@uberbatman Cat Soup is so cool! I know it’s meant to take place after death, or in a weird pre-death state, but it really reminds me of the random imagery of a dream.
For something with a similar fun, surreal animation style, I’d recommend “The Triplets of Belleville.” It’s a fun, odd, quirky movie about three very weird opera singers, a steadfast grandmother, and a fat dog, coming to the rescue of a beloved grandson.
“Dead Leaves” is an animated Japanese short with a very unconventional style. It’s all very splashy and colorful, with dark, snarky humor.
For documentaries, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is absolutely mesmerizing. It’s shot in a very calming and rhythmic way (some might say slow and repetitive, but the pacing was what I loved about the movie.) It’s about a father and son who own one of the world’s top sushi restaurants, their amazing work ethic and dedication to the pursuit of perfection. There’s lots of stuff of people carefully and expertly doing food prep on great ingredients, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s actually all very visually interesting. It’s basically a visual essay about flow, the mental state of being completely immersed in a task, a type of happiness.
Stay,(film) a movie with a similar premise to Jacob’s Ladder, and with an artistic visual style.
What Dreams May Come This movie has Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Jr. in lead roles, so it goes without saying that it’s family-friendly and kind of fucking cheesy. But you know what? I adore it. There’s a heaven that’s made out of impressionist paintings, but even the stuff on earth and in hell is shot with care and in saturated, beautiful colors. There’s nothing like getting high and watching this movie.
2046 A movie that takes place in 1960s Hong Kong, and in an imagined future that the protagonist is writing about. 2046 is the hotel room number of the woman he’s in love with, and a year in the future that you can visit by train. The pace is calming and rhythmic (read: slow- I love this type of pacing, but you have to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy it) and the mix of the 60’s and sci-fi is very cool.
Far North Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean are in it, which is pretty much dream casting, so there’s that. Other than the sparse dialogue, most of the movie is long shots of the harsh arctic wilderness. They didn’t fake it; the whole thing was shot on Svalbard, a bunch of islands halfway between Norway and the north pole. It’s breathtaking.
For books, After Dark by Haruki Murakami, and “The Great Book of Amber” by Roger Zelazny are both pretty great. “After Dark” is all about how a regular city can be lonely and surreal at night, and the strange and marginal people who inhabit the night. It really captures the strange feeling of staying up all night. The mental images aren’t dazzling, but they are distinctive, evocative, and memorable.
Great Book of Amber has an insane holy shit quotient, and it’s visually dazzling. Imagine “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the Game of Thrones books) on acid, or Lord of the Rings meets a hard-boiled crime novel, on acid. The premise is that a backstabbing royal family can travel to anything in an infinite multiverse using their minds, but there are all kinds of underlying mysteries. This needs to be an epic miniseries, or an overblown five-part trilogy with a bloated special-effects budget, stat. There’s all kinds of crazy, trippy shit here.
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