Current mood:	disgruntled
Current music:	Can - Paper House/Mushroom

Don't fuck with my mind, man!
There are a category of movies (well, not just movies, but there are other forms of media too) that I've heard called "mindfuck" movies. You know the type--complicated, nonlinear storylines that usually involve philosophy of some sort. Thus far, these movies have really rubbed me the wrong way, mainly because people end up thinking that they're deeper than they really are. The Matrix, for example, was pretty good but got spoiled by stoners referencing the movie in an attempt to sound deep ("Dude, like, how do we know if this world is real and stuff?" "That's, like, real deep, man..."). I Heart Huckabees, too, was all right, but it tried to sound a lot deeper than it actually was. Though I suspect that other people felt the same way. I still kinda liked it though. But Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Total, utter, COMPLETE crap, filled with so many plot holes, deus ex machina, and bad storytelling that if people weren't so engrossed with the whole "Dude! The story is backwards!" then they would see how absolutely weak the story actually is.

Things considered, and this is one of my favorite--albeit hardly original--expresions, most people are about as deep as puddles. Any movie or whatever that shows even the slightest inkling of philosophy use, even if the philosophy is totally unsound, people jump on it and think it's deep and everything without stopping to think that there's the possibility that it doesn't make sense. It's one of my pet peeves, for example, that so many works of media supposedly have "existentialist themes" when apparently, 9 times out of 10 not only does it not really have existentialist themes but the person using the phrase clearly doesn't even know what the word "existentialist" really means.

I've really lost a lot of faith in movies that try to incorporate philosophical themes for these reasons. I really do want to see a movie that's deep, but still uses philosophy correctly. I dunno, there are several other "mindfuck"-type movies like Donnie Darko and Memento that other people have said are good, but I hope that these people aren't the "shallow as puddle"-types that I just mentioned. Anybody have any other recommendations here?