Most UNIQUE Movie You've Seen?

Cafe Society
101

See also “The Fountain”, a beautiful but ultimately stupid film - three intertwined stories set in past, present and future, all starring Hugh Jackman and all on the theme of death and the acceptance thereof.

And there’s also “Orlando”, featuring an apparently immortal character who switches gender at one point, with varous vignettes ranging from the Elizabethan era to the modern day.

It’s hard to find a completely unique (pace, pedants) film - even if it manages to be at the time, it will be copied. I thought Richard Linklater’s Slacker (mentioned above) was a highly original film at the time; it went on to inspire Clerks and everything that followed from that.

102

I’m guessing you’re talking about Moebius. It’s a full length movie @ 89 min and I left out a lot in the description. Like all of Kim’s movies, you have to be prepared to intently watch, especially this movie because theirs no dialog. Also like all of his movies, when it ends, you’re left speechless and full of questions. But, if you’re like me, you’re looking forward to his next work! Though never as a double bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juEpWjwygRE

Sadly, he passed away last year due to Covid, but he left a substantial filmography as director, producer and writer.

103

More unique movies, Asian of course.

I’m using the reviews from Asianwiki in place of my purposely vague descriptions.

Late Bloomer by Go Shibata

“Sumida Masakiyo is a severely-disabled man who lives an independent life with the help of an electric wheelchair, voice machine, and a carer. Using his real name, Sumida exerts himself to act the role of the “attacker Sumida”. Sumida is leading a peaceful life in the good company of a musician Take (Hotta Naozo), a carer as well as a good listener, when a college student, Nobuko (Torii Mari), wishing to gain some experience of care, appears. Sumida becomes attracted to Nobuko, but a feeling of discomfort, which he finds hard to come to terms with, develops in him and gradually he surrenders himself to insanity. Sumida commits a string of killings, and the story converges towards a bloody ending.”

https://asianwiki.com/Late_Bloomer

Minor spoiler

Actor Ariko Arita has CP.

Elbowroom by Ham Kyoung Rok

"When Su-Hee was 5-years-old she was abandoned by her mother and left to live in a Christian run institution for the disabled. Su-Hee is physically disabled. She has lived in the institution all her life and is now a young adult. Su-Hee meets a man named Min-Soo who also lives in the institution and is disabled. They shared a close bond and fall in love. Su-Hee and Min-Soo have their own secret room where they spend time together. The couple also have sex there.

One day In the bathroom, a volunteer notices Su-Hee’s swollen stomach and realizes she is pregnant. Everything will change for Su-Hee. Welfare authorities assume Su-Hee was raped and she is taken away to live in another shelter for young women. Su-Hee feels uncomfortable surrounded by non-disabled teens and feels loneliness …"

https://asianwiki.com/Elbowroom

Minor spoiler

Actress Park Ji Won was disabled at birth by accident. She has the most beautiful and infectious smile!
https://asianwiki.com/Park_Ji-Won_(actress_2)

Major related spoiler for both of the above movies. Innocent Witness by Lee Han

“Soon-Ho ([Jung Woo-Sung] is a poor lawyer. He defends a suspect in a murder case. While working on the case, Soon-Ho meets Ji-Woo. She is the only witness in the murder case and she has autism.”

https://asianwiki.com/Innocent_Witness

Ji Woo attends regular school because her mother thinks it’s best for her. At the end of the movie, she’s attending a special needs school and tells Soon Ho that the other students are strange. When Soon Ho asks if that’s bad, Ji Woo says she likes it because she doesn’t have to act normal anymore.

Oasis by Lee Chang Dong

"After Jong-Du (Sol Kyung-Gu) serves 3 three years in prison for a hit-and-run accident he returns home, but finds that his family has moved without telling him. Jong-Du is a social misfit and also mildly retarded. He finds himself in trouble again after being unable to pay for a restaurant bill. At the police station his brother ([Ryoo Seung-Wan]picks him up and his family eventually takes him back in, but reluctantly.

One day, Jong-Du decides to visit the victim’s family from the hit-and-run accident. The son ([Son Byung-Ho] is moving out of the house and leaving behind his sister Gong-Ju who has cerebral palsy. The neighbors are to watch over her while the son collects her disability checks. The family kicks Jong-Du out of their home, but Jong-Du already has taken an interest in Gong-Ju."

Warning This love movie begins with the mentally diminished Jong Du trying to sexually assault Gong Ju, leaving some reviewers turned off by a potential rape turning into true love. If you can watch past the attempted rape scene, the rest of the movie continues on as a truly unconditional love story.

https://asianwiki.com/Oasis

Major spoiler

I put the other physical disabilities of Ariko Arita and Park Jin Won in spoilers because Moon So Ri isn’t physically disabled. I was shocked when in the scene in the subway and the fantasy scene, she’s completely non-disabled. I had seen clips of Moon before, but her transformation in this film, (aided only by fake teeth) into a physically distorted state is absolutely amazing! After filming was completed, she was hospitalized because of the physical strain she put herself through.

104

Another Japanese movie that I can’t see being remade or the theme of the movie being redone anywhere else.

“An “air doll” (played by [Bae Doo-Na) suddenly develops human feelings one day. Without her owner knowing, the air doll decides to walk around town. She then falls in love with Junichi, whom she spots while walking the aisles of a video rental store. She then starts to date Junichi and eventually works at the video shop. Everything seems to be going perfect for the air doll until something unexpected happens to her.”

https://asianwiki.com/Air_Doll

There are other pinku (Japanese softcore) movies that use the same basic storyline, a doll, mannikin or even a cat comes to human life. But Air Doll is much, much deeper and therefore unique. When Nozomi comes to life and tries to live and love as a real woman, she’s reminded that she’s just a sex doll, meant only for pleasure. An examination and condemnation of the treatment of real women in the male dominated Japanese society.

105

While we’re talking about air dolls, we should mention Lars and the Real Girl. It’s not one of my favorite films, but it’s reasonably good. Ryan Gosling plays a man who has trouble interacting with other people. He gets an air doll which he insists in talking about as if she was a real person. He slowly gets accustomed to interacting with other people. Maybe I just don’t know enough about that sort of film, but it strikes me as pretty unique, especially considering that it got treated as a mainstream movie, not one that only showed in porno theaters.

106

Primer was the first movie that came to mind as well, for me.
Obligatory xkcd infographic:

107

Ha!

I can’t believe I forgot I Heart Huckabees, my favorite movie of all time. How to explain it? It’s a comedy about existentialism.

A grassroots environmentalist keeps running into a tall African man, and he’s convinced the coincidence must mean something, so he hires Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as existential detectives to spy on his life. Along the way we meet a firefighter obsessed with breaking US dependence on oil, a model having an identity crisis and an ad exec desperate for social approval. Oh, and the French nihilists.

I love that film. Super weird.

108

It’s not so bad. Reading this and then watching it again made it even more entertaining for me.

109

Not to be confused with Hanna-Barbera’s:

Augie
My Son, My Son

:slightly_smiling_face:

110

I can’t believe no one has mentioned the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive (not to be confused with Mulholland Falls). Maybe not “the most” anything, but it’s certainly right up there in terms of weirdness.

John Dies at the End (2012) is also pretty weird, but not off-the-charts weird.

These two other films are “unique” for completely different reasons:

  • The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) - although this is, story-wise, a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Offenbach opera, its weird and wondrous visuals (unusual sets, costumes, lighting, etc.) make it unique (BTW, this is the film that George A. Romero said inspired him to become a filmmaker, and it has also been praised by Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Scorsese);

  • Solarbabies (1986) - I know this is not what the OP intended, and I’m not trying to hijack the topic, but this one is unique in being the single most boring “mainstream” movie I have ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Basically, it’s 94 minutes of teens dressed in what looks like hockey gear (?) rollerblading through the desert (how does one rollerblade on sand?) with the occasional appearance of a flying robot-ball that they have named “Orbie.” It’s not even “so bad, it’s good”–it’s just really, really bad.

111

Trouble in Mind, a 1985 rather depressing film. A cop is out of prison after killing a mob boss because they couldn’t bring him down any other way and is trying to put his life back together.

What makes it unusual is the milieu. It is set in Rain City – filmed in Seattle – and the city is occupied by some force. There are soldiers and military vehicles with a red and black yin yang and areas marked off with the same symbol. This is never mentioned or alluded to by any of the characters save at the end

when

One climbs into the back of a jeep and says, “I want to join,” and they drive off with him.

112

Nobody has mentioned The First Nudie Musical.

It’s a movie about a movie production company that decides to produce a softcore porn film, with musical numbers. It’s a comedy, as you might expect; but the combination of softcore porn, musical numbers, and comedy, makes for some strange scenes and dialogue. It’s unique because nobody has tried anything similar before or since–with good reason, because the film stunk, and is now almost forgotten.

To state just one example, Cindy Williams–the straight-laced girlfriend in American Graffiti, and the straight-laced Shirley Feeney in “Laverne and Shirley” is the movie-within-the movie’s director, calling out, “Let’s get a stunt cock in here! Stunt cock, please!” Better casting may have helped.

113

I can totally picture Cindy saying that! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

114

That same year saw the release of Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy, so it’s not clear Nudie Musical was unique even when it was first released.

And Cindy Williams often let her freak flag fly before she become Shirley in Laverne and Shirley. A movie I have fond (if fuzzy) memories of, which might even be eligible for discussion as an entry in this thread, is Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, with Cindy Williams.

115

Many years ago I turned on a cable movie channel, maybe HBO or Cinemax, but anyways, I just turned it on and ended up watching a very strange Mike Figgis arthouse movie called The Loss of Sexual Innocence. There’s a very loose, shallow plot, but it’s mostly comprised of short vignettes that bounce around between different times, places, and people.

There’s one memorable scene in which two adult identical twins, separated at birth (both played by Saffron Burrows), happen to be in the same airport at the same time and, completely unaware of each other before, momentarily lock eyes from across the concourse, and then go on their separate ways, possibly to never meet again. It doesn’t sound like much from that description, but that scene is absolutely stunning and I will never forget it.

116

Much of the same team (most notably writer-producer-director-composer-actor Bruce Kimmel later made The Creature that Wasn’t Nice (AKA Spaceship AKA The Naked Space). It’s essentially a stupid musical version of Alien. Besides Kimmel and Wiliams it has Leslie Nielsen and Patrick MacNee (!!)

The Creature sings “I Want to Eat Your Face”

117

“Putney Swope” was a…unique experience. It was a fairly awful movie but had its entertainingly weird moments.

Favorite fake ad: where the protagonist sings “I have a malignancy in my prostate. But when I’m with you, it’s benign.”

118

I actually tried watching this once, but couldn’t get into it, and had 5 other movies I rented.
Does the pace pick up after a while?

119

The Navigator

The Music of Chance

120

Huh. My three-word review and yours only differ by one word.