10 'WTF Did I Just Pay To See' Movies
Ever wanted to see the Power Rangers on a work retreat? No? Well, you're getting it anyway.
The 20th century established cinema as we know it, and while technological developments like sound and colour dominated its first half, the second was spent making and breaking rules, tropes and memes that, even considering the wide array of approaches on display, created something of a unified language for film and fiction.
While the orthodoxy is still chugging ahead in full force with Hollywood at the helm, using audience expectations to shape and dominate the market, there has increasingly been more room on the fringes for some pretty weird shiitake mushrooms to grow through. Blame the advent of digital technology, the European influence, the swelling permissiveness of society's tastes or the death of irony, but the past few decades have seen more and more film oddities arrive on our screens.
Nobody asked for a sentient penis, an incestual family, a puppet child or a sex-crazed baby woman, and yet they exist in spite of demand. These films are the bestest weirdest ones, and will have you scratching your head and tearing your eyes out and questioning the very nature of your existence - in the best way possible - all the while wondering what the f*ck you paid to see.
10. Greener Grass (2019)
Suburban USA has been the focal point for a lot of satire over the years, with the mundane lives of the average white-collar worker, the house- or trophy-wife and their nuclear family proving fertile ground for self-conscious hilarity in everything from the films of Joe Dante to the writings of Don DeLillo to the music of Ben Folds. But while the suburban situation as a whole has been done to death, Greener Grass finds a way to resurrect it - and then some.
Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe's surreal black comedy plants us in a bizarre suburban town where everything is exactly as it's supposed to be and nothing is as it seems. The adults wear braces, every colour is pastel, golf carts are the primary mode of transportation and everyday metaphysics aren't as stable as they once were.
At the centre of all this is housewife Jill Davies (DeBoer), who kicks things off by giving away her infant daughter at a sports game. Taking the idea of the 2.5 average kids to its illogical extreme, her neighbour Lisa (Luebbe) becomes pregnant with the football from her son's match, which becomes Twilson, the latest member of the clan after she delivers, while Jill's son Julian (Julian Hilliard) turns into a golden retriever, who the Davies send to school in people clothes.
Sure, there's marital breakdown, rebellious kids and home-swapping, but this is the suburbs like you've never seen them.