And one that’s great, a favorite of yours… Most of the unique movies I’m thinking of are either shitty, or just “good”.
“Buffalo '66” is mine. … “The Swimmer” (1968) would be my second choice.
I had this conversation earlier, and for someone who never ventures off into movies from every decade, other countries, different styles, low-budget, independent, the first foreign flick he’d see would be considered the most unique.
I don’t watch many movies but this one sticks out.
i would describe it as sort of a multi-realities version of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”.
Almost anything by Werner Herzog.
There is no such thing as “most unique” anything. A thing is unique or it’s not.
Human Highway by Neil Young. Starring Neil Young, DEVO, Dennis Hopper and more. He’s remastered it in recent years; cut it up, added a sequence which was cool, but generally the messing with it made it worse. If you can find it on VHS you’ll get the real one. Wanna see DEVO and Neil Young (with Boogie Boy in a baby’s crib!) jamming some Hey Hey My My? There’s only one place to catch that.
El Topo
Fellini Satyricon
Both unique in their own surreal way.
Has any other movie been filmed over 12 years like Boyhood was?
Forbidden Zone is a pretty unusual movie. I happened to come across it while channel surfing one night, so I wasn’t expecting it.
But the overall strangest movie I think I’ve ever seen is Eraserhead.
This one, apparently based on a play (if that matters):
Here’s a scene from it:
Dr Caligari. The first time I watched it I couldn’t decide whether it stunk or was amazing. I eventually settled on the second. The word that best describes the film is psychotronic.
“There is much to be learned from a despairing shriek.”
I was going to say this, but about a year ago I decided to give up and resign myself to the fact that the word’s meaning has changed. It is now merely a synonym for “unusual.” For the former meaning, we can use “sui generis” or “one-of-a-kind” or some other word I can’t think of at the moment.
Sad, but it happens.
I’m also giving up on correcting people when they use the simple past form in place of the past participle. This is near universal among the under-20 crowd now.
Example? 
I’ve seen some of these. They are interesting.
My suggestion – Prospero’s Books. A very weird and interesting take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But what’s really weird is that sometimes there’;s a “frame” around the main picture, filled with moving characters. It’s like a medieval manuscript with all of those random illustrations on the edges – only they;re animated. (Not that it was animated as in the sense of “cartoons” in the movie – it was just moving)
I refuse! Fight for the unique meaning of unique!
Here’s a fan-made trailer for ERASERHEAD. I saw this at the Granada theater in Dallas in the early 80s, going in knowing nothing about it other than it had a poster with an interesting vibe. I would say the closest I ever came to this later was Lars von Trier’s KINGDOM, but that still doesn’t quite match the entertaining weirdness of this.
I’ll never accept “most unique”, but I was always fine with “almost unique”.
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance at the Music Box Theatre. I know I’ve seen Powaqqatsi, but I don’t remember if it was a double feature that night. There may have been intoxicants involved, I’m not sure, that night was a blur.
This always strikes me as a silly bit of pedantry that suffers from a failure of imagination and of how human beings use language.
Years ago, there was a restaurant in my town that served only Native American foods. It was the only such restaurant in my town. It was unique.
I’ve been thinking about opening a restaurant that serves only the dreams of extinct mammals. Fried Stellar’s Sea Cow nightmares; grilled sabretooth tiger reveries; giant sloth daydream salad.
My restaurant, if it ever opens, will be more goddamned unique than the Native American one. And if you’re not able to parse what “more goddamned unique” means, that’s on you.
As for a unique movie I’ve seen, there was a Czech puppet movie/fairy tale I saw in the late nineties. It may have been The Pied Piper. Beautiful, creative, fascinating. I didn’t much care for it.
Paprika is like nothing else.
Well, not really the “most unique”–it would be really difficult to think of something that is utterly unlike anything else, but I’ll go with Naisu no Mori (given the title Funky Forest in English). It is a series of dreams, but weirder than those in Kurosawa’s Yume/Dreams.
Thanks for sharing that.