Pretentious Arthouse Films -

[MongyPleb]

Some people hate 'em, some people think they're the only thing worth watching, I just think they're cool.
Post ones you like or hate or want to watch.

I just watched Only Lovers Left Alive directed by Jim Jarmusch starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton and it was fantastic.

 

[IHeardThatCurtis]

Spring Breakers is super pretentious.Their is nothing deep about Riff Franco and some dumb teenage girls.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

I like "The Master" because I like scientology

 

[Positron]

Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier: I would call Part I a daring but failed experiment; Part II is simply absurd feminist "women are victims" propaganda.

Enter the Void by Gaspar Noé: you'd be impressed by the director's deliriously colorful, soaring vision -- for about 30 minutes. Afterwards it gets repetitive and boring.

Guilty of Romance by Sion Sono: I think it is brilliant art-wise and pretty strong dramatically, but the tagged on pseudo-philosophical rumination drags the film down. Bizarre music.

Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky: simply magic. The dreamy/nightmarish atmosphere will stay with you for a long time.

 

[MongyPleb]

Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier:

Plus Shia Leboeuf, our national treasure, is a damn delight in these kinds of rolls.

 

[AnOminous]

Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders. Just a good film. Has Harry Dean Stanton in it, how do you beat that?

 

[Mesh Gear Fox]

The Cremaster Cycle. It was painful.

 

[AnOminous]

The Cremaster Cycle. It was painful.

The only thing Matthew Barney ever did that anyone should emulate is fucking Bjork.

 

[Positron]

Plus Shia Leboeuf, our national treasure, is a damn delight in these kinds of rolls.

Well he's sole role is basically looking pretty (and yes he is gorgeous). Christian Slater pleasantly surprised me in his acting though.

The only thing Matthew Barney ever did that anyone should emulate is fucking Bjork.

But definitely NOT marrying Bjork.

 

[Ravana]

I first saw Tree of Life in theaters in Dubai with a couple friends on the ship I was on. One was conservative, the other liberal, and me somewhere in the middle. Now I bring this up because despite those two never agreeing on anything in general we were all in agreement that the movie was garbage. We weren't totally sure if maybe the movie had been censored and thus was missing scenes or dialogue or what. Years later I watched the US home release and it turns out it was just as disjointed as the version I saw in the theater. Tree of Life sucks.

 

[CWCissey]

Buffalo 66 where noted madman Vincent Gallo somehow gets some stellar actors to appear in his indie flick, succeeds in making it actually pretty good, then throws away all goodwill by calling Christina Ricci fat.

 

[XYZpdq]

Flaming Ears was a German as all fuck dystopian SF something or other about lesbians who fuck furniture and go to weird looking clubs and generally being German art film people.
Half of what made it cool was I got a vhs of it for a couple of bucks in a grocery store's cheap videos bin.

 

[Bogs]

I was just watched some Robert Bresson films: Pickpocket and A Man Escaped. I'd hardly call them pretentious, but they definitely are French.

 

[MongyPleb]

There's an indie animated film called Ernest and Celestine directed by Benjamin Renner that's about a bear and a mouse being friends. Similar to the Secret of Kells.

 

[TheMightyMonarch]

Spring Breakers is super pretentious.Their is nothing deep about Riff Franco and some dumb teenage girls.

Ugh, I watched that movie about two months ago. It was shit. It was just tits, drugs, and even more gratuitous sex innuendo. Thing is, the premise had potential and some of the imagery wasn't half bad. But everything else sucked.

Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier: I would call Part I a daring but failed experiment; Part II is simply absurd feminist "women are victims" propaganda.

Came here to specifically mention Von Trier and that movie. With my short ass attention span, I'm surprised that I managed to sit through those two movies.
You're last point is interesting because I thought the fact that the audience was supposed to sympathize with her abandoning her toddler son was a load of bullshit.
Your Movie Sucks (Of Cool Cat fame!) perfectly sums up every problem that I have with this movie.

 

[AnOminous]

Your last point is interesting because I thought the fact that the audience was supposed to sympathize with her abandoning her toddler son was a load of bullshit.

Isn't Trainspotting kind of the king of art-house films at this point?

In that, we're actually supposed to sympathize with the fact that a heroin addict allows her own child to die because she's more interested in a fix than a dying baby.

And we do, sort of, because it's that good a film.

But seriously, wtf. The fact that an art-house film expects you to sympathize with an execrable, awful person doesn't actually invalidate the film.

One of my personal examples of this is a not-much-remembered film by a guy named Cyril Collard, Les Nuits Fauves, generally translated as Savage Nights. It's about how the filmmaker deliberately went around spreading AIDS to male and female victims, didn't give a shit about this, and made an amazing movie about what a terrible person he was.

Then he died of AIDS.

There was nothing pretentious about this film. He was completely upfront about how horrible he was. It was still an "art-house" film in that no mainstream audience would approve of it at all.

 

[Positron]

Came here to specifically mention Von Trier and that movie. With my short ass attention span, I'm surprised that I managed to sit through those two movies.
You're last point is interesting because I thought the fact that the audience was supposed to sympathize with her abandoning her toddler son was a load of bullshit.

I cannot be entirely sure that von Trier deliberately sets up the protagonist Joe as sympathatic. Some audience may take Seligman's concluding remark, that Joe has suffered so much simply because she is a woman (which is bullshit), at face value, but then Seligman is nothing but a more well-read loveshy, and he might said so in order to get in Joe's good graces and then her pants. Still I think there is something very manipulative about Part II of Nymphomaniac: the film deliberately sets up a whole series of gauntlets for Joe: the child negligence and the subsequent divorce, the trouble at work, the self-induced abortion (which is the height of absurdity), and the "sex triangle" at the end of the film, that the audience may be tempted to feel sorry for Joe, and, because the Part II focuses almost entirely on sex (unlike Part I, which has Joe's relationship with her father as counterpoint), come home thinking that her suffering is due entirely to her free pursuit of female sexuality -- and this is in complete accord with the politically-correct mainstream thinking that sexually liberated women are unjustly punished in a men's world.

 

[Deadwaste]

I decided to watch it's such a beautiful day. It's...an experience I'll say.

 

[KingGeedorah]

So a thread about shitty movies that pretend their not shitty? Okay!

Russian Ark was cool and shot so well that the story and movie don't even matter if you like history.

David Lynch is a hack, but his movies are always hilarious (not sure if intended goal).

Enter the Void was stupid and I don't care that he wants to buttfuck his sister.

I like some of the more serious Takashi Miike stuff like Audition and most recently Gozu. Something about Koreans getting into fucked up situations just works for me.

 

[Connor Bible]

I've been meaning to watch Nicholas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives, in part because I loved Drive.