I tried around three times to get into a mindset to watch Wreckmeister Harmonies

The Damned - Confusing as hell even after the first few viewings. I love Visconti, but sometimes his movies start out with so much talking and name throwing you feel exhausted after the first half hour. I couldn't breathe!

Irreversible - although parts of it can be hard to watch (several graphic elements, and that damn spinning camera technique every time the film jumps back in time)

Primer - on the short side, but one that certainly requires you to wrap your brain around it's concept.

I've always had a soft spot for "The Draughtman's Contract". Great film, but fairly straight forward. CTWL was also fairly watchable too.

Baby of Macon would be to me the one that I needed to "work at". Very difficult to watch.

Other films I'd say would be:

Fear and Loathing: getting into the mindset of gonzo journalism isn't easy.
Clockwork Orange: simple film, but I almost walked out of it several times (I was only 19 or 20 at the time, so it probably shocked me more than it would now).
Sixth Sense: only because it was amazing how the "secret" really was in plain sight all the time and that there did seem to be no inconsistancies whatsoever in the previous hour and a half (I'd even been told beforehand that it was the one that Bruce Willis "played a ghost", yet I still did the OMG thing - obviously wasn't listening properly).

Well first of all, I am a little surprise to see how old this thread is, but my choice of movies that have complex synopses are:

Vanilla Sky
Donnie Darko ( didn't make any sense at all)
The Matrix, and sequels.
Mission Impossible, just to name a few.

Cool as Ice

Vanilla Sky. First time I saw it I would have given it 2.5/4 stars. After watching again it's one of my absolute favorites.

And in all this time, we never got to hear the "Spy Game" theory.

Still nothing?

All in all, "Appleseed", a Japanese sci-fi animé film inspired by a manga, is a vastly superior product to any North-American film of the same type (sci-fi CGI, let alone the first motion-capture GCI animé film), in both conception, originality (within the bounds of the manga genre) and execution. It has its problems, though.

It can only be fully appreciated the second time around, when the pressure to understand what's going on with the devilishly complicated story and its numerous plot twists is no longer a primary issue for the viewer, such as distinguishing between the somewhat informative and very evocative flashbacks and the real-time storyline. Some questions get answered with repeated viewings. Others remain a mystery, such as: What kind of war was the heroine waging for so long that she didn't know about the existence of Olympus, which must have taken decades to build? Was she on a different planet or reality plane or something, considering that she barely looks older than 22? The initial fight sequence remains a total mystery. We know that ESWAT wanted to find the heroine to recruit her and take her out of the war, which explains her rescue. But who were the attackers? What is the meaning of the initial scolding of Athena by the legislature with reference to "mercenaries"? [I've played that scene in Japanese with English subtitles and in English and it still remains opaque.] What does Hades mean, during his first apperaance, when he says ESWAT is pursuing a "decoy"? Who were the "fembots" working for? Why did the military renounce its coup so fast at the end and, most of all, off-screen?

As most of these questions get asked during the first half-hour of the film, I could understand why some people would simply walk out with a headache.

Compared to those questions, the rest of the plot twists are almost a breeze and a relief. And it is possible to enjoy the film's amazing visuals and the groovy music even stoned out of one's gourd, which is probably the preferred mode of viewing: 1. Roll and smoke a joint. 2. Pop in the DVD. 3. Relaaaax, dude.

P.S.: Although not "movies" per se, most episodes of The Simpsons have to watched in slow motion to discover all the hidden political messages and in-jokes, which really frustrates me when I'm too lazy to turn the VCR on.

Things like "Hotel Rwanda" and "Schindler's List" are always tough for me to watch. Luckily after watching something like that I will do something to lift my spirits like fool around with this crazy cabby.

I would agree with:

Mulholland Dr.
A Tale of Two Sisters

How about:

Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Machinist
American Psycho (towards the end)
Ichi the Killer
Angel's Egg (anime)
Shin'ya Tsukamoto's stuff (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, A Snake of June)

And this isn't a movie, but I'd also suggest the HBO series Carnivale.

Talk about working at it... I just watched Last Year at Marienbad on TFO last night for what must be, maybe, the 5th or 6th time in 46 years and I think I finally GOT it, or at least part of its message, after suffering through all those hours of what first appeared as meaningless chatter:

Layer Cake

Add INLAND EMPIRE to this list. The films plays out like a mental endurance challenge, but the more you watch the more rewarded you feel. By the end you'll be championing Lynch (if you don't already) for creating such a deep psychological film from odds and ends he filmed on location.

...or calling for his head on a platter.

Working out INLAND EMPIRE is like trying to solve Pi.

Try some of Kurosawa Kiyoshi films and see if they could be had after the first viewing:

Bright Future
Cure
Pulse

...

Also after Kudama's take on Talking Head over three years ago, I would probably agree with this especially if it's anything similar to Oshii's Red Spectacles. I still have no idea about that one ...

... And the brainstorms just keep on coming...

Reflecting on Last Year at Marienbad, I am reminded that a large part of the dialog revolves around the meaning of the statue of the couple with a dog that appears all through the film in the various parks where the outdoor scenes were filmed (the statue itself was papier mâché so it could be easily moved at the director's whim).

The husband character M (Sacha Pitoëff) - can we ever trust that guy? - volunteers the information to X (the man) and A (the woman) that it is in reality a representation of Charles III ("Charles the Fat"), deposed IXth century Holy Roman Emperor, and his wife, at the moment of learning their fate. This hardly seems possible because (1) the man in the grouping is anything but "fat" and (2) his story doesn't seem like a good subject for mythical idealization of any kind since he was, by all accounts, a fat slob voted out of his job for incompetence and, possibly, treason.


Charles III, "the Fat"

But the couple is represented with a dog and one of the only obvious examples of famous lovers with a dog from literature is the story of Tristan and Iseut (Isolde in German), from the French novels of Béroul and Thomas (XIIth century) where Tristan gives his dog to Iseut (a lady married to king Mark, which starts with an "M", like the French word for husband, "mari") to protect her in his absence. To confuse matters further, the dog is the traditional symbol of marital fidelity, Tristan essentially saying to Iseut that she should consider him like her true husband and protector, even though she is married to somebody else. (A similar scene appears in The Thief of Bagdad, 1940, by the way, to be completely anal about it.)

This is interesting because that would make the film about Love more than about Death (see previous spoiler), although the story of Tristan and Isolde is also about the death of the two lovers, brought about by confusion, jealousy and fatal misunderstandings. The fact that the husband (?) M (Mark?) wants to mislead them by pretending the statue represents a banal personage like Charles III would indicate (1) that he wants to prevent them from thinking about the two famous lovers and to turn their thoughts to the consequences of treason and (2) that he is himself a very banal, literal sort of person. (Or is he?)

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Or is that too far-fetched?