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Rachel Getting Married was worth it to hear Debra Winger yell, "You weren't supposed to kill him!"

Alternate explanation: Anne Hathaway's audition reel to play Judy Garland.

Ouch

lame

I'd put Synecodche New York at the top of this list. I don't normally talk during movies, but I was literally shouting "What the fuck?" at the movie 15 minutes in. And I didn't stop shouting that for the rest of that three-hour long fucking movie.

Also, Paddydog's reason for Rachel Getting Married was spot-on. That is the other movie I ever shouted at.

Bslim: If you haven't read the source material, there's a lot of jumping around causing people to go "WTF just happened?". At least, it's happened to me multiple viewings now.

I would like to say, attempting to watch Mullahand Drive for the first time while making out with a woman is impossible. I did not understand a single moment of the movie. And then there were little people. EVERYWHERE. At that point, my focus moved from the movie back to her until the credits.

I'm with Slim on this one...please explain to me how Akira is confusing? Weird yes, but confusing?

This is what happens when I take too long to write something...the answer to my question gets posted before my comment and I look like an idiot. I still don't think it's that confusing.

@Dr. P

But you still look like an idiot?

That's why with the better stuff (good movies, heroin, etc.), it's best that you become your own source.
I ordered my own copy of Primer before I brought the rental back to the store.

What the hell is all of this confusion about Rachel Getting Married? It's a film about a self-centered, ex-model who is the black sheep of the family, mostly due to her drug addiction that led to an unfortunate tragedy. There is a wedding going on which forces the family to come together which results in hurtful words and finally a modicum of reconciliation.

I guess everyone fell asleep during the film. I thought it was an okay flick.

This explains a lot about RGM:

"The screenplay was written by Jenny Lumet, the daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of Lena Horne. Lumet, a junior high school drama teacher, has written four earlier screenplays, but this was the first to be produced."

A junior high school drama teacher. There you go.

Watching "Primer" is like trying to follow the real Debate competitors who talk as fast as possible, only they're rambling on about physics and the time-space continuum. It's entertaining but mentally exhausting.

I left the theater after watching "Lost Highway" wondering if I would ever recover. Considering that my brain wouldn't know if it had been permanently broken in the first place, I could be in a perpetual state of confusion and not even know it.

The inclusion of "Rachel Getting Married" is very meta because it's the most confusing thing of all.

I need to go lie down.

I am so sick of hearing about how dull the wedding was. Yes, it was dull. It was put-me-to-sleep-in-a-hurricane dull.

Here's the thing: weddings are fucking dull. All of them. My wedding, should I ever have one, will be an expensive, boring, fake-nice-and-try-to-stay-awake timesuck for everyone in attendance. Unless you are actually Jennifer Peterson or Kevin Heinz, your wedding was dull, too. (If you copied them, then obviously your wedding was even more dull than most, and your whole life is probably dull, too.)

And that's for people who know you. If you are watching a movie, any wedding you see is between people you do not know. But they're never interesting unless they're interrupted by a man with a sword. Or a man looking down from a balcony yelling "ELAINE!"

Everyone hates weddings. We go because the bride(s) and/or groom(s) want us there and we love them. Then we get drunk on their dimes at the reception so we can hook up with strangers or make out with toilets.

And hell, the wedding's dullness is the entire point of the scene. The whole movie, everyone's on knife's edge about Kym. What's she going to fuck up now?! But during the wedding, and suddenly everything just chills out for a few minutes. Yes, Sidney is a total sap with no stage presence at all, and none of us want to hear him sing. But that's exactly the point. Hooray, dullness!

I actually liked Rachel Getting Married, but I will admit that I was taken out of it more than once wondering about the collection of friends and family they had at that event. Were they in a contest to see how many "unique" individuals they could fit in one country estate? There were dancers with feather headdresses and hipster acoustic guitarists, and an old fey cowboy. How did they all get there?

Dorothy:

I think the premise was that the father was some kind of record producer, possibly specializing in some niche aspect of the industry.

But he might also have been the guy Peter Gabriel and David Burns pay to find them a penurious country's culture that they can exploit on their own records.

None of that explains why they were permitted to destroy one of Neil Young's best songs or why there was a huge scene all about who was seated where at the wedding when actually it turned out to be a barbeque (undoubtedly of loin of rare Tibetan ibis) with no assigned seating.

I had a former manager who was so obsessed with Lost Highway that he actually wrote a book on his theory about it.

Throngs of threatened under-appreciated brains ITT.

Lost Highway. . .wow. I was too confused to even say, "What the Fuck" out loud.

What was so confusing about Rachel Getting Married is that I just kept wondering where the hell it was going. Like I kept expecting things to happen and for the wedding to be a complete disaster or for redemption or SOMETHING. But...no we just got this ginormous wedding with just about every single ethnic band and tradition they could think of (see how inclusive we are!) and it lasted like three hours and NOTHING HAPPENED. SHE LEFT THE HOUSE. And just...WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH?

I see you have three Lynch films - but not [i]Inland Empire[/i]? Compared to that, [i]Lost Highway[/i] is a yellow brick road.

Mrs. Julien, I fell asleep during Synecdoche. It was a mercy nap.

can i get an amen?

I see no one jumped on the Suicide Club bandwagon I tried to start yesterday. Either no one has seen the film that opens with 50 school girls killing themselves by jumping in front of a moving subway train, or no one finds a film that was written, directed, and edited to have no plausible explanation to connect all the events confusing. I'm disappointed either way.

I fell asleep during Synecdoche. It was a mercy nap.

can i get an amen?

Pffft. I fell asleep at home before I could even get out the door to go see Synecdoche.

Thank you Thank you Thank you for putting Eva on here... Akira messed me up the first time I saw it (hey, I was 14 and not really paying attention) but Eva...Hell I've never understood Evangelion. Except for the bit about the end of the series being so low-budget it required total lack of colour and had the aesthetic sensibilities of pretentious Calvin Klein 80s advertisement executives.

I really have no idea how any of you consider Primer to be confusing. I've seen it about ten times, read countless lengthy interviews with the writer/director/etc., and read tons of online takes about it.

It's clear as fuckin' day.

I didn't mention this film in the earlier article because someone already did, but Naked Lunch is more WTF than Videodrome. It's impossible to understand Peter Weller's constant mumbling without headphones (are there TVs with headphone jacks anymore?) or subtitles. In my mind, it's the most confusing Cronenberg film.

My other pick that didn't make the list is Tetsuo the Iron Man, which should take Akira's place. We could fill a list like this one exclusively with Japanese works.

I agree that Rachel Getting Married wasn't confusing, it was balls-out pretentious and boring. It was so bad that I watched it all as the visual equivalent of a hair shirt to pay for my sins. Must've been Lent, I don't remember.

How about The Wall?

We've all seen it in college, drunk off our asses, but did we really understand it?

I don't remember much of it.

"The inclusion of "Rachel Getting Married" is very meta because it's the most confusing thing of all."

Well said, Kballs.

Did anyone else think Pi was pretty straightforward? Even though some of the topics were definitely intellectually exhausting at times the plot seemed straightforward enough.

The End of Evangelion is only confusing if you think Eva is about giant robots, which it isn't, it's about depression.

Word, Rachel Getting Married. Weird Dad using the F word & starting a dishwasher-emptying competition? FAB FIVE FREDDY AS HIMSELF?!? Why are those people still playing music, get off my lawn!

Primer isn't some great film, but it's an elegant concept & achievement. Dude made a time travel movie for like $10K that almost immediately garnered a place in the sci-fi firmament, & that fans continue to dissect & debate.

Also, ya'll some dodo birds in here. Turn off your JokeBlocker, cripes!

What does that mean?

Here's a hint for one of the movies on the list: The first half of the movie is a dreammmmm....

Not telling which one ;)

I'm gonna go with Waking Life as a glaring omission. While the nature of the movie is not really that confusing, most of the conversations in each little segment cover some pretty heady philosophical discussions.

The problem with the film is that if you take any time after a segment to think about the segment you just watched, you inevitably miss the beginning of the next segment. As a result you never know what anyone is really talking about because you don't get to hear the entire argument.

Throw in visuals that draw your attention away from the dialogue, and you have one seriously confusing movie.

And Avatar was not that confusing. It's clear that it's a hackjob story, but it's very linear. I'm still gonna go with the Ghost in the Shell films (and first season.)

how about THE CUBE - now that was strange

I'm just going to pretend that this RGM silliness is everyone being ironic cause they're so hip (and they don't even know it).

Anywho, I loved Synecdoche, New York. Confusing as hell? Oh, yes. I had to read countless interviews and reviews and etc. before I finally had a grasp on it. Whether I actually liked the film before the research or after I had figured it out, I can't remember. Either way, to go through that much work for a film either says something for it, or that I'm insane.

Bit of randomness: Samantha Morton fucking rocked it in S, NY. I love that woman.

Pi: Esoteric topic, unexplained surreal imagery, but a pretty clearly-told story.

Synechdoche: An absurdist dark comedy like EVERY OTHER CHARLIE KAUFMAN FILM, though a bit longer and grimmer. What did people not get about it?

Akira: Really? Kids given psychic powers in hubristic scientific experiment, one gets out of control? Not only is it not confusing, it's just about the same plot as EVERY mad scientist story.

I'm thinking The Wizard Of Oz should have headed this list.

umm, she's a farm girl, but then the school teacher is a serial killer, and she is going to expose her. but then she freaks out and she's in a village full of midgets. She wanders off and hallucinates the road being full of gold, but she doesn't want any of it, just runs down it.

then she starts talking to inanimate objects (like a scarecrow), then she teams up with some kind of robot that wants to rip the beating heart out of a human...that's where i got lost. . .then she goes into a jungle and terrorizes a lion, almost pulls his tail off, nothing is making sense at this point. eventually she finds a city founded on a creepy religious cult that hoards gems and is driven by beauty parlours, and the whole city worships a charlatan based soley on the fact that he has a crude dirigible.

In the end, the director takes that shabby out that "it was all a dream" and we are expected to rejoice. and yet all the people at "the farm" are the same people who were in her "hallucination". I don't know why we are supposed to buy this "twist" let alone think it is genius.

none of these were that confusing except maybe eraserhead. Naked Lunch Inland Empire Holy Mountain those were confusing and what about slacker and waking life not that they were necessarily confusing but could be mind boggling at times or even a scanner darkly
Altered States was more confusing than these movies and it wasn't confusing. Hell 12 Monkeys was much better than Primer if you time travel you affect nothing because time can only happen once, if you go back in time weren't you already there before you time traveled, I mean IT ALREADY happened, therefor you were already there. Since all time is simultaneous the same could be said for going forward. There are quantum mechanics that back this up. Terry Gilliam knew it. Movies aren't really that confusing, you just need to figure out the context for the images you are seeing. Synecdoche was trying too hard. Thats what happens when you write a story on gay clown acid. Fuck You Satan - Pope Dee Dee Ramone