“Nothing fixes a thing so intently in the memory as the wish to forget it.”-Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard
DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry
FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, [...]
DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington
PLOT: A survivor of the apocalypse is conflicted about his mother, who is addicted to a
black fluid that keeps her eternally young but causes disorientation and scarring.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scars of Youth is a beautifully lensed film, filled with dreamlike images and montages. [...]
DIRECTED BY: Philip Chidel
FEATURING: Christian Oliver, Dean Stapleton
PLOT: A medical student gets more than he bargained for when he accepts an
experimental internship and discovers that immortality comes with a steep price.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Subject Two is a fresh twist on the Frankenstein plot. It envisions being reanimated from the undead’s perspective. It [...]
DIRECTED BY: Paul Solet
FEATURING: Jordan Ladd, Gabrielle Rose, Stephen Park
PLOT: A mother gives birth to a stillborn baby girl after a car wreck leaves
her young family dead. The baby, however, comes back to life shortly after she is born. Unfortunately, the infant girl, with her proclivity to attract flies and drink human blood, is [...]
“How can you tell what is a dream and what’s real when you can’t even tell when you’re awake and when you’re asleep?”–line from Joe’s internal monologue in Johnny Got His Gun
DIRECTED BY: Dalton Trumbo
FEATURING: Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards, Donald Sutherland
PLOT: Joe is an ordinary young man with a sweetheart back home who goes [...]
“I CAN SEE YOU is a film about the thing that frightens me the most… my own mind… we as sentient human beings are completely at the mercy of an organ that we may never fully understand; an organ that, at the slightest malfunction, can throw our perception of reality into such chaos and confusion [...]
DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze
FEATURING: Max Records, voices of James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara
PLOT: A troubled, rambunctious boy travels to a land where wild beasts anoint him
their king, but discovers that socialization is a struggle even in his imagination.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jonze slips a couple of odd visions into this ersatz [...]
“I only include things that are psychologically true in my stories, no matter how bizarre, stupid, silly or gratuitous the episodes in them may seem… I can only hope that the spectacle of me trying to inflict pain on hard-to-reach places on my own body is amusing to some people.”–Guy Maddin
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Darcy [...]
AKA The Never Dead (Australia)
“…when you’re dealing with a movie with this many oddball ideas, and a director who’s not afraid to ‘go weird’ just because he wants to, your best bet is probably just to keep quiet, enjoy the ride, and then see how you feel once the whole crazy experience is over with.”–Scott [...]
“The story functions, of course, on several levels, political, sociological, philosophical and, what’s most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level.”–Stanley Kubrick
DIRECTED BY: Stanley Kubrick
FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee
PLOT: Alex is the leader of a small gang of violent, thrill-seeking youths in England sometime in the indefinite near future. After a home invasion goes bad, his [...]
