Strange and Incomprehendable

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alright i know this is the second question in a row and i hate to ask so many frivolous questions but i must know. What are the strangest shows, movies, anime, and music films youve ever witnessed. you know besides of course the obvious(Mtv odities, Tool & Pink Floyd videos).

-- Aaron (cure2200@yahoo.com), November 20, 2002

Answers

You want strange and incomprehendable? Madonna's song for the new James Bond movie...questions abound.

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo9@cs.com), November 28, 2002.

Shakespeare-always so lovely. I hate to follow it with this but... Anybody see the first episode of "Taken" by Steven Speilberg? I turned it on by accident while channel surfing; first line I heard was something about "the Chim Chim people" result: flashback to Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke singing Chim Chim Cherie. Yipes! Is this the best Spielberg can think up or is he out fishing for Christmas money? I watched it long enough to see the same ole' same ole' sci fi plots of good guys/bad aliens. Bad aliens sneaking up on simpletons (good guys) taking a walk out in the woods at total midnight... (smart). Oh boring boring boring. Isn't it possible aliens from outer space might have legit addresses? Families? Careers? Laughs? Even E.T. by now would have a cell phone and a place to send that damn bill.

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo9@cs.com), December 07, 2002.

"Premonitions following an evil deed" a short film by David Lynch. It's described on one site as "faceless drones performing indiscernible labor around a nude woman imprisoned in a giant glass cylinder." It seems to me to be Lynch inspired to his own nightmares on film by those horrifying post-mortem images of poor Elizebeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia.

-- Barb e (Suesuesbeo9@cs.com), May 29, 2003.

'Confessions of a Trick Baby' is a damn strange movie. I was tripping when I watched it, thinking it was basically normal, but it slips in the most fucked up things and I kept getting blown away by it all.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), November 21, 2002.

Oh, you mean the Freeway sequel? I've seen the first one. Ostensibly a modern Little Red Riding Hood, but then they throw all this other weirdness into the plot. Pretty good film actually.

Liquid Sky, Motorama and The Royal Tennenbaums are all pretty unusual. Megaville, The Magic Christian, Didn't You Hear. Italian horror and the Phantasm series. The Lathe Of Heaven (PBS version). O Lucky Man! warped my mind as a child. For animation, Angel's Egg.

It'd be interesting to hear what the Flux crew regards as strange (hint, hint).

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), November 21, 2002.



Weirdest movie of 2002: requium for a dream

a drak look into the world of a modern herroin addict with a few other stange and disgusting turns. Great directing. Cold and ominus sound trak.

Strangest CD: Bauhaus - In the Flat Feild Harsh minimalist post punk. Very inteligent. Very sureal. Proof that a song can be worth a thousand pictures.

Strangest book: Surviver by Chuck Plahniuk(also wins it strangest last name :). ) No one matches Chuck Plahniuk repetitive versis and ironic plot lines.

-- Aaron (cure2200@yahoo.com), November 21, 2002.


You mean that thing has a prequel, neat, so its called 'The Freeway'. I'll get it out. And yeah, I thought COATB was really good, ostensibly a modern Hansel and Gretel, come to think of it.

I loved 'Requiem for a Dream', what a conclusion. Probably should see pi (same director).

I suppose most people have seen the Aphex Twin video clip 'Window Licker'. MAN thats strange and cool!

Chuck Palahniuk does seem to have an awesome style. Try Brett Easton Ellis, particuarly 'American Phsycho'. That novel is without limits and as strange as *hell*. Wonder how many friends Ellis lost after that one. One of the best books I've ever read.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), November 22, 2002.


while not that strange, "cube" was pretty odd and innovative.

cant remember any other films though.

-- zach the new lurker (mr_spidy@hotmail.com), November 22, 2002.


I call "strange and incomprehensible" works which I'm unable to relate to my own experience. Films which depict a world I can't recognize, stories that seem devoid of purpose or meaning.

Some of the most puzzling movies I've seen: Hello Dolly, Men in Black, Kate and Leopold, and almost any movie about sports.

Paul-- gotta disagree. Magic Christian, along with anything else written by Terry Southern is not hard to understand at all.

-- Peter Chung (cretep@earthlink.net), November 24, 2002.


Ha ha, If I was thinking of strange like that I might as well describe half the commercials over here.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), November 25, 2002.


By that criteria, the movie adaptation of Harry Potter is the strangest thing I've seen :-)

It is ironic how big studios attempt to make a product with mass appeal, using focus groups and the like, and so often wind up with a completely incomprehensible "film". Hudson Hawk anyone? Tomb Raider? Sphere? Congo?

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), November 25, 2002.


I guess inadvertant strangeness is pretty funny.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), November 26, 2002.

"I call "strange and incomprehensible" works which I'm unable to relate to my own experience."

Its great that Peter just gave us his interpretation of strange. Sybil becomes unable to relate to anyone, and in the end, she seems as estranged physically, as mentally.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net), November 26, 2002.


WRonG tHreaD! oh well

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net), November 26, 2002.

Good point, I've seen American commercials and they scared the hell out of me. And then I saw an American friend of mine looking at the same commercials and getting scared too. That was when my girlfriend, her sister, told me she had realised her sister was not going back to the States :).

Still usually when I refer to strange it means something that breaks with my mundane experience and speaks to my more inner worlds. I'm attracted to this kind of strangeness. I think that is what happens to me with The Wall and Aeon Flux, for instance.

So, strange movies: Any Kubrick movie I saw, most Terry Gillian movies, Monty Python, Holly Smoke (with Kate Winslet), Dune (yeah, I preferred it to the book, uhhh), Day After (not the movie itself, but the situation it portrays - I had two "hallucinations" already in which I woke up and thought the dazzling sun light at the window was a nuke, and it felt like dying), A.I. (how can Stephen Spielberg completely fuck with a movie that was going so well before the kid left home - if we ignore the "funny" sequence of the kid following his mom around the house), all Andrei Tarkovsky movies.

-- Ricardo Dirani (spharion@hotpop.com), November 27, 2002.



Ricardo, right on! That's my kind of "strangeness" as well. Most of the films I mentioned are among my all time favorites.

I think familiarity in art is like a descending circle. There's only so far you can go into strange before it becomes familiar again; and the more times you go around this circle, the deeper it gets. I like to believe so, anyway.

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), November 27, 2002.


Obviously, the meaning of "strange" is as personal and subjective as the meaning of "normal". But I avoid using the word as you define it, because to do so only reinforces the accepted perception of what IS normal. Why should referring to one's inner world be considered abnormal? Who should say so?

For the general public, the term "strange" carries too many negative connotations for me to want to describe valuable works of art as "strange". "Strange" seems to be applied by most people to works they find inaccessible, alienating and off-putting.

As I've said before, Eraserhead, to me, is not a strange movie. Kubrick and Tarkovsky are among the LEAST strange filmmakers I can think of. Their work refers to what are the most primary concerns of being human in this world.

Strange, to me, would be the work of, say, Barry Sonnenfeld, Tony Scott, and recent Disney features. These films are frankly inscrutable. I'm hopeless in finding any way to explain what they are about. They seem to refer to motifs and a consciousness which are culturally microscopic.

-- Peter Chung (cretep@earthlink.net), November 27, 2002.


Hey, I liked recent Disney features (well, two of them).

Peter, you give Hollywood too much credit here. What commercial films do is seize upon a certain aspect of pop culture (say, The Beverly Hillbillies) and magnify it. If people liked seeing Jed, the logic follows, they'll like seeing ten times more Jed. The same with britpop and Austin Powers, space opera and Star Wars, "War Of The Worlds" and Independence Day. These films do not attempt to create a familiar experience, but re-create a previous recreation; there cannot be "relevance" in a formulaic work, because the simulacra is too entrenched. The films are effectively about themselves (try asking a Star Wars fan why they line up for Luca's next episode; generally, they'll answer "because it's Star Wars").

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), November 28, 2002.


I would think of my inner world not as abnormal, but definitely as out of the norm, norm meaning my own everyday life and perceptions, meaning I'm not usually in touch with my inner world.

I don't know if this relates, a while ago I was trying to think of strange things as in things that don't relate to me, just to realise that I've probably been dodging them so efficiently I almost can't remember any. Disney movies such as Atlantis scare the hell out of me. Seeing the trailer was enough to keep me a good distance away. So anyway, coincidentally yesterday I downloaded Quake III demo and realised for my surprise it worked perfectly on my old iBook. So I connected to a server and realised I was the only one who had chosen a female model: The Major, which I named Aeon Flux. The machine gun makes a sound similar to Aeon's guns, it was cool.

Maybe because of that I dreamt with shooting. But it was not Aeon or anything. It was myself invading a building and killing everybody with an AK 47. Funny thing is that the dream was not "running" very smoothly. Basically, the characters refused to die, so I had to walk to them and tell them "ok, I did shoot you, now drop dead", and they would agree to pretend they were dead, and I remember thinking I had taken my dream management to the next level. Then after "shooting" almost every man in the building, I got to a place full of other guys and started telling them about my love for the Kalashnikov (the company that produces the AK 47), and how M 16s are crap.

That's pretty strange, since I never had a Kalashnikov in my hands, I know the AK 47 is not that good, and extremely heavy. But I do remember getting very pissed off at the M 16s repeated jams in a time when whenever I left to the streets I had it strapped to me and would count on loading it and shooting with it in case I was attacked.

And then I turn on TV to see it was locked on the news about the two missiles fired against an airliner and the destruction of a building in a hotel full of tourists. I follow the news about it and find myself considering to strap a M 16 back to my shoulders for the first time since I happily parted from it.

Ironic. Reminds me of Ray Bradburry's Martian Chronicles, when the Martians are chasing a human to give him rights over half of the planet. The human is shooting at them, thinking he is being attacked. Short after the Martians leave the puzzled human, he sees half of Earth being obliterated in a nuclear flash. That marks his and all human population's departure from Mars to Earth, to fight for their homeworld. My impression is that the Martians knew it was about to happen, and were playing with the irony. Because the next act is the other half of Earth being obliterated and with it all of the human race, marking the end of the human dominion of Mars.

The eminence of war should make me think of leaving here, but instead it makes me consider moving to the front.

-- Ricardo Dirani (spharion@hotpop.com), November 28, 2002.


Ricardo, can you dream lucidly at will?

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), November 28, 2002.

No, I can't dream lucidly at will. I dream in different levels of lucidity ranging from completely chaotic dreams I can barely think about while waken, others so realistic that I take some time to understand it was a dream after I wake, to dreams in which I stop the action to study (and enjoy) the graphic texture of it.

-- Ricardo Dirani (spharion3@yahoo.com), December 01, 2002.

You know you can take courses that help you to dream lucidly, I'm just curious about it all.

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), December 02, 2002.

which dreams indeed are the ambition for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream

-- shakespeare (rosl@yahoo.com), December 02, 2002.

I strenuously second the vote for Chuck Palahniuk novels. I find his work a bit patchy - Fight Club and Invisible Monsters are light years ahead of his other books, Survivor, Choke, and Lullaby. I've mentioned elsewhere that Invisible Monsters is a fine book - probably my favorite work by a 'contemporary' author working in or close to the mainstream. (For this purpose, let mainstream = appearing in Barnes & Noble) If you want a warped but insightful take on beauty and gender issues in modern America, check it out. Also if you're some kind of sicko who gets off on mutilation and transexuals.

But that could just be me.

-- Charles Martin (bebop432@earthlink.net), March 06, 2003.


why are we discussing weird without mentioning lovecraft?the man's work is so odd he ends up inventing words just to describe it all.(no one will know what eldritch means without rteading him)in the same vein,in the mouth of madness is a rather strange movie.so's dark city and anything by terry gilliam. one of the weirdest non-drug-induced experiences i've ever had was the rpg planescape:torment.while playing the game,you will find yourself in incredibly deep philosophical discussions...with a machine.combat is a chore just used to move the player from one plot revelation to the next.the issues of chaos-order,machine consciousness,and the eventual fate of the universe are all covered,but the central theme is what can truly change your innerself,and whether or not immortality is a good thing.they are really the same question in the game. deus ex was also a fairly odd game,if just for the ending (the phrase god from a machine is not used in the classical sense).akira also has an absolute batshit ending.if you want a good and weird book,read stanislaw lem's solaris.i still can't tell if the main character is nuts or not.they recently made it into a movie,but george clooney's the lead,so it probably sucks.

-- alex walsh (doesn't work,sorry@yahoo.com), May 02, 2003.

WHAT KIND OF VIDEO GAMES HAVE I BEEN MISSING OUT ON! o_00000000000000

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), May 05, 2003.

For sheer weirdness you can't beat the Cremaster films, now playing in my neck of the woods... Cremaster 2 did my head in. Probably the best art-house musical western satire pulp travelogue furniture expo ever made. ;-)

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), May 25, 2003.

I see now I didn't address the main point of Chung's, that he avoids strange for the negative connotation of the word for the general public. I would only wish then some kind of substitute that conveys the positive feeling of enstrangement :). Bizarre? Grotesque? Disturbing?

-- Ricardo Dirani (spharion@hotpop.com), June 11, 2003.

Secret knowledge! Secret power!

-- Sam (janecherrington@paradise.net.nz), June 12, 2003.

The Color Of Pomegranates was a pretty challenging film. I liked it, although I wish Paradjanov had kept up the beauty of the first 5 minutes (the waterlogged books/flickering light temple scene). The rest was slow going, but did have the most ornate costumes I have ever witnessed... those 18th century Armenians knew how to dress...

-- Inu (paul@nadisrec.com), November 21, 2003.

Ok... strangest movie EVER... FORBIDDEN ZONE. Totally freakin whacked out B&W 80's movie directed by Danny Elfman's brother, the soundtrack is incredibly awesome and it is the first music that Oingo Boingo ever recorded. Does anyone know what I am talking about? It's not an animation, but it has some animated parts in it. If you like weird movies, YOU MUST SEE THIS. yes. YES!

-- Max W. (antiflarm@hotmail.com), November 22, 2003.

I never thought that two of my life's passions, Oingo Boingo and Aeon Flux, would ever coincide like that... Only on this forum, I suppose!

But I'm a huge fan of Richard and Danny Elfman, and what a bizarre movie Forbidden Zone is! Very catchy soundtrack, though. It's Danny Elfman's first film score too.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover yesterday that someone compared the new Cat in the Hat film to Forbidden Zone. I'm definitely avoiding the Cat, but Forbidden Zone is a joy of strange and incomprehensible film.

-- skye (skyknyt@aol.com), November 22, 2003.


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