What were some movies you had to look up explanations of after watching?
3 years ago by Corroded to c/moviesandtv
Beau is Afraid was the last one I recall. I think it was mostly the latter half of the movie where I started to get a bit confused and needed the ending explained to me.
What movies made you look up some kind of explanation afterwards? I feel like I have done it several times in the past for more surreal movies but can't think of any other examples.
It can also be a TV show.
As soon as I read the title of this post, I knew that Primer would be one of the first comments.
You are not alone, that is the hardest time loop movie to wrap your head around.
12 Angry Men. Gen X kid here, not my style, B&W a fair bit before my time, too old.
My god. Put it on for a lark before bedtime on a worknight. Far too tired, stayed up all the way through, suffered the next day. Worth it.
If OP had asked, "Name a movie you couldn't put down?" or "What's a movie that sucked you in and you had no choice to stop?" Yeah. That one.
Mainly because it’s so accurately done. It truly shows how insane it can get and it’s made worse by all the people violating their own “rules” repeatedly
I think this movie is virtually impossible to understand in 1 viewing.
I was going to say this, but I figured I could just scroll until I found where someone else inevitably said it.
By the end, I was just letting the drama wash over me and not even trying to sort out which version of who was doing what in which timeline.
And honestly, I suspect that that's the best way to appreciate it anyway.
Ha, me neither. Love everything about the movie though. The fact that Shane did everything for this movie (wrote, directed, produced, acted, music, editing), it was made on such a small budget (7k I think), and shot over 5 weeks, yet it really doesn't feel "cheap" when you watch it, is such an achievement.
It was supposed to be a pilot for a TV series, that's why it makes even less sense than the other Lynch movies.
I think what makes it so tricky for many is trying to “interpret” Lynch’s storytelling.
Spoiler, sort of?
At the beginning, we see a POV of laying down on a pillow in a dark room. Then a dream begins — with dream-logic and structure — and eventually winds up with the cowboy saying, “time to wake up.” Then the final act reveals what really happened to the main character (and how the dream made her the innocent victim/hero).
I watched that movie with my dad.
We were both equally confused and all the unexpected masturbation made it a tad awkward
And a bunch more.
Which one is your fav out of this list?
Of these, I think mother!. The Images and vibes there are taking up the most rent-free space in my brain.
I neglected to mention Gasper Noe; basically everything he's done. But his work leans too hard into palpable horrors for me to ever actively recommend.
The more I read about 2001 and the more I watch it the more I love it!
2001 was a movie that made me go "wait, what? People like this?"
I heard it come up so often and was excited to watch it. Absolutely hated. One of the worst movies I've ever watched. I had to look it up a lot after I watched it because I was sure I had to be missing something big. But no, I wasn't. Really not my kind of movie, I guess.
I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn't age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.
I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.
And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.
I absolutely love 2001 and could not get through Solaris, I'm sure I will try again, but Solaris takes the long meandering scenes (which I generally enjoy) of doing nothing to an extreme, and I say that as a tarkovsky fan as well.
That being said, the third act of 2001 could use a bit of editing for modern tastes.
Kubrick actually fought against including an intermission. It was the norm at the time to pause a movie halfway in, raise the house lights, and let everyone piss and get a snack.
The compromise was that the house lights would stay down and the movie would keep running showing the intermission card, with the music that he had composed for it.
I can see from the filmmaker’s perspective but given it’s basically unheard of these days it felt cool and novel. Pretty sure the screening I went to did just what you described
I watched it with my partner and we riffed on it the whole time. Thoroughly enjoyable. Making fun of the movie's bad parts allowed me to get past the boredom and appreciate the good.
After watching the movie twice, then reading the book and watching the movie a third time. I now know what's going on.
Synecdoche New York
I didn't have a chance.
One my favs as far as heady horror films go. I mean not horror in the traditional sense but getting old is terrifying.
Cloud Atlas (2012)
I didn't think the plot of the film was too confusing, but trying to keep track of which cast member played which character in each respective time period while watching the film was challenging.
It took me like half the movie to understand the pidgin for New Hawaii.
The book doesn't jump around. Each story is like a book opened to the halfway point, with another book inserted. They're all nested like this down to New Hawaii, which plays through straight, before finishing each story in turn.
I love ambitious (if somewhat failed) movies like this, and I'm not really sure if the Wachowskis could have done a better job.
I didn’t exactly need the ending explained, but Everything Everywhere All At Once has so much going on that I got really hyper focused on looking up commentary for everything in the movie. There were a lot of things I missed so I found it really valuable beyond just wanting to deep dive every little detail haha.
Surprisingly, after all the hype of Interstellar being incredibly confusing, I felt like I missed something because it seemed fairly straightforward (not the plot, which was obviously convoluted, just that I understood the ending). Then I looked up explanations of the ending and they fit my interpretation so that was a bit anticlimactic lol
For Interstellar, I think it's either you get it or you don't. I got the idea pretty well, aside from the physics and stuff behind it. I talked with some people who couldn't understand it and tried to explain it but it still left them confused.
I don't remember being confused. But it was definitely one of those movies where I had to sit for 15 minutes after the credits rolled to process the emotional impact.
The Fountain. It kinda makes sense on first watch, but you really need to read the companion graphic novel to get it.
Me too. But I still really enjoyed the weirdness of it.
naked lunch. i think i read everything and was still confused.
I can think of at least two things wrong with that title
Memento is the most extreme cases of this I've ever experienced. A week later, I was still walking around with a notebook, slide rule, and french curve trying to work out what the hell actually happened in that bitch.
Les Revenants (The Returned). French series about a village where deceased residents start coming back from the dead. The ending was good, but there was a lot of ambiguity about what happened and why it stopped. I went down the rabbit hole and found some compelling reddit threads that tied it up rather neatly.
Not really for an explanation, but I looked up the original short story Total Recall (the 90's version) was based on to see if it concretely says if everything was real or if everything was just in the protagonist's head and it just cemented it for me that the story is way more ambiguous, and the Arnold film was taking the "it's all real" approach.
The Arnold film (subtly) tells you that it isn't real. In the beginning, when they are prepping Quaid for the implant, one of the technicians remarks "That's a new one... Blue sky on Mars." At the end of the movie, bam, blue sky on Mars.
There is zero chance that anyone could predict such an event, and no way for Hauser to have known about the reactor or what it would do. Hauser's mission was to infiltrate the rebels and get to Kuato.
There's a lot of other circumstantial evidence, and you could probably explain away a lot of other stuff. But the fact remains that nothing can't be explained as part of the dream, and there's one thing that can't be explained as real.
The doctor also pretty much tells Hauser the plot of the third act of the movie when trying to convince him to wake up. He also meets the dream girl he exactly described at Rekall in Melina.
The is this real or a dream idea was a major theme in many of Phillip K Dick's works. Considering he wrote many of his novels and short stories while off his face on amphetamines and a cocktail of other drugs i guess it should not be much of a surprise.
I wonder if that is a reason so many of his works have been adapted for the screen. Eg:
A Scanner Darkly
Blade Runner
Total Recall
Minority Report
The Adjustment Bureau
Paycheck
Screamers
Impostor
The Crystal Crypt
Next
A Scanner Darkly, which is about someone losing himself to psychodelic drugs was very much autobiographical.
Paycheck
The time travel thing with Ben Affleck was written by the same guy as Blade Runner and Total Recall? Whoa.
I guess I'll also have to see Imposter and The Crystal Crypt; they're the only two on that list I've not seen or even heard of before now, but everything else was pretty cool.
I'll be a degen and say Kara no Kyōkai/Garden of Sinners
The thing just kinda assumes you're inside Kinoko Nasu's head.
Michael Haneke's Caché (2005). I love the movie and am not sure the explantions helped a lot.
Tenet. Especially what's happening in the beginning. And I still found no explanation for one of my main questions: why doesn't the person who created the algorithm just destroy it if they realized what it can be used for?
I’m proud to say that I’ve never watched a movie and thought _ I have no idea what just happened or why it was important._ Competent movies always give you everything you need to figure out whats going on IMO. Watching with closed captioning on and putting your phone away is key in the way I watch (turning off CC if something onscreen is more visual oriented like most of 2001: A Space Odyssey).
I enjoy watching analysis but think those “x movie explained” videos are personally useless.
I’d say the most challenging movie I’ve watched was Lost Highway but being familiar with Lynch’s other works and being a fan of surrealism in books and other movies gave me a general idea of what was going on the first go around (as much as possible considering he doesn’t ever share what his movies are actually doing). My opinions about some parts of it have changed a little with each watch but that’s the fun of his movies.
My partner is one of those people that gets lost with movies but she literally checks her phone all the time. I love her but good lord I’ll never understand someone who watches a movie for the first time and decides to go on Facebook or TikTok throughout. Even if the movie sucks I still think people should commit to watching a movie fully when they start it but I understand that opinion isn’t universal.
@lemmy.film
General discussion about movies and TV shows.
Spoilers are strictly forbidden in post titles.
Posts soliciting spoilers (endings, plot elements, twists, etc.) should contain
[spoilers]in their title. Comments in these posts do not need to be hidden in spoiler MarkDown if they pertain to the title's subject matter.
Otherwise, spoilers but must be contained in MarkDown as follows:
::: your spoiler warning
the crazy movie ending that no one saw coming!
:::
Your mods are here to help if you need any clarification!
Subcommunities: The Bear (FX) - [!thebear@lemmy.film](/c/thebear @lemmy.film)
Related communities: !entertainment@beehaw.org !moviesuggestions@lemmy.world
go to feed...
@lemmy.film
General discussion about movies and TV shows.
Spoilers are strictly forbidden in post titles.
Posts soliciting spoilers (endings, plot elements, twists, etc.) should contain
[spoilers]in their title. Comments in these posts do not need to be hidden in spoiler MarkDown if they pertain to the title's subject matter.
Otherwise, spoilers but must be contained in MarkDown as follows:
::: your spoiler warning
the crazy movie ending that no one saw coming!
:::
Your mods are here to help if you need any clarification!
Subcommunities: The Bear (FX) - [!thebear@lemmy.film](/c/thebear @lemmy.film)
Related communities: !entertainment@beehaw.org !moviesuggestions@lemmy.world
go to feed...
Primer. Watched it twice in a row. Then went online to read about it too.
save