Lots of sugestions here. I’m going to have to poke around on imdb to see what some of these are. Looks like I’ve got a wide selection On the ones I’m familiar with:
The Game, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys are all movies I liked, but IIRC they’re not quite what I’m looking for here - a little more external to the subject. Oh no, I might just have to rewatch them to be sure, how will I survive?
Blade Runner and Total Recall are more of action movies than what I’m really looking for here. David Lynch films - I’ve seen Lost Highway and some of his other stuff, they come off to me more like ‘lets be confusing for the sake of confusion’ than what I’m looking for (I’m not a big Lynch fan). The drug movies also aren’t really what I’m trying to get at here.
Without question one of the best films I’ve ever seen in bringing you a First-person POV of a mentally-damaged person is still in current release in many areas: David Cronenberg’s Spider. A remarkable film.
Total Recall tried to be a “mess with your mind” movie, in the sense that you would keep asking yourself “was he really doing all this stuff, liberating Mars, killing bad guys, even though he started out as a bad guy himself, or was it all just a delusion from the time he went to Rekall?” But I don’t think it succeeded.
For my money, there were too many scenes that took place outside of Quade’s frame of reference to make me think it was all in his mind. Isn’t it in the Uniform Movie-Makers Code that if you tell a story that’s “it all in Character X’s imagination” you have to pretty much tell it from Character X’s point of view?
Granted, there is lots of great foreshadowing (you can see Rachel Ticotin’s picture on the screen at Rekall, and one of the technicians mutters “Oh, Blue Sky on Mars – that’s a new one!” Maybe in the hands of some other director than Paul Verhoeven, who has the subtlety of napalm, they could have brought off the mind-bending angle better.
Total Recall tried to be a “mess with your mind” movie, in the sense that you would keep asking yourself “was he really doing all this stuff, liberating Mars, killing bad guys, even though he started out as a bad guy himself, or was it all just a delusion from the time he went to Rekall?” But I don’t think it succeeded.
For my money, there were too many scenes that took place outside of Quade’s frame of reference to make me think it was all in his mind. Isn’t it in the Uniform Movie-Makers Code that if you tell a story that’s “it all in Character X’s imagination” you have to pretty much tell it from Character X’s point of view?
Granted, there is lots of great foreshadowing (you can see Rachel Ticotin’s picture on the screen at Rekall, and one of the technicians mutters “Oh, Blue Sky on Mars – that’s a new one!” Maybe in the hands of some other director than Paul Verhoeven, who has the subtlety of napalm, they could have brought off the mind-bending angle better.
I won’t say it screws with the mind, more of just playing with it, but Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen manages to weave between “reality” and “fantasy” nicely. And overlap, of course.
The book is better than the movie, but I would offer two qualifiers here: First of all, I thought the movie was quite good, though not as nuanced as the book, for obvious reasons, so watching the movie will still offer plenty of entertainment, and I think qualifies as a “screw with your mind” movie. Second, the book is freakin’ GRAPHIC. I mean, I’m not one to be easily put off by graphic description, but I found it hard to get through the last half of this. It’s page after page of sick crap that’ll make you squirm. That said, it’s a good read, and the sick-factor is actually relevant to the theme of the book, even if it doesn’t seem so initially.
Anyway, they’ve been mentioned, but I’ll repeat the nominations for Jacob’s Ladder and Pi. I know that drug-induced mind-fucks have been poo-pooed, but I’ll still mention Requiem For A Dream, because it’s so damned good.
ElJeffe: Well, in my opinion the movie could have been much better. Christian Bale didn’t manage a third of the menace of the Bateman character. It’s not a bad movie though, and if you haven’t read the book then you could do worse than to watch it. Of course, the book is stomach churning, so if anyone out there is the slightest bit icky about blood n guts (or Genesis, for that matter) then do not read it!