Beau is Afraid was the last one I recall. I think it was mostly the latter half of the movie where I started to get a bit confused and needed the ending explained to me.
What movies made you look up some kind of explanation afterwards? I feel like I have done it several times in the past for more surreal movies but can’t think of any other examples.
It can also be a TV show.
2001 was a movie that made me go “wait, what? People like this?”
I heard it come up so often and was excited to watch it. Absolutely hated. One of the worst movies I’ve ever watched. I had to look it up a lot after I watched it because I was sure I had to be missing something big. But no, I wasn’t. Really not my kind of movie, I guess.
I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn’t age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.
I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.
And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.
I absolutely love 2001 and could not get through Solaris, I’m sure I will try again, but Solaris takes the long meandering scenes (which I generally enjoy) of doing nothing to an extreme, and I say that as a tarkovsky fan as well.
That being said, the third act of 2001 could use a bit of editing for modern tastes.
I watched it with my partner and we riffed on it the whole time. Thoroughly enjoyable. Making fun of the movie’s bad parts allowed me to get past the boredom and appreciate the good.
If you have the chance to see it in a cinema I highly recommend. Something about the big projection and sound, plus ideally an intermission really made it click for me
Kubrick actually fought against including an intermission. It was the norm at the time to pause a movie halfway in, raise the house lights, and let everyone piss and get a snack.
The compromise was that the house lights would stay down and the movie would keep running showing the intermission card, with the music that he had composed for it.
I can see from the filmmaker’s perspective but given it’s basically unheard of these days it felt cool and novel. Pretty sure the screening I went to did just what you described