12. Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé's entire output at this point consists of two features, a handful of shorts, and contributions to the anthology films Destricted and 8, but even with such a small body of work, he's earned a reputation for his staggering cruelty, both to his characters and to his audiences. His first feature, I Stand Alone, centers on a blunt, miserable butcher who translates his miserable childhood into a miserable life for him and for those around him. Noé lets him work out his philosophy of hatred and contemptuous self-sufficiency in slow, excruciating detail, as though he was some grotesque flower gradually blooming into poisonous maturity. And Noé's follow-up, the justly infamous Irréversible, tells the story of a grotesque rape and an even more grotesque revenge with a backward chronology, a nauseatingly whirling camera, and a level of grunge and grit guaranteed to unsettle. He's said the film's barrage of grinding static, disorienting camera work, and insistent, pounding repetition of horrors were all intended to make viewers feel like they were losing their minds. His tactics are unnervingly effective.
13. Todd Solondz
A quintessential Nerd Wit' Attitude, Todd Solondz has earned a cult following by rubbing movie-goers' faces in misery, misanthropy, sexual perversion, and the grotesque. Though an uncompromising wallow in the depths of adolescent agony by every other standard, Solondz's 1995 breakthrough film Welcome To The Dollhouse now looks positively meek compared to the films that followed it. 1998's Happiness infamously offered a sympathetic exploration of pedophilia through the story of a loving father and husband (Dylan Baker, in a career-making role) who also happens to molest little boys. The film was dropped by its distributors but not even oceans of controversy and press could transform it into a hit. Solondz followed with the racially and sexually explosive Storytelling and Palindromes, a pitch-black, largely self-financed art film with a pregnant, 13-year-old protagonist played by eight different thespians, including Jennifer Jason Leigh and actor Will Denton. In case a plot involving abortion, teen pregnancy, killing abortion doctors, and pedophilia weren't provocative enough, Solondz begins the film by killing off his most popular character, the geeky protagonist of Welcome To The Dollhouse.
14. Oliver Stone
You want provocative? How about a movie accusing the goddamn government of perpetrating a conspiracy to kill JFK? Or an über-violent, balls-out treatise on the dangers of über-violent entertainment? Or an old-fashioned motherfucking sand-and-sandals epic depicting Alexander The Great's steamy acts of man-love passion? You want provocative? Oliver Stone has it. True, the only thing shocking about Stone's big 9/11 movie World Trade Center was how sappy it was. But for the most part, the flamboyant Vietnam vet—please ask him about Vietnam!—has made a career out of rhetorical outrageousness unencumbered by subtlety or stylistic restraint.
15. James Toback
Since writing the screenplay for 1974's The Gambler, writer-director-provocateur James Toback has subjected an increasingly small circle of moviegoers to his pet obsessions with sex, gambling, violence, retro-pop, philosophers and great writers you stopped caring about after college, organized crime, and classical music. With a complete indifference to anything outside the realm of his own ego, Toback has essentially made the same film over and over again, a combustible cocktail of high art, pop trash, gratuitous nudity, and full-frontal pretension, often graced with at least a cameo appearance by the publicity-shy shrinking violet of an auteur himself, as well as his good buddy/muse Mike Tyson. Toback has thumbed his nose at propriety and good taste for decades, but his pinnacle in provocation is undoubtedly Black And White, a wholly improvised, wildly self-indulgent free-form essay on sex and race featuring a notorious scene where Robert Downey Jr. hits on Mike Tyson while Downey's turned-on wife (a cornrows-sporting Brooke Shields) tapes it all for posterity. When Black And White was slapped with an NC-17, Toback stuck some especially spicy sex scenes on the Internet. Now that's provocatastic!
16. Lars von Trier
Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier is just as cruel to his characters as he is to his audiences: As a feature filmmaker, he's best known for Breaking The Waves, Dogville, Dancer In The Dark, and Manderlay, four features in which women are systematically abused and broken as they desperately try to maintain a kind, giving attitude toward the people exploiting them. His central philosophy in these films, repeated over and over, seems to be that good intentions just spur evil people on to worse acts of evil, and that softness is synonymous with weakness. But even outside these notoriously emotionally wrenching films, von Trier has made a career out of provocation. His obstreperous, gnomish attitude toward filmmaking can perhaps best be seen in The Five Obstructions, where he smugly challenges one of his inspirations, Jørgen Leth, to remake his classic short "The Perfect Human" five times, under increasingly twisted, ridiculous constrictions. And of course, as one of the cofounders of the Dogme 95 movement, he established a manifesto about the conditions under which films should be made, and judged other filmmakers' "purity" by how well they followed his restrictions. It's worth noting, however, that he himself walked away from those conditions shortly after laying them down; von Trier is masterful at manipulating emotions both in life and onscreen, but he seems far more interested in pushing people down roads he finds interesting than he is in traveling them himself.
17. John Waters
After John Waters' cult sensation Pink Flamingos was released in 1972, some wondered what the self-proclaimed Baltimore "trash artist" could film that would be more shocking than lovemaking hippies squashing chickens between their bodies and transvestites eating dog shit. But what those folks missed is that with Waters, it's never just the acts themselves that are off-putting. It's his tinny style and down-is-up approach to beauty and class. In movies as diverse as the serial killer homage Female Trouble and the teen-friendly musical Hairspray, Waters lionizes the outré and makes anyone who doesn't see the world as he does feel like a hopeless square.
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