You love movies. How do I know this about you? Well, no one, absolutely zero people, make it to this site without being a huge movie fan. You just can’t accidentally end up here. It just doesn’t happen. And lately, THiNC. has been undergoing a fairly systematic change to how it’s structured and how the whole site works. Historically, being good at search engine optimization, I just actively would short circuit confused movie viewers and trawl them into my movie primers. But in the past year or so, we have been seeing a dramatic rise in individuals actually coming to the site intentionally. (Woah, what is that about? You know who you are. Welcome back, good to see you again.) And to that end, I am trying to create content specifically for you guys. And what is super cool about this trend is that I already know what you are looking for. Wha-How?! Trust me a sec would you?…
Historically, my trawling for visitors has yielded readers that just want to know what happened in that movie they just watched. They didn’t understand it, because it was incredibly confusing. But those visitors got their answer and then never came back again. (Most of them anyway.) They literally never once even saw the front page. But that is changing. And now, readers or more likely to come back than ever before. And the reason you guys are coming back? You just want to know where you can find more crazy movies like that one weird one off movie that you accidentally found, and really loved. So you guys, to a person, want more movies like that one (whatever that one is). You want more crazy. You want more complicated. You want more hard to understand. You want more incredibly engaging movies like you have found here before. So you started off here accidentally, and now you are back just so you can find more great movies that make you think.
How The Ranking Was Done
I am going to start a new series of posts that will bring you completely underrated, brilliant, crazy, mindjobby type movies, that you probably have missed in the past. It will consist solely of my top 25 favorite mindjobs. So, while we regularly have fun talking about dramas, or comedies, or documentaries, this list will solely consist of movies that may just break your brain. The other criterion I will randomly apply to this list, is that 90% of the movie watching public, probably will have never heard of these movies before. And finally, these movies have to be really, really good. Any one of these movies will stand on its own and will be a fun watch if you have never heard of it before. So the four rules defining this list I will be recommending to you will be as follows:
- Has to be a great mindjob
- It has to be relatively unknown
- It needs to be fairly recent
- It has to be really, really good
But what is the definition of a mindjob? (First, if you just type mindjob into the Google looking for a definition, do you know where you’ll end up…yes, that’s right…you’ll end up back here. Which means, that I get to decide what it means for all of humanity. THE POWER!!!!) Generally, a mindjob movie is a film that right hooks you with a wicked surprise you should have seen coming but didn’t. Usually said right hook comes towards the end of the movie (though not always), but will always make you rethink absolutely everything you’ve seen thus far.
And what about being “relatively unknown”? Well, I have found a quick proprietary way to summarize relative popularity. It has to do with using Google Trends, and a datapoint from IMDB, but I promise it’s clever. SUPER CLEVER. Finally, the movie just has to be really, really good.
The bottom line – the algorithm multiplies the THiNC. Rating, against the relative unknownness of the movie, and finally I added a really clever pinch of movie ranking disparity/negativity. Wait, what was that last one? OK, so I took the distance between the audience score, and the critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. I gave a bonus to movies that were less liked by audiences and more liked by critics. Bottom line? I just went looking for the absolute best mindjob movies that literally no one knows about.
OK? Make sense?
And the first movie in our top 25 count down? The Exam. And the race to number one will go quickly from there, week by week as I release one entry a week. If you would like to see the entire list released so far, you can find them here.
Edited by, CY