JLJanis

Seeing that Egoyan has not made the cut as yet, I'll nominate Exotica. That film gets richer for me every time I watch it -- infinitely rewarding. The same applies to Bergman's Persona, which is definitely one of the all-time-great "good thinking movies."

wendersfan

Agreed. Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is another 'repeat viewing necessary' film. And I think if we started listing Bergman's films we'd probably never stop. He made dozens of great films, and I'd say all of them reward multiple viewings.

JLJanis

Totally fair -- Bergman is one of the all time greats IMO (and probably my favorite director of all time), and most of his films not only reward multiple viewings but demand them -- not because they are obtuse, but rather because they tend to be so thematically dense. The only reason I chose Persona is that many people I know have not seen the film, and I think it is the most directly challenging film in his entire oeuvre.

ravan

'Bring it on'

mcarver

I had thought of adding Egoyan to my list of director's, but in a sense his films don't require repeated viewings to "understand" them. They require repeated viewings because they are so good. Calendar comes to mind for one I enjoy re-watching.

davidlynchfan

I pretty much understand all the movies listed here the first time viewing it!!

Robert

Usual Suspects(duh)
Mission: Impossible

Gunde

Memento (I'll never get enough of this one!)
Usual Suspects
Donnie Darko
Mulholland Drive (and many other Lynch movies....)
Session 9
Following
American Beauty (not hard to understand - just amazing!)

Rypro 525

go here
http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...hreadid=260836
and try to explain it in simple terms and mention where i went wrong in my explimation of the movie.

MaudlinHarold

Here's a list of movies I find I notice something new most every time I re-watch (be it details/nuances, subplots, etc.)

Rashomon
Pulp Fiction
12 Monkeys
Citizen Kane
Harold & Maude
Waking Life
Rear Window
Big Sleep (never makes sense no matter HOW much I watch it)
Memento
Dancer in the Dark
2001
The Conversation
Amelie
Short Cuts (tragically not on DVD)
Wild Strawberries

and the Simpsons is always good for a reference-a-minute

Vampyr

I'm glad you mentioned Saragossa Manuscript, The (1965). The truth is that I still am trying to bring myself to watch it again. Something tells me I'll actually like it a lot after more than one or two viewings. It's just a hunch.

Now....That's quite a list! I must agree with you BIG TIME on Big Sleep, The. I just am crazy about this movie.......BUT....Just WTF is going on here

I'm not going to get into a list of movies "I find I notice something new most every time I re-watch (be it details/nuances, subplots, etc.)" That list would just be toooooo looooooog. However, Sunset Blvd should certainly be on such a list. That masterpiece never stops surprising and amazing the viewer. IMHO

Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942) ~ I love this movie, but didn't really care for it until I watched it a few times.

OK....One last movie to list before this post gets out of control
When I first watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) I not only didn't understand it, but hated it ( except for Moira Kelly taking off her top ). In fact, I thought it was soooooo strange that I was oddly drawn to watching it more than once.

I STILL have very little idea WTF is happening in this movie Yet, the more I watch it the more I'm drawn to it.
It's hypnotic!
BTW: I still like watching Moira Kelly taking off her top

DarthMarklar

Only one vote (so far) for LOTR? I thought there'd be more? Well, I'll second Calistoga's vote for LOTR.

On a side note, what about movies that have surprise endings (i.e. 6th Sense) where you have to re-watch the film either to find holes in the story or just to be 100% positive that no one really had a conversation with Bruce Willis I know I had to rewatch it because I swore he had a conversation with the kids mom when he visited the house.

bboisvert

I agree with the vast majority of your list and I agree with your Memento comments too.

I found that after you got used to the "gimmick" and you had seen the whole plot, there wasn't much else to take away from the film. Given the popularity of the movie, though, I guess we're in the minority.

Burnt Alive

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

Am I The only one who fully understood Donnie Darko on the first viewing?

holo69

Vanilla Sky
Fight Club
Mulholland Drive
Lost Highway
Bladerunner

DeputyDave

Well, anther thread reminded me of this one (actually one of my favorite films, I can't believe I haven't thought of it in so long): Being There. I admit I was young when I first saw it but when it (finally) dawned on me what the film was really, at its heart, about I HAD to sit and watch it again immediately. Being young I and from a religious household I had never conceived that such heresy would be aired in public (I was naive, OK?). Although now a view like that would be considered trendy, at the time I think they went out on a limb making this movie.

johnglass

Would it be cliche to add the Godfather trilogy to this list? I've watched these movies dozens of times and I still have a hard time keeping up with all the different characters (and all the italian names don't help, even though I'm italian myself).

CitizenKaneRBud

The thing is, some people can put everything together as its coming, or after little thought. With Memento, many people had trouble keeping track because A.) it went backwords, B.) Teddys monologue at the end gave a lot of information to swallow at once... it may take a few watches for them to put the pieces together. Another example is Vanilla Sky. Basically, at the end, Noah Tyler gives away exactly what happened in a detailed explanation. It's not open-ended at all, but many people were confused by it. It was a lot of information at once, and hard for audience members to put 2 and 2 together (I'm not saying they're unintelligent, everyone's mind works differently though).

On a side note, my brother-in-law actually claims to have understood Mulholland Drive after the first viewing. Do I believe him? Nope. Is it possible? With Mulholland Drive, maybe not.. but with Memento or Vanilla Sky I can see it happening.

d2cheer

Can you tell me what this is?? I have not heard of this one. Only one on the list I am not familiar with so I am understandibly curious about it... I like lists like this to give me ideas about other movie to watch, so I guess this would be one I may be interested in... I check out the IMDB also and came up with nothing.

wendersfan

It's a Michael Haneke film starring Juliette Binoche. It came out about three years ago, I think. Basically, it's about how a single act of anger has far-reaching effects upon seemingly non-related people. It's also fantastic.

Look under Code Inconnu, Haneke, or Binoche.

sundog

The full title is "Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys" and that hints at its fractured structure. Directed by Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) and featuring Juliette Binoche, the film follows a few different stories of people from various social classes (in Paris I believe). It's rather overt in its political tones, but Haneke gets wonderful performances from his actors and plays with the narrative so that the heavy-handed "messages" are rendered much more palatable.

The centerpiece of the film is a long take depicting the intersection of the characters on the street, impressive in its technique and shocking in its content. Haneke also has some other great moments playing with distinctions between film and reality.

Code Unknown is one of my favorites from last year and I've been itching to see it again. There is a DVD available in the US.

mcarver

Code Unknown is a delightful film (in no small part thanks to Juliette Binoche).

If you are interested in some "interesting" titles, check out my lists of selected films on DVD:

Overlooked Films

Independent Films

Foreign Films

at Michael's Movie Mayhem

Hokeyboy

I got it on the first viewing. I didn't get every single clue, foreshadowing subplot, or hidden nuance, but I got the basic "idea" of what had happened over the course of the movie.

It really wasn't *that* complex. Brilliant, haunting, and mindblowing? Absolutely. The basic gist of what had "happened" isn't that hard to figure out.

Of course, it's all interpretation, isn't it?

baracine

I have just watched this film again on DVD and figured out one or two things about the story and about its DVD presentation and aspect ratio...

I - THE FILM
The Saragossa Manuscript is a very entertaining film that two or three viewings will eventually allow you to understand fully. Its style mixes an easy congeniality and libertine spirit à la Tom Jones (1963) with elements of sophisticated comedy and slapstick commedia dell'arte, all delivered by an expert cast and imbued with a tangible sense of fun and mystery.

Some 150 years before Bram Stoker wrote of Dracula's exotic brides, this story centers around the efforts by a brave officer in mid-XVIIIth Century Spain to distance himself from ghosts or evil spirits that visit him every night and take the form of two charming Muslim sisters who want to be his lovers and bear his children, even in succubi form, and insist that he convert to Islam (a big no-no in these times). Those erotic (and heretic) reveries also have something to do with devilry and all things forbidden and his encounters with those women are encouraged by the mysterious figure of the Cabalist (another forbidden science) and his sister Rebecca and severely repressed by roaming members of the Catholic Inquisition. This framing story is the pretext for a series of very involving and amusing moral tales told in flashback by several participants, who all echo each other and whose moral seems to be that all religious and social prohibitions and ghost stories should be taken with a grain of salt. In this ocean of mystery and gothicism stands the figure of Don Pedro Velasquez, a bespectacled mathematician who befriends the hero and who seems the only character to believe in the cold light of reason (foreshadowings of Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers).

After several viewings, the only point in the film which remains mysterious is why Frasqueta's lover (Pena Flor) should appear with a bloodied face when he climbs in her bedroom through a window, a fact the viewer has to provide his own backstory for and which could be evidence that the original film was even longer than the 182 minutes at which it clocks in on the restored DVD edition. (Personal theory: Pena Flor really was Frasqueta's lover and the band of thugs Frasqueta hired to deceive her husband into believing he had paid to have his wife's lover killed really did attempt to kill him before he paid them to kill her husband instead.) Well, that and the fact that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, an early fan of the film and one the persons responsible for its restoration, was fond of quoting a scene from the film that doesn't seem to exist anymore (a character's confrontation with Death at the foot of his bed), although DVD Savant has a plausible explanation for this story ( http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s453sarag.html ), i.e. Garcia was thinking of another film (the Mexican film Macario, 1960).

II - THE DVD
This film was restored thanks to the efforts and money of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and the above-mentioned Jerry Garcia, and with the collaboration of the director. It was shot in Dyaliscope, the French CinemaScope equivalent, which is always projected at a standard 2.35:1 ratio. This "enhanced for widescreen TVs" DVD shows an image with a ratio of 2:1, which means that the picture information is still squeezed by a ratio of 1.15:1 in relation to the way it should be shown normally. In this presentation, the picture is "fish-eyed" and the characters and animals appear too slim. There is no way around this problem if you watch it on a 4:3 television set. However, if you own a widescreen TV, you can set-up your DVD player as for a standard 4:3 TV monitor and gently unsqueeze the resulting picture with any one of the "cheater" modes provided by your TV model to approximate a 2:35 presentation. There is no way of knowing if this drawback is the result of simple ignorance (mistaking the 2:1 squeeze of Dyaliscope with a 2:1 projection ratio) or of a compromise allowing to use the greater part of the TV screen in both 4:3 and 1.77:1 TV sets. It took me a long time to figure out this problem and I am glad to share this little trick with you.



This is how the picture appears on the DVD (2:1). It should be 2.35:1. I don't believe the image is cropped on the sides, just that it needs more unsqueezing. Note how the globe in the background is not a perfect circle.

This website helps in following the plot's twists and turns: http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literat...gossa/plot.htm

rw2516

Suprised nobody's mentioned Vertigo