Has anyone mentioned “Memento”? A mainstream film … backwards?
I’ll PM ya.
Black Moon where I’ve never been able to find a coherent explanation of what was going on. Even the Wikipedia and IMDB summaries includes things that are not necessarily implied by the movie. Basically, a woman goes to a farmhouse and weird things happen.
Director Louis Malle tended to make films whose very premise was outrageous, but this one can’t be explained.
I’m pretty sure that Stroszek is the movie that Ian Curtis of Joy Division watched before he hung himself.
I’d nominate Liquid Sky. Imdb summarizes it as “A small, heroin seeking UFO lands on a Manhattan roof, observes a bizarre, drug addicted fashion model and sucks endorphin from her sexual encounters’ brains.”
Yeah, I was thinking about that one. Love the soundtrack. Me and my rhythm boooooooooox…
Also used/ripped off in I Come In Peace.
Twice Upon a Time is unique in that it’s the only animated film that uses a complicated process known as Lumage.
The strangest, most out there movie I’ve ever seen is Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It’s about a guy who puts a metal rod in his leg and slowly turns into a metal man. The whole time I was WTF is going on?!
It does though. The lack of edits make it an entirely different viewing experience. Roger Ebert (I think) equated movies to dreams where every edit is an awakening. Russian Ark was a completely different kind of narrative.
I am familiar with much of Harmony Korine’s other work, but I have never seen anything like Gummo.
Yeah, it’s unique, along with Julien Donkey Boy… I don’t like the movies much (I think I gave them a 6/10), but they are “different”.
“My Dinner With Andre” is unique - just a conversation between the two original authors of the screenplay, also actors. But then there’s this not-so-good movie called “Mindwalk” which has three Hollywood actors (well, Liv did a few) who are basically quoting old philosophers in the 1980s.
Being John Malkovich is certainly an unusual film. The plot revolves around the idea that a man finds a portal that leads to the actor John Malkovitch’s mind.
The director was only allowed to film in the Hermitage for a few hours on a single day, so it was a creative response to that constraint, more than a choice.
I think Russian Ark is more like a medieval/renaissance pageant or masque than anything else.
Or perhaps simply a guided tour through the Hermitage, brought to life with actors.
Pan’s Labyrinth and Brazil
Schultze gets the Blues. Bittersweet, and a bit odd.
Forbidden Zone has been mentioned, but this song is fun: Pico & Sepulveda - YouTube
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is pretty unusual.
It’s a movie within a movie – a movie about making an ‘unfilmable’ movie, with scenes of the movie being made intercut with scenes around the making of it.
But… the book Tristram Shandy (of which they are making a movie) is itself, as they mention, post-modernist even though it was written before modernism had even been invented. The book is self-referral, metafictional, contains stories within stories within stories, and often breaks the fourth wall, as the author directly addresses the reader.
In the inner movie, the most over-the-top scenes are taken straight from the book itself, with most of the dialog verbatim from the book.
Both the inner and the outer movies are extremely funny and will easily stand multiple viewings. But it certainly helps to have read Tristram Shandy .
I think the author, Laurence Sterne, would have loved the movie.
That reminds me - the short films of William Kentridge - e.g. Johannesburg and Felix in Exile - they are done using a charcoal palimpsest technique, so you see the ghosts of the previous drawings, and only really allow for one take.
I think there’s some truth to this with movies that are just plain weird. But I’m reading this thread with interest more for movies that fit into the “unique” category not because they are weird, but because when you’re watching them you just have no idea what will happen. Nothing seems to be ruled out, they cannot be pigeon-holed into a genre, they show no inclination to follow the standard plot formulae, the tropes, the usual expectation of what can and can’t happen. Obviously just one or two plot twists doesn’t qualify, I mean movies that are not “comfortable” to watch the whole way through.
Coherence that @running_coach mentioned in the second post is a good example.
I was gonna mention this one.
I think Southland Tales deserves a mention. I won’t claim it’s a good film, but I felt it was unique. The combination of cast, plot, and the atmosphere of the film made for a very weird mish-mash.
So it was mostly unique?