Magnolia, which came out about a year and a half ago had a very complicated plot which intertwined the lives of several characters. It was a little too arty and self-conscious for my taste, but Tom Cruise did a wonderful job as the ultimate male chauvinist. It’s 3 1/2 hours long, but worth a look.
CJ
Well, if we are looking for movies that benefit from being watched twice, THE SIXTH SENSE is obvious.
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is one I was still struggling with on the third viewing. And there’s good ol’ 2001.
Oh, and I second LONE STAR, which juggles at least ten story lines
(the two main characters, living in the same town, never even meet).
Fifteen Iquana
You guys are marvelous. I’m making a list and heading to the rental place.
You mentioned some movies that I loved: Magnolia and the Usual Suspects were fabulous. And I’m a complete cult maniac for Mystery Train. What a hilarious flick!
I loved the way the person with power in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover had the longest tie…so that the end, one guy had this tiny weird looking thing around his neck. That was one of the freakiest movies I’ve ever seen. I’ll have to rent it again, it’s been so long since I saw it.
Oh, I own a copy of Angelheart and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels too. I was pretty disappointed that Ritchie’s film Snatch was kind of lame in comparison.
L
I double “Go” and “Magnolia.” The former is like Pulp Fiction for puppies and the latter is just, well, gotta see it.
That reminds me of another movie, that I liked marginally better: ** It’s the Rage. ** It’s stuctured in a similar way.
I was thinking of mentioning Akira myself except that I didn’t really like the anime that much; it was quite interesting but rather tasteless IMO.
Princess Mononoke a much better anime and one of my top movies of any form. The plot is moderately complex especially in the sense that it refuses to make clean distinctions between good and evil and refuses to go for the easy happy ending.
Anime is famous for its complex plots and no doubt, anime experts here will be able to name some which are both complicated and good.
Just saw Bowfinger and, while it’s a comedy, you have to give props to whoever put that script together- it’s amazing.
I’ll throw support for all these already mentioned:
L.A. Confidential, Pulp Fiction, Brazil, 12 Monkies, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Being John Malkovich, Ran, Rashomon, Seven Days In May, Gorky Park.
A few unmentioned:
Robert Altman’s Nashville and The Player.
Coppola’s The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II and Apocalypse Now.
In the Heat of the Night, can’t recall the director
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
Robert Redford’s The Candidate (I think he directed and starred.)
Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate.
Taxi Driver.
American Beauty.
Three Kings.
The Young Lions.
not sure if this would qualify, but Seven Samaurai. Most Kurosawa films show depth on subsequent viewings.
I’d agree with anything by Robert Altman (Short Cuts & The Player are terrific). Most of Stanley Kubricks work (still don’t get 2001 after watching about 20 times though).
Also Francis Copollas early work (Godfather I/II, Apocolypse Now and The Converstation are terrific)
Anything by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Draughtsmans Contract, 8.5 Women, The Pillow Book are all terrific)
Most of David Lynchs movie are complex (Blue Velvet is a classic)
Fight Club, Sixth Sense and Unbreakable all have good plots and twists.
Se7en and The Usual Suspects have the best ending of a hollywood movie I’ve ever seen (and its also a terrific film)
Angel Heart has a good, but for me obvious, twist in the tail.
David Cronenberg has made some challenging movies also (Existenz is wonderful and Crash is challenging)
and I second everyone who mentioned Magnolia, American Beauty, Unforgiven, Chinatown and Croupier
I second Fight Club and Unbreakable for twists that left me with my mouth open.
As for anime, one of my favorites is Lily C.A.T.. It’s a science-fiction mystery that takes place on a spaceship, a-la Alien.
The Spanish Prisoner was good.
I’m sure you’ve seen Dr. Strangelove, several different plots going on there.
I second The Pillow Book but do NOT see it with your mother!
Because it’s based on a true story and no one really knows what happened so they gave no answer. But a very interesting and intriguing movie nonetheless, another second.
Two of my favorite complicated films have not yet been mentioned: Fellini’s decadent and hypnotic La Dolce Vita (1960) and Griffith’s moving and multi-tiered Intolerance (1916).
Cool thread.
How “complicated” do you want to get? Last Year at Marienbad is a notoriously complex and symbolic – in other words, for many people, frustratingly slow and opaque – bit of cinema. It’s best seen as literature, like reading a cross between, say, Greene and Joyce, or some other bizarre pairing. It’s recommended for advanced viewers, though.
On a more rational level, I’ll highly recommend the films of Julio Medem. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is very good; The Red Squirrel isn’t quite as good, being marred by some random elements that don’t quite work (randomness and chance are key to Medem’s cinema philosophy), but it’s still fine. Best of all is his latest film, Sex and Lucia (Spanish title: Lucia y el sexo), which absolutely blew me away at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. It’s not on video yet; look for it in your local foreign/repertory cinema in the coming months.
And continuing in the Spanish-language theme, Amores Perros, from a couple of years ago, is two-thirds of a masterpiece. This year’s Y Tu Mama Tambien is also deceptively simple over an incredibly subtle and complicated thematic underpinning; it only seems like it’s a raunchy teen-oriented traveling sex comedy.
And an unexpected recommendation: South Park, Bigger Longer and Uncut. Seriously. This movie has an amazing number of layers if you think about what’s really going on.
A foreign film to watch for on video (don’t think it’s been released yet): Thomas in Love. Very European, but fast-paced and highly unusual. Look on my website for a review.
Oh, and last year’s Foreign Academy Award winner, No Man’s Land, is quite a sharp little film, well worth your time. The whole story is thoroughly symbolic, though you’ll probably get it on the first pass, rather than needing a second viewing.
Other people have recommended some John Sayles, who’s always a sure bet for this kind of viewer. His new film, Sunshine State, isn’t quite as good as Lone Star, but it’s still worth checking out in the cinema if you’re a fan. And for complicated story structures, I strongly suggest you look at Limbo, a survival story set in Alaska. A word of warning: The ending is extremely unconventional, and I know a lot of people who hate it. But if you go back through the film and look at the actual theme being examined, rather than the apparent subject, you’ll find it’s absolutely of a piece, and a quite audacious statement by a master storyteller. Come back and start a fresh thread for discussion if you need help.
If you want an amazingly rich display of visual symbolism, try Julie Taymor’s Titus. It sort of requires that you be open to an unconventional treatment of Shakespearean verse, but it’s got marvelous performances, and the screen is full nearly to bursting with remarkable imagery. Don’t know if the movie quite pulls off the final shot, though.
(Incidentally, thank you very much for this thread. I regularly have arguments with people, including on this message board, about whether movies with layers of meaning are interesting and worthwhile, if difficult, or whether they are – in those people’s usual phrasing – “boring, pretentious crap.” I can certainly understand those sorts of movies not being their cup of tea, but I’m boggled by their insistence that complex, thematically intricate movies are ipso facto self-indulgent garbage. Is James Joyce a bad writer simply because he’s inaccessible to the average reader of Scrooge McDuck?)
I think I am going to second Existenz. It was a wonderfully strange movie, though some people I’ve seen it with said they could see the ending a mile away. I don’t know that it is complex per se in the sense of multiple layers of meaning, but it could be. I certainly put some meaning in there, anyway.
I think The Matrix has a cornucopia of messages in it, some obvious (Christ) others not (free will). So many are polarized on this movie (stinker or not a stinker, that is the question) that I almost hesitate to even mention it.
Fight Club I will third (or fourth) as well. If you don’t find the whole movie a contradiction in terms, I don’t think you’ve thought about it enough. Wonderful story (the only movie that, IMO, was better than the book!).
Possibly it’s been mentioned, but I wanted to make sure the recenet Memento was included. I’ve enjoyed it as much the second time; it’s not spoiled by knowing the ending (if “ending” is the right word); you just get a different perspective.
By the way, Lissener, apparently there’s a new film version of Solaris in the works, directed by Steven Soderbergh. I’m sure the visual effects will be great (it probably has a hundred times the budget of the 1972 Russian movie) but I wonder if they’ll muck up Stanislaw Lem’s truly deep novel with a bunch of American thriller conventions. The tag line doesn’t seem appropriate to what I remember of the novel: “There are some places man was not meant to go.”
The Saragossa Manuscript
Wanted to follow up on a couple of items:
Baldwin, you’re correct that the remake of Solaris is fraught with peril – these sorts of projects almost invariably try to juggle too many competing requirements (in this case, loyalty to Lem, loyalty to Tarkovsky, loyalty to sci-fi conventions, and loyalty to the studio, i.e. lowest-common-denominator populism), and end up falling on their faces. I’ve got my fingers crossed on this one, though, because Soderbergh has been so reliably interesting as a director.
The history on the project is that James Cameron wanted for years to do it, but couldn’t get it off the ground; then Soderbergh came along, and the project was in pre-production within months. That indicates to me that whatever Soderbergh brought to the table was some sort of breakthrough. For a clue, see this Film Threat interview (conducted when he was still just the writer, before he was tapped to direct), in which Soderbergh says it’s intended to be “a combination of 2001 and Last Tango in Paris.” Cameron is still producing, which means he’s able to defend it from the studio, but he’s not directing, which means the movie might actually have some real ideas in it. It’ll be interesting, if nothing else.
(For more info, check out Corona’s Coming Attractions “movies in progress” page.)
And I also wanted to jump on yojimboguy’s mention of Robert Altman’s The Player, which I should have seen and commented on in my previous message. That’s an excellent example of a movie that works differently on its second viewing. Watch the movie, laugh at the clever ending – and then watch it again immediately, paying special attention to the very first five seconds, and how that changes the way the rest of the movie plays, now that you know how it ends. I’ve referred to this movie as a snake eating its tail; truly an underrated masterpiece.
I’ll second The Spanish Prisoner and anything done by Mamet.
So far, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Marathon Man. One of my early favorites.
Here’s a recent thread recommendation, for: Nine Queens.
The only poster to the thread, richardb, called it complicated, and I guess compared to most stuff out there, it is.