Hello?
Kentucky Fried Movie?
Trading Places?
The ‘Thriller’ video for Michael Jackson?
Into The Night?
Amazon Women On The Moon?
He also co-directed with Nic Roeg what I would consider his best film - Performance
Yes, Kentucky Fried Movie had a few funny bits, and you are also right in that Trading Places was also quite good (though to me not nearly as good as Animal House, Blues Brothers or A.A.W.I.London) but the others on his resume don’t do anything for me at all…
Holy fuck! You’re the closest I’ve come to actually meeting someone who’s seen Performance without me having to show it to them!
You left out his best film: Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin!
By the way, Deliverance was a “cult” movie that was the #2 top grossing film of its year, second only to The Poseidon Adventure.
Beat me to it. [on preview: Bo, ***Performance ***isn’t as obscure as you think. It rented with respectable frequency at the vidstore I used to work at, and is pretty well known above a relatively moderate level of movie-buffdom.]
And Boorman’s masterpiece, Point Blank–one of the oh let’s say 50 greatest American films ever made–leaves ***Deliverance ***and ***Excalibur ***in its dust. [on preview: drat, beat to the punch again.]
And as abysmal as most of Bob Clark’s movies are, he also directed the seminal Black Christmas.
Charles Vidor’s ***Gilda ***has no near second anywhere in his body of work.
Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man is a really great film, IMO. The rest of his output was mediocre to blindingly awful.
Uh, no one else comes to mind at at the moment.
–lissener, also a fan of The Rocketeer, which I would rate above October Sky (which is lackluster as anything Ron Howard, the reigning prince of lackluster, directed) any day, and who would rather be force fed a roadkill porcupine–tail first–than ever watch ***Jumanji ***again.
What good movie has he made?
Andrew Davis did the suspenseful hit The Fugitive and had a minor hit with Under Siege AKA Die Hard on a Battleship AKA The only good Steven Segal movie AKA Why the hell don’t Erika Eleniak’s boobs jiggle in the slightest.
The rest of his output is pretty meh.
Maybe at your vidstore it rented well, but I’m telling you that in my experience, if I haven’t shown them that movie, they haven’t heard of it.
Yeah, I forgot that was his. Excellent film.
And, of course, A Christmas Story. And Porky’s. Of course, he also gave us Rhinestone and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses2…
One of my all-time favorites. And I also love Psych-Out and Freebie and the Bean, but they’re just fun movies; The Stunt Man is wickedly clever, scathing commentary on Hollywood that stands far above his other work, and it’s got a great thriller/mystery plot at it’s heart as well. It’s also the movie that I think was best represented by it’s movie poster, ever.
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lissener, have you seen The Sinister Saga of Making ‘The Stunt Man’? There’s only 4 reviews at IMDB.com, and one is fairly negative. I’m wondering if this is on a par with The Kid Stays In The Picture, for instance?
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Jan de Bont’s first film as director was the excellent Speed, but he followed it with such gems as Speed 2, Twister, and the Lara Croft sequel.
No, it’s in my queue. I find those kind docs usually dash my fantasies rather than fill my gaps, but I’ll get to it eventually.
thanx for the heads up; i just set it in my queue at Netflix
Abraham Polonsky did the superb Force of Evil. The Blacklist kept him from directing much more, and when he returned, it was with the terminally preachy Tell them Willie Boy Is Here. But Force of Evil is one of the best gangster films made, with great performances from John Garfield and Thomas Gomez.
Daniel Petrie did a lot of films, but the only classic was Resurrection.
Yves Robert had only one film that made a splash on this side of the Atlantic, but The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe is one of the funniest spy comedies ever made.
Jean-Jacques Beineix made a big splash with Diva, but nothing of note since.
Robert Mandel did the thriller F/X with a great premise – a special effects artist is hired to fake a killing, and discovers it’s real. Exciting film.
Philip De Broca scored with the antiwar film King of Heats, but nothing else made an impact.
Robert Downey had the classic Putney Swope, about an all-Black ad agency in the 60s; his other films flopped and his son is far better known and more successful.
Well Moon in the Gutter wasn’t a total flop and Betty Blue managed to get nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. Of course that is pretty much it.
And the list is missing Coccoon. Now you might not think it’s such a great film, but it made Steve Guttenberg look talented, and that in iteself takes real genius.
Apollo 13 is a masterpiece of movie making. Great story, and direction that called no attention to itself. I still choke up at Jim Lovell’s very elderly mother telling her grandson that “My Jimmy could land a washing machine if they could get it to fly” not to be scarred. That was a movie moment.
Dances With Wolves is a great flick, indeed. I remember that when it won that year’s Best Picture Oscar, I was quite happy, as I thought that it very much deserved it.
Then I actually watched GoodFellas. Which, of course, wuz robbedby… Dances With Wolves. (Still love it, though. Plus, it features one of my five favorite scores ever, courtesy of the incomparable John Barry.)
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. They are the defiition of middlebrow, self-serious, personality-free filmmaking. Splash is the exception–full of vim and vitality–but the historical dramas in particular are colorless and bland. All you have to do is compare them to The Right Stuff, Raging Bull or All the President’s Men to highlight the difference between provocative and creative storytelling on one hand and overly-reverent, boring hagiography on the other.