Green IslandTrippy Movies
October 27th 2010 07:00
I thought since that pagan mushroom taking festival is nearly upon us, when Siberian’s drink reindeer piss and Christian’s worship that big fly agaric called Santa Claus, it would be a good idea to get a good list going down. I know that lists are a favourite of all slack-arsed bloggers looking to steal the transient limelight with prurience or nostalgia but I'm not above such cheap tactics myself.
So here’s the topic – Trippy Movies. It’s a wide category. One man’s trippy could be another’s blandness. I like to think of myself as more descriptive rather than prescriptive and I’m thus prepared to accept anyone’s notion of what trippy is. I say this because I want you my loyal and random readers alike to contribute your list too. Please send me via the comment box or my email (trippytraveller@gmail.com) your list. After a few weeks and enough contributions I’ll publish the definitive list. Unlike the karaoke list there will be no order to the list. In other words number 1 on your list picks up no more points than number 10. Each time a movie makes a list it gets a point and the ten films that have the most points will make the final list. And because this is a trippy list there is no limit to how many films you can put in your list: one or one hundred is perfectly fine by me.
Just to give you a flavour of what trippy could be I’ll head off up the highway of my own trippy imagination throwing out comments as I go. Trippy for me is a film with a non-linear narrative, a film with multiple endings (hence Brazil making my list). It is a film that deliberately and provocatively breaks the rules of story-telling. A story that flicks the V at Hollywood’s grammar of film making. Every movie I watch I kind of want Leonardo de Cappuccino to die within the first ten minutes, preferably after being raped by his own 5 foot ego dressed up as Sonic the hedgehog. On this subject Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is a masterpiece in this sadly ignored genre.
Trippy is a film with no easily graspable interpretation (Lost Highway). It is a style of filming that is visceral, impacting, disturbing and gloriously watchable (Tetsuo). Trippy is also about good old fashion drugs – those recreational little creatures that illuminate, horrify, addict and stupefy (Requiem for a Dream). Trippy is also about a nice big rizla fatty (Up in Smoke). For me trippy is also about ambition, politics and controversy – the stripping away of the gift wrapping of polite behavior to reveal the profound and disturbing about human nature (Apocalypse Now and Jacob’s Ladder).
What is not trippy is Korean soap operas (unless superlative badness can excel itself to such an extent that it comes out the other side as a trippy masterpiece. Or that could just be some wicked hydroponics talking). Trippy is not a John Cusack rom-com. Nor is it that puerile brand of cartoon rip-off taken to its ultimate expression in X-men. The Pope in his white golf cart is trippier than Avatar (thank god the Oscars dissed this over-hyped bit of techno-consumerism: My whole life is 3-D - what’s the big deal?).
Everything that David Lynch ever did is trippy. Just his hairstyle alone could make a trippy list. By the way check out Davey Boy doing weather descriptions on his website. In contrast, Stephen blockbuster Spleeyburger wouldn’t know trippy if it crawled out his arse and started typing out the Naked Lunch.
So that’s enough waffle-talk. Time for my list. The order is just random, as it fell out of my addled memory.
1) TX1138 (1971)
I watched this cult masterpiece recently and loved it. You just can’t beat a good dystopian vision of the future to get the trippy heckles up. It’s the future and everyone has an alphanumeric combination instead of a name. They worship OMM 0910 and take drugs. Starring Robert Duval and directed by George Lucas. The movie studios hated it and reluctantly released it after cutting the last five minutes.
Quote:
Male voice (medicine cabinet): What's wrong?
Man: I need something stronger.
Male voice (medicine cabinet): Take four red capsules. In 10 minutes, take two more. Help is on the way.
2) Up in Smoke
I know it’s immature and so outrageously 70’s and clichéd but nevertheless it’s hilarious. The scene where they hurriedly eat their stash of hallucinogenics because they get pulled by the cops and then have to appear in court rolling around in an LSD stupor is a masterpiece of trippy slapstick.
Quote:
Pedro: Hey how am I driving, man?
Man Stoner: [looks around]: I think we're parked.
3) Apocalypse Now
This is perhaps my all-time favourite movie. Just brilliant the way Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is adapted to the setting of the Vietnam War. Great performances from Martin Sheen (who had a heart attack during filming), Dennis Hopper (who made this at the height of his cocaine frenzy) and Marlon Brando (at the height of his fatness who ad-libbed big sections of the script and showed the world that he was still the man). The scene where the surfer takes acid and just digs on the madness of a night assault by the Viet Cong clings to the memory like bubblegum to the sole of your shoe. There is no better ‘War is madness’ movie.
Quote:
Willard: [voice-over] Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory.
4) Jacob’s Ladder
Multiple stories, a bit of disco, a good old fashion conspiracy and a touch of Meister Eckhart: really what more could you want? Put this one in the machine, roll up a large one and get truly sucked into this masterpiece.
Quote:
Louis: If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth.
5) Requiem for a Dream
Despite seen sporting a dodgy moustache and making an X-men movie Darren Aronofsky is a minor genius and of his better films this cautionary tale about getting addicted to heroin and other drugs is perhaps his second trippiest (that award goes to Pi). The brilliant scenes of the old lady getting manically into cleaning and speed-diet pills deserves some type of award in itself.
Quote:
Sara Goldfarb: [about her pills] Purple in the morning, blue in the afternoon, orange in the evening.
6) Tetsuo
I saw this movie in a tent in Glastonbury Festival way back when there were no banks at the sell-out-piece-of-shit festival. The strange greeny, grey colours in the film and the relentlessness of the metal that bursts from the bloke’s body says more than the actual dialogue. I can’t remember much about the actual plot but it convinced me at the time that the average Japanese man has a got an existential fuck-up of a life. I vowed never to go anywhere near the place. Odd how I ended up living in Japan. Not so odd that 700,000 Japanese hide in their rooms. I presume they too are spouting shards of iron from their spines.
Quote:
Metals Fetishist: Together, we can turn this fucking world to rust!
7) Yellow Submarine
A seminal work by the fab four. All their other movies other than Yellow Submarine were only marginally better than an Elvis flick. This one is trippy as hell. In fact they over-do the trippy thing. That’ll be the 60’s for you. Give a hippy a tab of LSD and he’ll end up boring the arse off you with his theories about life. Still I love this movie. The Blue Meanies are the Tories all over and who’s he? – he’s a nowhere man.
Quote:
Paul: Look, it's a school of whales.
Ringo: They look a little bit old for school.
Paul: University then.
Ringo: University of "Wales".
John: They look like drop-outs to me.
8) Brazil
This is one of the most ambitious movies ever made. It confounds and illuminates in equal degrees. There are a number of endings all strung together like pearls on a necklace. Robert de Nero waved his fee just to get in on the action. It’s sci-fi, it’s absurdist, it’s Kafka, it’s trippy as hell. I couldn’t begin to start telling you the story. Brazil is Terry Gillian’s stella contribution to intelligent movies. I love the bit where two adjoining rooms share one table.
Quote:
Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.
Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?
9) Lost Highway
Really no trippy list is complete without a bit of Davey L. I chose this one because the transformation from one character to another comes as a huge shock and obviously without any explanation. It’s provocative and the one part where Mr. Creepy phones himself is as scary as George W. in power. And if you are reading Mr. Lynch: that last movie of yours was unmitigated drivel – you need to hold back boy, the world really can’t deal with 3 hours of total and utter confusion without at least a bit of light relief. Get some tits in the next one; or just confine yourself to four parallel universes.
Quote:
Ed: Fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat.
10) Trainspotting
I really don’t need to say much about this choice. I’m sure you’ve all seen it and probably a few of you persevered with the Scottish dialect book. Perhaps Irving Welsh is not as great as many of us thought at the time, but still it is great to have a British movie that matches American offerings for cult cool. Who could forget Spud going for a job interview on speed? I did something similar in my early twenties when I was loving it on the dole and trying to impress the dole office with my keenness and ineptitude.
Quote:
.. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?
11) The Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg, ‘The Baron of Blood’, has his own brand of trippy that he must smear around his puckered piece every morning before he goes to work. He does a great job of making William S. Burroughs’s incomprehensible book into an incomprehensible film complete with insecty type writers and some outrageous batty boy alien sex. I’ve watched this one straight and then re-watched it high. Neither state of mind made the thing much clearer to me. I love it.
Quote:
No "glot." Come "Fliday."
12) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The world is a poorer place for the loss of gonzo. This is one of the few books that I read from start to finish without pausing for either a joint or a can of super strength. Hilarious. And so is the movie. Incidentally the movie made me realize I share one thing in common with Johnny Depp – chicken legs. There are so many great scenes in this movie that it is hard to single one out. However, I can relate to the checking-in sequence when the carpet turns into a grabbing mass of octopus tentacles. Oh to be young and foolish again.
Quote:
Raoul Duke: We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
13) Being John Malkovich
Last and by no means least is this gem. There are so few truly original plot lines out there. This is one of them. Yes, it plays with the idea of a story-within-a-story, but does so in such a wacky far out way that it transcends most indulgent metafiction. The ending has true pathos, the puppet work is mesmerizing and Johnny Boy Cusack can go to his grave knowing that his boyish looks and average talent were not entirely wasted on forgettable dross. Ditto for Cameron Diaz. Why the hell the director of this masterpiece, Spike Jonze made Jackass movies is beyond me. Perhaps he’s been attending the same Hollywood parties as Darren A.
Quote:
Craig Schwartz: There's a tiny door in my office, Maxine. It's a portal and it takes you inside John Malkovich. You see the world through John Malkovich's eyes... and then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out... into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Maxine: Sounds great! Who the fuck is John Malkovich?
Craig Schwartz: Oh, he's an actor. He's one of the great American actors of the 20th century.
Maxine: Oh yeah? What's he been in?
Craig Schwartz: Lots of things. That jewel thief movie, for example. He's very well respected. Anyway, the point is... this is a very odd thing. It's supernatural, for lack of a better word. I mean, it raises all sorts of philosophical-type questions, you know... about the nature of self, about the existence of a soul. You know, am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? I had a piece of wood in my hand Maxine. I don't have it any more. Where is it? Did it disappear? How could that be? Is it still in Malkovich's head? I don't know! Do you see what a metaphysical can of worms this portal is? I don't see how I could go on living my life the way I've lived it before.
So if you enjoyed these films or you enjoyed my blog about these films and you feel inspired to put aside just a few minutes of your time then please, please write me out your list. You don’t have to write 2,500 words like I’ve just done (unless you want to); just send me the bare bones list. I’ve missed out many classics of trippy cinema I know and I want you my readership to fill in the gaps.
Trip me a mail: trippytraveller@gmail.com
| 78 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Green Island
Trippy Traveller
my list is much like your list:
Apocalypse Now
Being John Malkovich
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
My additions would be;
The men who stare at goats
Paprika (Japanese animation)
5 is all I got right now. If I think of more I'll drop you a line.
Cheers,
S.
Comment by Green Island
Trippy Traveller
In no particular order:
*Le huitième jour (The 8th Day) - Interesting human drama involving downs syndrom with a mise-en-abyme mexican soundtrack.
*Todo sobre mi madre (All about my mother) or most things by that big queen almodovar.
*Going Places (Depardieu,Patrick Dewaere) - dirty french bastards on a shagging rampage, genius.
*Série noire (again Dewaere, dead now but awesome actor) - Awesome, troubled, trippy performance by Dewaere
*Pulp Fiction
*Elephant - trippy camera angles
Comment by b_rad
- A Scanner Darkly
- Donny Darko
- The Majestic
- Half Baked
- Back to the Future 1 and 2
- From Dusk till Dawn
- Requiem for a Dream
- Jacob's Ladder
- The Dark Crystal
Comment by spence
city of lost children
boys dont cry
women of the dunes (japanese)
the island of dr. moreau
meet the feebles
wicker man (the original, not the nick cage remake)
ice pirates
eyes wide shut
waking life