Absolutely! I don’t remember hearing anything about this movie and don’t even remember how I came to watch it the first time – probably a rental that I decided to try because (a) it had a political title and (b) I knew the names of the stars and liked them. Since then I’ve bought my own copy of the movie and watched it a few more times. I loved the all-Dorothy band! An unsung classic for sure!
Omg, Happiness! That was the most disturbing movie I had ever seen. I didn’t hate it, but I’m not sure I liked it either.
What, you were expecting it to take you to a happy place?
Red Rock West and Clay Pigeons are a couple of country noir gems, IMHO. Nick Cage with Dennis Hopper and Joaquin Phoenix with Vince Vaughn, respectively. Vaughn is* creepy* good.
Buster and Billie with Jan Michael Vincent (1974)and A New Leaf with Walter Matthau and Elaine May (1971).
If you’re up for a bit of a mind fuck, double feature this with Freeway, another brilliant performance by a young Reese Witherspoon.
One could argue that they’re both ‘coming of age the hard way’ stories, but damn.
So good.
Why are you killin’ all them girls, Bob?
I caught Thunderheart with Val Kilmer the other day on HBO. I always liked that film.
Cops and Robbers is one of the best heist film’s ever, yet it’s almost completely unknown today. It’s one of my life’s great disappointments that A) almost nobody knows this movie, B) the only versions available for consumers are all edited-for-TV versions and C) they formatted it for TV, leaving no widescreen cut available at all.
I’ve seen a few of the films mentioned above.
From memory (I might have forgotten one or two):
Withnail & I
L.A. Story
Tender Mercies
Far From Heaven
Down By Law
A Simple Plan
The Whole Nine Yards
Grand Canyon
My Dinner with Andre
Lone Star
Trust
Big Night
Lost in America
Kung Fu Hustle
The Omega Man
After Dark, My Sweet
Local Hero
In Bruges
Charley Varrick
The Grifters
Drugstore Cowboy
Coming Home
Blow
Straight Time
Joe vs. the Volcano
Get Shorty
Matewan
Contagion
Auto Focus
Happiness
The Secret of Roan Inish
Did they “fall through the cracks?” I don’t know. Not being a blockbuster isn’t the same as falling through the cracks – seems to me some of them were pretty successful.
Quite a few of them weren’t exactly aiming for big huge success – they were indies, and may not have gotten widely released. But on their own terms, they were successful.
Don’t know. Anyway, it’s been fun reading, and I’ve definitely added a few titles to my must-see list.
I came to this thread late and may have missed these, but anyway:
Dinner Rush takes place in one night at a restaurant run by Danny Aiello. I don’t want to spoil it, but John Corbett is a little surprising. “When did this happen? When did dinner become a Broadway show?” (Quoting from 15-year-old memory, cut me some slack). It was well reviewed, but I think kind of neglected at the theatre. I remember really liking it.
I don’t know that I adored Knockaround Guys. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was just OK. But I thought Vin Diesel was really good as the burned out goon. (Vin Diesel was also quite good in Find Me Guilty, another movie I thought was just OK. The guy can act when he wants to.)
Great film. Literally my first Netflix selection, in 2005.
Four Lions is a UK movie from a few years ago about four British Muslim men who decide to become suicide bombers. It’s a comedy, by the way. A dark one, but it’s a comedy. I thought it was pretty funny and it got 82% at Rotten Tomatoes.
A close friend who is a little person remarked to me when this film came out that the Peter Dinkelage (a near-unknown then) might become “the Sidney Poitier for little people. We won’t get our Denzel Washington for another decade or two, though.” He meant that Dinkelage might break one barrier by being taken seriously as an actor…but we’ll have to wait a while longer before people hardly even register that a certain actor is little.
Look who got beat with the ugly stick.
“Vicious Circles” is a fine little erotic thriller B-movie that has a lot more going for it than most others, but hardly got noticed despite having a “name” actor (Ben Gazzara) in it. Carolyn Lowery does a great job of playing a women who’s living with (and having an incestuous relationship with) her brother in France. Her brother, a bit of a naive dummy, gets caught up in a drug scheme and when it all goes south, he’s the one left holding the proverbial bag, getting sentenced to prison. Lowery’s character learns that getting her brother out of prison will require a large sum of money so she can hire a decent lawyer for him, so she raises money by becoming a voluntary sex-slave-for-hire for an organization of horny Parisian millionaires called The Circle. So the stage is set for the degradation of both her and her brother, but the real action of the story is how she turns things around on the Circle jerks, the Parisians who set up her brother, and the Paris authorities.
It’s not an A movie by any means but it’s one of the VERY few erotic thrillers that’s both erotic and thrilling, and should have gotten all the attention that the greatly inferior “Body of Evidence” did in the erotic thriller category. Instead, it kinda fell through the cracks.
I hadn’t heard of it before, but am now hunting. 
Indeed. I kind of feels that a lot of people have a different interpretation of “fall through the cracks” than me. Many of these made good money, hell some even won Oscars.
And directed by Chris Morris, one of the Gods of British comedy. I can heartily recommend pretty much anything he has touched.
The Gods Must Be Crazy I & 2.
So much fun for the whole family. I used to ask people in the university cafeteria if the voices in my head were disturbing them when they sat down next to me.