Have you ever seen a movie and thought that it was just trying to be smart for the sake of it? Where the intellectual pomposity of the writer/director was just so great it stopped you enjoying the film or left you wondering what the fuck was going on (and not in a good way)? Was it so full of twists and turns and double bluffs that you got to the end and didn’t even know what had happened in the end?
The most recent example I had of this is the film Primer which was hard enough to follow to start with but which got even more convoluted as it went on to the point where I gave up watching it about 2/3rds of the way through. It wasn’t so much that it was complex (which it was), but more the way the film was presented. It left you to keep making conclusions about what was going on but without ever really confirming whether what you’re concluding is correct or not. The characters clearly know what they’re talking about but I’m not sure I do and they don’t deign to say very much for the audience to clue you in.
i.e. it took me quite a long time to confirm that it was, indeed, a film about time travel. At the point where one of them was going back and recording conversations and playing them back in his ear piece I just completely lost track of what was supposed to be happening.
I thought I was just being dense but having looked up comments by other Dopers on the film it appears I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Another for me would be Blue from the three colours trilogy. Not exactly too clever but it’s full of all these long shots and somewhat pointless things happening that just scream “I’m an arthouse movie, respect my depth and beauty!”.
Finally the film Layer Cake was another that I switched off before the end because the umpteenth double cross left me profoundly lost and, ultimately, not giving a shit about it anyway.
2001: A Space Odyssey. The people behind it may have been genius, but the overall effect was slow, boring, cold, and with a most colorful and groovy ending that made no sense and left you wondering that the frack was going on. Obviously I didn’t have the genius to appreciate theirs, that or Kubrick and Clark may have been great at telling stories, but terrible at portraying them on screen.
I somehow knew that this would show up. This movie polarises people: either you love it, or hate it. I’m of the former persuasion. I love movies that you have to work at - where it’s not all laid out on a plate. There *is *a plot - just a very abstruse one.
But to counter the above, one movie that I thought I ought to love, but never got to grips with is the original version of Solaris. All your comments about 2001 apply to Solaris for me.
I thought Fight Club could’ve been SO MUCH BETTER if it was just a movie about some guys who were in a club and fought each other. The first 2 acts were like top 20 of all time, but the 3rd act dropped it out of my top 100.
The original 1961 “The Time Machine” wasn’t particularly convoluted. If you buy the premise of time travel, which was clearly explained (even to my 10-year-old self) at the beginning of the movie. And “2001” isn’t convoluted at all. It’s a pretty simple and straight-forward narrative. The idea is thought provoking, mind expanding, awe inspiring and all that, but the movie certainly isn’t convoluted.
Now, “Memento”, that’s convoluted.
Anything that involves a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards and the same within those, I would describe a too convoluted for the good of the storytelling. Although “Pulp Fiction” is the exception that I think disproves my rule.
The movie “Heist” (Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito) immediately comes to mind for this thread.
If you go through all the double-crossing/double-double-crossing that Gene Hackman’s character would have had to anticipated, the complexity is beyond any actual theft !
I remember seeing this in the theatre and feeling disappointed - that if they’d ended the movie about 20 minutes earlier (without the last 3 twists ;-), it would have been so much better. But for the story to play out as it did would require Hackman’s character to by psychic and able to tell the future. With these abilities he could do just as well playing the lottery.
The poster child for this question has to be The Big Sleep. Reportedly, even the actors and screenwriters (William Faulknet and Leigh Brackett! Can you believe it?) and even the author of the original novel couldn’t quite figure what was going on:
I’d like to give Honorable Mention to the original D.O.A. I had to watch that film three times to figure out what was going on. (On the other hand, I knew exactly what was going on in the lame re-make a third of the way in.)
The scenes in Pulp Fiction were in random order. The scenes in Memento were in a very clear reverse chronological order. Pulp Fiction is far inferior, in my opinion.
Seconded on POTC 2 and 3. This is what happens when script writers get in over their heads and start taking themselves too seriously.
My picks are Se7en, The Bone Collector, and any other movie featuring a serial killer who goes by a plan that requires slightly less mental effort than working out the theory of relativity. Listen up, serial killers! That Zodiac guy set the standard for complex scheming. If you put any more planning into killing a bunch of people in creepy and disturbing ways than he did, then you’re thinking too much and taking all the fun out of your life. You’d probably be happier teaching high school calculus.
I enjoyed Inside Man, but I found its complex plot very difficult to understand. Movies like this one make me feel as if my mind, which used to be a steel trap, is now a steel sieve.
I agree with **Grumman ** - yes, Primer is convoluted, but the convolutions, taken as a whole, are a statement about how messing with time travel screws everything up - that’s price you pay for hubristically (love the word!) thinking you could do something so unnatural.
So, yeah, it is convoluted - but you don’t have to be able to follow the convolutions to get the basic gist of their role in the movie. Now, if you want to follow them through, you can - the movie is well structured - but you have to get online to a fanboy site and find some geek who mapped them all out. I found a few when I went looking after I saw the movie…but geeky precision isn’t really necessary to grasp the movie…
Southland Tales - Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Mandy Moore, Seann William Scott and many other recognizable faces.
The trouble with this movie? It’s 2 and half hours long and you haven’t got a clue what’s going on until about 2 hours in. At that point, you can see the big ending coming from a mile away.