THINK a film being slightly difficult to follow makes it a work of genius and you a genius for watching it? Idiots claim these are cerebral masterpieces:
Shutter Island
When a film’s twist makes you think ‘Why the f**k would anyone do that?’ you know you’re on to a winner. The revelation that lovely Leonardo DiCaprio was crazy and that his doctors were fostering his delusions only to lobotomise him at the end is so completely bollocks that you’d be hard-pressed to find a stupider clever film.
The Village
Follows in the footsteps of The Sixth Sense by not revealing what’s happening until the very end, but this time the reveal makes no sense whatsoever. If the village is in the modern day why are there no planes or helicopters? Why do they never hear any road noise or illegal raves? Do the villagers never stop to wonder where the monsters get those fabulous red cloaks?
Inception
Another DiCaprio gem, Inception is pleasant enough if you don’t bother to think about it. When you do you’ll go through six layers of trying to find the point of all this reality-bending where the first half is spent establishing the rules and the second half spent ignoring them. Any film that might all be a dream is aggressively wasting your time.
2001: A Space Odyssey
It’s a classic of filmmaking, but 53 years on there’s no shame in admitting that even Kubrick’s first ‘level of interpretation’ is a mindf**k and it may just be that it doesn’t make much sense. Like, anything after the third monolith you’re better off letting wash over you. It was the 60s. Coloured lightshows were considered intrinsically worthwhile.
Mulholland Drive
What you have to remember to understand this award-winning masterpiece is: David Lynch was going to make a TV series, like Twin Peaks, but the financers didn’t like the pilot so he hastily converted it into a movie with money from Frenchmen who don’t care whether films make sense as long as they’re sexy. That’s it. That’s the explanation.
