Pajiba

Thank God you italicized because:
"Love, Actually, Inexplicably"
sounds like a sequel to me and wasn't the first one horrible enough?

Lost Highway.

How is Lost Highway less confusing than A Clockwork Orange? How is A Clockwork Orange confusing? It doesn't even have time ravel or parallel dimensions.

Also, Primer. That shit will break your brain pan, beautifully.

??? Confusing??? no... a lot of the movies were strange and odd, but not confusing... (well Momento was because I missed the first 5 minutes of the film...i;e. the last 5 min of the story...)
Clockwork Orange made a lot of sense... deranged but it followed a story line

How fucking stupid does a person have to be to not understand A Clockwork Orange? I'm not saying everybody has to LIKE it, but at what point is someone saying to themselves, "Man, I just don't know what the hell is going on here."?

Oh, and End of Evangelion should be on there, but I'm not surprised it isn't.

Thank you for leaving Inception off (stupid EW). If you didn't understand the film it was because you were too busy stuffing popcorn and Whoppers into your maw to be bothered. Or you're like my grandpa who doesn't like the whole newfangled "flash back" plot device because it ain't linear enough to follow.

Another vote for Primer... not just to be on the list, but to be #1, by a lot.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End Of Evangelion
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Solid State Society

is no one going to mention "a bug's life"?!

Lost Stupid Fucking Highway. #1, with a bullet.

4. The Matrix Revolutions

It doesn't count when the movie doesn't make sense because it is FUCKING AWFUL.

Gummo. Dear god, Gummo.

This movie would better be titled "Confusing movies I could actually stand to rewatch"

Gummo...just....Gummo.

A quick Wiki search informs me that I was not thinking of Gummo, but instead was thinking of Julien Donkey-Boy. See? So damn confused I don't even know what movie I was watching. Bacon on the wall...why?

Here are two diagrams from Primer trying to break down the movie timeline.

one

two

Do the Movie movies count? Why would someone watch them, let alone pay to watch them? Were the scripts discovered inside a burning paper bag on someone's front doorstep?

Oka, so maybe they're not so much "confusing" as "a white-hot poker directly into the frontal lobe".

meh, I owe you a drink. Fuck that, I'm getting you hammered should the two of us ever meet. Like, wake up in Detox hammered. That's how many drinks I'm getting you.

At this point, it's not even worth mentioning how fucking retardabley stupid and pointless and confusing Gummo is. Hate. There you go. Hate. Hate. Hate. Bacon on the wall, huh? BRILLIANT! Hate...

Anyhow, I'm surprised The Box weren't up in this heezy. That movie was slicker than slick stuff for the first half-hour, then... I... I don't even know. Granted, a half-hour in, I was half in the bag, but still... FINE - I WAS ALL THE WAY IN THE BAG, BUT SO GODDAM WHAT?! LIKE YOU'VE NEVER DONE IT, YOU SMARMY SHITBIRDS!

Anyhow, uh... Yeah. I was absolutely dumbfangled at what the hell was going on. HALF-ASSED SPOILER ALERT! Actually, fuck spoilers - I can't possibly ruin it because I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about, chronologically or how it pertains to the plot. The library thing? What the fuck was that? And the weird water cube thingies? The hell did that have to do with anything? Fake foot? What the huh? I hated it. Not Gummo levels of hatred, but more of a dull, plod-around-inebriated-in-my-own-skull kind of hate. I had a friend ask about it over the weekend, and honestly? I couldn't tell him anything about it. BECAUSE I HAD NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT HAD HAPPENED.

In closing, fuck you Harmony Korine.

I know what's confusing about Vanilla Sky. It's why anyone thinks Penelope 'I talk through my nose' Cruz is attractive.

I second "Lost Highway", in my opinion it's way less coherent than "Mulholland Dr" which kind of begins to make more sense when taken in a "long dream sequence" context.

Well, clearly not enough British people have seen Primer, because it definitely belongs on the list.

But... A Clockwork Orange? Love freakin' Actually? What's so hard to understand about those?

I can see how some people may not understand 2001 without having read the book. Sure, the movie is filled with pretty images, but doesn't really explain what's going on with the monoliths.

It's cool that people are mentioning Evangelion, although it always made perfect sense to me. I'm going with Primer.

Bug seems a good choice. It's confusing that the characters could fall down the path they do and have it still be believable in the film.

A better choice is Suicide Club and it's follow-up, Noriko's Dinner Table. Sion Sono intentionally added a whole lot of red herrings and extraneous details to leave the entire combined narrative up for interpretation. Here's all you know: in the first film, a bunch of people kill themselves; in the second film, teenage runaways are hired out as families to lonely men. Everything else is a big old cake of wtf?.

People actually find A Clockwork Orange and 2001 confusing? After all these years?

Now I'm confused.

I can't believe Terry Gilliam isn't on the list- Brazil had about 6 endings.

One popcorn film I'd add is Back to the Future 2.
It had about 5 time skips and sets up for #3. I remember my brother and I trying to explain it to my dad. Perhaps b/c only children understand things.

I thought the point of "Rachel Getting Married" was that this unfortunate chick was born into a pretentiously annoying family. So annoying in fact, that she almost had no choice but to hate them and be constantly smacked-out. Despite the terrible things she did, you end up feeling sorry for her because most of us would've ended up just like her.

I'm surprised there's no mention of "Akira"
The original 80's theatrical release left me very puzzled.

list like this one and the one linked make me go "What?! Are people stupid?! Oh, right..."

So nothing has changed in the world much eh. Another fantastic day to blow my brains out.

I second ERASERHEAD. Interesting, but ... how did the singing lady get in the radiator? how come the chicken dinner was walking off, after it was cooked? (or something like that; haven't seen it in 25 years).

I suspect some 70's European "horror" movies might fit in this list, but can't think of any specific examples. The earlier VAMPYR was confusing the first time I saw it, but made more sense the second time.

This makes perfect sense. Vanilla Sky is horribly confusing because, well, Tom Cruise & a full-grown woman.

You know you were thinking it.

I am loving the explanations for "Rachel Getting Married" you guys are coming up with in this discussion.

What, exactly, is confusing about 12 Monkeys/Eternal Sunshine/A Clockwork Orange?

I will give them Mulholland Dr., because it is quite confusing until you google it and read the dream theory. And I assume the "confusion" in Memento is over whether or not Leonard actually killed his wife, because that's left pretty ambiguous.

Starship Troopers. The entire movie, the mister and I were trying to figure out how the hell it was cheaper and more efficient to transport infantry across space and throw away all that man power rather than just taking off and nuking the site from orbit. It made no sense, and to this day, I still get enraged thinking about it.

Blow Up. It's a British film, but this is a British list so no excuses as to why it's not on it.

That movie is considered "great" by indie/foreign film standards. I just think it makes absolutely no friggin sense.

"You just have to have some patience and enjoy the damn thing and not be the kind of person who wants explosions every two seconds."

Or words, for that matter...

I'm gonna throw Tetsuo: The Iron Man and the original Ghost in the Shell. The dialog in the GITS movies is superdeep and laden with information/exposition.

@Zerath: Yes, I agree with you about Akira, I read the manga, then watched the movie, and then reread the manga. Thankfully they're redoing the movie, into two movies this time following the books more closely, which is for me a very happy thing, providing they do not Eff it up.

@wealhtheow: Read the book first, then watch the movie, the book makes more sense, specially since it's more accurate, and the movie is....well the movie is what it's supposed to be, a cheap hollywood rendering of one of Heinlein's greater works, that got itself expositioned into two more movies and a tv series. and only the tv series made sense and introduced the one set of aliens on our side.

Pretty much anything by David Lynch is completely incomprehensible.
Eraserhead...
Blue Velvet...
Dune...
Mulholland Drive (at least it had some sweet lesbian scenes)...

All the Twilight "saga" movies. I'm confused why people like them. :p

"Mulholland Drive (at least it had some sweet lesbian scenes)..."

Well, unless that was two different actresses playing the same part, in which case it was a masturbation scene. In which case, you is bloody confused, mate!

There is no David Lynch film that can't be made more confusing is you just think about it a bit more. :)

Videodrome was a cautionary tale about the perils of watching too much TV, with an emphasis on the VCR as a potentially schismatic influence on reality.

Eraserhead was a purely surrealist tale of a man's search for love and affection in a bleak, postindustrial world.

At least, that's what I told a guy who asked me what they were about.

oh, I thought confusing as in "I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY THIS WAS EVEN MADE?!?!?!?!"

So for movies like Love Actually and Vanilla Sky, maybe they're confusing because at some point the audience feels that the characters are behaving in confusing ways? As in, it's not what a given audience member would do in that particular situation? Actually, that might work out for a bunch of the entries on this list, based of course on varying degrees of audience stupidity.

Anything by David Lynch is pretty much meant to confuse the shit out of you because that's how he rolls and why I can't abide his movies (now Twin Peaks, on the other hand, is fantastic). I do remember having some "WTF?" moments watching Vanilla Sky but I was in high school when it came out and I wasn't as smart and sophisticated as am I now, obviously.

and greg, apparently you need to rewatch Mulholland Drive because there is definitely some lesbian action in that movie.

After reading some of the comments I think it's safe to say that I'm the only person on earth who actually like "Vanilla Sky".

MULHULLAND DRIVE!?
I find most of the list ridiculous but worst of all is how much I loved Mulhulland Drive until the end and you see the whole thing is written off as a lame ass death dream... cop OUTTTT. I felt like Lynch was really getting lazy- tying it all up nicely with a bow.

"The Ring" was utterly confusing. I mean, I get the part about the video tape killing people. And the movie is visually stunning. But the whole explanation of the video, the crabby guy with horses whose wife killed herself and some adopted kid. None of that back story makes a lick of fucking sense. I even tried to watch this movie a 2nd time, without any wine to possibly muddle my thoughts, and it still made no sense.

"Palindromes" was also a hot mess. Having different actors play the same part is an interesting idea for about 5 minutes, then it's just annoying. Plus i just hated the movie.

David Lynch movies are meant to confuse. Harmony Korine is all about random scenes with sideshow freaks, white trash, etc... I thought Gummo was hilarious.

I'd nominate Tim Burton's awful version of Planet of the Apes. That ending makes no fucking sense whatsoever (and not in a good way).
Primer, I kind of got after the second viewing. Mulholland Drive made me want to smash things and I'm afraid that I have never given it a second shot...

Naked Lunch

I agree on all of them. I'll add Lost Highway, The Game, every David Lynch movie actually now that I think about it, Matrix Revolutions - still no idea what happened there...

And Kris, I love Vanilla Sky.

Eraserhead
Tetsuo the Iron Man

Pi

Jeeze...this is like a list of my favorite movies (and Kris, I like Vanilla Sky too!)

Donnie Darko's nothing compared to Southland Tales.

Inland Empire. Try deciphering that film; three hours of god knows what, Laura Dern running around and speaking in a Southern accent, Polish women, dreams, movies, vaginas, and hookers dancing 'The Locomotion'...yeah, there's some meaning in there somewhere.
And having watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as often as I have, I can assure you, it's only confusing the first time. Give it another shot, or twenty.

British people are dumb

Primer by a longshot.