<p>Anyone know of any good examples of the aforementioned films?</p>
<p>waking life, i heart huckabees, triplets of belleville, generally a lot of foreign films [amelie, y tu mama tambien, bad education…], and just check the sundance section of your video store</p>
<p>eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, garden state</p>
<p>goodbye lenin, amores perros, crash, closer, donnie darko…run lola run, osama, in this world, das experiment. I’ll think of more, eventually</p>
<p>I’m a huge fan of the what-have-you genre.</p>
<p>Gael Garcia Bernal!!!
amores perros, y tu mama tambien, bad education, the crime of padre amaro, the motorcycle diaries</p>
<p>I second Motorcycle Diaries and add Maria Full of Grace.</p>
<p>(We watched both of those in AP Spanish class, lol…we had the coolest teacher ever.)</p>
<p>spirited away, napoleon dynamite (if you go for that kind of humor), hotel rwanda, crash, pieces of april, hero, march of the penguins, closer, sideways, harold and kumar go to white castle</p>
<p>the dreamers</p>
<p>Triplets of Belleville was amusing. Closer was very intellectual. Amelie is hilarious. Garden State was good, especially for a breakout director. I’ve heard y tu mama tambien was good and I really want to see Sideways and Hotel Rwanda. Do movies like Closer and Harold and Kumar and the like really serve as “What-have-you” films, though?</p>
<p>Actually, I’m going to broaden it and say include your favorite movies as well.</p>
<p>i second the donnie darko…my favorite movie for sure :)</p>
<p>Run Lola Run, Big Fish, Trainspotting, Pieces of April, I Heart Huckabees, Spirited Away…</p>
<p>pi, requiem for a dream</p>
<p>Spirited Away, Ghost in the Shell, Pulp Fiction, Dodgeball, Battle Royale…</p>
<p>dude, pi was freaky.</p>
<p>goodbye lenin was an amazing movie, im also germaphile, so that helps. kill bill 1 and 2 are both very artsy if you llook into it. memento, leon the professional,really sexual that one is. on aligator street(this is a movie made by a hungarian group that does stop animation. its really hard to find but well worth the search, some bloody insane stuff)</p>
<p>here’s what I’ve seen of the ones listed above:</p>
<p>*i heart huckabees – funny, well-made (I liked the music), not as deep as it seemed to think it was; lily tomlin was excellent, and dustin hoffman was good too.
*eternal sunshine of the spotless mind – oh my god. I love this movie. some of the best lines I’ve seen in a movie so far. highly recommended.
*garden state – I HATED this movie. whenever they’d have a scene that had some beauty to it, they spoiled it by having the actors just start practically monologuing about what it meant – or at least that’s how it felt to me. too much explanation made it lose its delicate feel and turned it banal instead.
*donnie darko – pointless, though some parts were good. of course, I saw the director’s cut, so that may make a difference… but I really thought it was overrated.
*spirited away – mmm… I have a soft spot for miyazaki films, this one included.
*napoleon dynamite – not actually funny, in my opinion. but a lot of my friends thought it was hilarious, so… to each his own.
*pulp fiction – now THIS was a funny movie. doesn’t feel like its length; I was amazed by how quickly it went because of how much I enjoyed every bit of it.</p>
<p>my additions (both as examples of the ‘what-have-you’ genre and as good movies):
*american splendor – paul giammati (the guy from sideways) plays a neurotic average guy, harvey pekar (who also appears in the film), who starts writing comics (which ALSO appear in the film) about his neurotic average life…and it’s somehow INCREDIBLY compelling. one of my favorites.
*the royal tenenbaums – idiosyncratic is the best word for this one. it’s ALMOST a great movie but ends up just being something that you enjoy for its parts rather than for the sum of those parts.
*lost in translation – if you haven’t seen this, you need to. it’s slow-moving and critically acclaimed; some people like it and some don’t. I did.
*ghost world – so, so, so good. WATCH IT. like a cross between “american splendor” and “lost in translation,” but better. One of those rare young-people movies that tries to be funny and deep and actually hits the mark.
*tampopo – a japanese ‘noodle western.’ “disjointed” but full of a certain “joie-de-vivre” (quoting a review there; I couldn’t think of the proper words to describe it)
*being john malkovich – inventive and probably ultimately pointless, but very enjoyable. if you liked eternal sunshine, check this one out – it’s also a charlie kaufman movie.
*anything by david lynch – only if you like strange, twisted, and incomprehensible movies. but if you do, these are just the ones for you.
*dr. strangelove – old black comedy about the cold war. peter sellers is everything. I love it.
*being there – another peter sellers movie. this one’s about a gardener who is sheltered and then released into the world; he’s really a very simple man, but nobody sees him that way, and the movie just follows the way other people react to him and interpret the very straightforward things that he says and does.
*the godfather trilogy – this isn’t an example of indie/artsy/alternative, but I suppose it could be a what-have-you… just put it in because it’s one of my absolute favoritest movies EVER, and if you haven’t seen it, you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. the ending of the first movie is freaking brilliant. go watch it now.</p>
<p>i thought pi was fine up until the drill machine part…then things just got weird.</p>
<p>requiem…they should show it in schools as part of the whole anti-drug thing. if anything, that movie would do the job better than the stuff they show now.</p>
<p>I’d also like to add Apocalypse Now…an excellent parallel to Heart of Darkness by Conrad.</p>