” was a pretty good short story, but the writer or director decided he wanted to do an homage to “Casablanca” and indulge in other pointless things. It only goes to show that PBS can screw things up as badly as Hollywood. (PBS is capable of doing good sf. Look up “The Lathe of Heaven”, or the circa 1988 version of “The Day of the Triffids”.)
Incomprehensible? AI was the last movie I saw that I wanted to walk out of. It was the most confusing and incomprehensible thing since The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (sp? - I’m to lazy to check IMDB)
Aside from casting Sting as a military hero, what was so imcomprehensible? There’s considerable absurdity (which is, after all, only fitting), but I never found the plot overly complex: the good Baron was gathering his old servants to help him save the city. It might help to recall that the whole thing is a satire based upon a satire.
The first movie is what established the closed loop, the conception of John Connor. Now Ah-nold wants to do a third movie, which can only make the timeline more confusing.
As for those antique glasses, that’s not necessarily a closed loop. It’s not said where McCoy got 'em.
I don’t think it has one. I mean, I liked the movie a lot (even went to see it twice, but only because the wife got sick 2/3rds of the way through the first time), but I see it as a straightforward heroic-justice action movie with two romantic plots tied in.
Perhaps you were thinking of the transparent aluminum?
Actually, believe it or not, it was written by Jack Nicholson.