Wednesday 28 May 2008

Not So Much Blown As Teased Slightly

3 Quarks Daily link to a piece titled The Red Pill: 10 Films Guaranteed To Blow Your Mind. The list looks like this:
The Truman Show (1998)
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Waking Life (2001)
The Matrix (1999)
Dark City (1998)
American Beauty (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Brazil (1985)
Network (1976)

Apparently somewhere around 1998 and 2001 minds were being blown on a regular basis. If I had to guess I'd say Ian MacKenzie, the author of the list, was aged somewhere around 28 to 32. Not that that would have stopped him from seeing, say, F for Fake, The Manchurian Candidate, If..., The Discrete Charm of the Bourgousie, Even Dwarfs Started Small or whatever, but he might have put less weight on those movies the made him go "whoa" as a teenager. You can imagine Ian and friends stroking their goatees to the wee small hours while considering the myriad intracies of the Fight Club and its place in the Fincher ouevre.

I guess I'm just disappointed, I wanted tips but all I got was list of movies I'd seen already.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually I'm 27, and no longer have a goatee. :-D But come on, these are some ground-breaking films, regardless of the time they were released. Yes, other films have touched on similar themes/are better at being films, etc - but I stand by my choices...however subjective.

Paul said...

I think you just caught me on a bad day....

I kept trying to find a way to say that they are all great movies and as mind-blowing goes an excellent place to start, but equivocation never seems to suit blog posts.

As I hinted at my disappointment was more that you hadn't picked something a little more obscure that I could then order from Amazon...

Anonymous said...

It should be called 'a list of films that think they're cleverer than they really are.' Or maybe 'films that seem better when you're stoned.' Come on! - The Truman Show? Pleasantville was better and even that wasn't brilliant.

Anonymous said...

Come on! These films only "shed light on the forces at work within our lives" if you've never bothered to stop and think about how the world works. They're spoon fed philosophy for lazy thinkers.

Paul said...

I think Joe has it closer to what I originally wanted to say.

Mr MacKenzie is right that it is a subjective choice, though it would help if they were being lauded for being well-made slightly-odd movies than truly mind-blowing.

I must have skipped the sentence you quote, Steve, as I may have been more snotty in my original post if I hadn't. As some bloke once said "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." I guess these movies are perfect examples of it.

You're probably more likely to shed light on the forces of our lives by watching a Humphrey Bogart movie (and I'm thinking of "In A Lonely Place" in particular) than any of those listed, and I don't believe Bogart had to indulge in any slow-motion wire-fu to make it all palateable...