Added: 1085 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Celebs | 18 Comments

Rating:

 

Share:     Embed:     Fave:    

Item added to your favorites.

You must be logged in to add to your faves. Use the login box on this page or click here to regsiter.

<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/16185/Ten-Mindfck-Movies/'>Ten Mindf#ck Movies</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

Cinema's always been about f#cking with your head ever since early pioneers like the Lumière brothers who, according to cinematic folklore, sent an audience running because they thought the oncoming train up on screen in The Arrival of the Mail Train was about to hit them, or Georges Méliès and his early sci-fi A Trip to the Moon.

There's nothing better than a movie that messes with your head like a night out on LSD with the late Timothy Leary while injecting datura into your eyeballs and freebasing ketamine. It's like simultaneously giving your brain an enema while also causing it to freeze over, then up and leave, probably hitchhiking its way to a sunny beach in the Caribbean, leaving you to stare vacantly at the floor wondering why your socks don't match, and you're not wearing any pants.

That's always the mark of a mind-blower of a movie. Movies that leave you not just scratching your head afterwards trying to work out what happened, but also lingers in the mind, and haunts it like a ghost...

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
This had a very powerful effect on me when I first watched it, as it will anybody. The dark, freaky central performance by Jake Gyllenhaal is gripping, he becomes our narrative anchor in a film set adrift on an unknown, uncharted sea - the performance restrains the film's confusing, elaborate narrative like a straightjacket. With talk of cellar doors, occult mysticism and brain-achingly complicated time-travel, it's a film that hangs on your mind like cold mist rising from a block of ice, or smoke spiralling from smouldering embers.

The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967)
No surprise this little gem came from the 60s, a whole decade dedicated to the art of the mindf#ck, it's dated terribly but it's still groovily weird. It stars the three vice monkeys who'd later go on to make Easy Rider, namely Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Cue some heavy drug use, a plot that doesn't exist, surreal images and psychedelic trippiness. Strap in, tune in, turn on and...Oh you know the drill...

Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Lynch's whole oeuvre could be on this list but then it would just be a Lynchian love-fest, so if I had to pick one it'd be this. But equally I could've chosen Lost Highway, Inland Empire, Blue Velvet, Straight Story - I'm kidding with that last one. From a baby that looks like a rotting baby dinosaur crossed with an embalmed ostrich head, to the industrialised setting and strange soundtrack, it's a surrealist meister stroke, wholly upsetting and for a first feature, truly remarkable. He's lived up to the promise of this admirably and could quite rightfully be called King Mindf#ck of Mindf#ckia. Must be all that transcendental meditation. Om...

Hidden (Caché) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
French film shot by an Austrian director. From the opening shot that tricks us into thinking we're seeing the POV of a motionless camera watching an apartment, which really turns out to be two people watching a recording of that shot, you can never really trust what happens in this film. That foreboding sense that we're being swindled never really lets up, and by the final shot which will have you scratching your head in total bafflement, you're confused, slightly frightened, and crying out for the simplicity and thoughtless, explosions-riddled retardedness of some Hollywood trash-by-numbers like, say, Mission Impossible III. What Haneke has managed to do with this movie is imbue it with a pervading sense of unease that permeates throughout, allowing it to be both strangely creepy and thought-provokingly unsettling.

Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)
If you've read the novel the intense craziness of the film will come as no surprise. William Burroughs, the book's author, famously used a cut and paste technique to create his novel, writing chunks of it, then chopping it up and placing them randomly to create a sense of dislocation. To film such an unfilmable novel is a challenge of epic proportions, so the film takes aspects of the novel, like the Interzone and mixes that with moments from Burrough's real life, like when he shot and killed his wife in a tragic William Tell-like misadventure. Robocop plays our protagonist and the strange, scaly creatures are both frightening and compelling. Do not watch on a drug comedown.

Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)
A few years after seeing this film I still can't quite work out how the narrative works towards the end of the movie. It's a film as baffling as the quantum world it deals with, which makes it very fitting. It deals with time travel which results in multiple versions of the characters walking about in the same reality repeating things each other's just done, or doing things they're about to do, and so multiple realities start to present themselves and it all becomes refreshingly, mind-bogglingly complicated. Bravo.

Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988)
Most anime movies are strange and we all know they can get pretty depraved, but Akira isn't just about trying to be disgusting or about tentacle raping demons (yes you Urotsukidoji) - it's an extremely well made and very influential movie, still unsurpassed - but one that descends ever more into a place where it is less and less easier to understand what is happening without resorting to some abstract philosophical theory. For me anyway. I was studying Heidegger's Being and Time when I first watched it, and it seemed to me to marry perfectly with his ontological enquiry into the nature of Being. But then again, I could've just been stoned.

Begotten (E. Elias Merhige, 1991)
This one will creep you out, short on dialogue, heavy on religious and pagan symbolism and suffering and PAIN! It's not for the faint-hearted, and is akin to passing through the bowels of the devil and being shat out into the infernos of hell. Arrrrgh! Just contemplating it has turned me into a jibbering, scared piece of jello. Run for your lives...!

Week End (Le weekend) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
Variety is the key to all things, so it's good to get a bit of experimental new-wave French cinema on this list, as no doubt, many of the directors featured above were probably heavily influenced by the style of Godard et al. The non-linear narratives, the random juxtaposition of images and dialogue, the brazen disregard for the, then, common rules of commercial cinema, while also acknowledging the narrative histories that stretched back to cinema's birth. This film has nods to Alice in Wonderland, the French-Algerian war, cannibals, hippies, the bourgeoisie, you name it, it's in.

El Topo (The Mole) (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
Another foreign language film where narrative coherency, like most on this list, is shunted in favour of occult references, Christian symbolism, Eastern philosophies and maimed dwarves. It's an allegorical Western with the central character on a quest for illumination. Made in 1970, not released on DVD until 2007, it's a little beauty.

So now you've seen the list, off you go to sh#t some bricks! Agree, disagree, kiss my grits! I must say one last thing and that's an honourable mention to Videodrome, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fear X, The Usual Suspects, Memento and Vertigo. Remember, the truth isn't out there, it just looks like it is...

Added: 1085 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Celebs | 18 Comments

Rating: