Name a little-known movie that deserves more recognition

[Dewey_Finn]

Well, I’ve never seen the miniseries version of Cold Comfort Farm and I was referring to and liked the 1995 film version starring Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell and others.

BTW, yet another recommendation for a film based on a book; The Hundred-Foot Journey. An Indian family that operates a restaurant in Mumbai loses the restaurant in political riots (and the mother of the family dies during them), so they move to Europe. They eventually settle in a small French town, where they operate an Indian restaurant, directly across the street from a Michelin-starred French restaurant run by an imperious French woman.

[dorvann]

Not to mention there are plenty of movies from the 80s that anyone who grew up through that decade would know that younger people would NOT know about. (Like I don’t think most post-millenials would know about Porky’s)

And I am sure they are movies popular in previous decades that people that lived THEM would all know.

Of course they are some movies that are timeless classics but some movies are more of a generational thing when it comes to popularity.

[needscoffee]

Can we please stop noting whether the movie being recommended has a sad or happy ending? There are already several I would have tried to catch except now I know enough to ruin it for me. Especially since these are supposedly little-known movies, it wouldn’t be expected that we already know the endings.

[ThelmaLou]

@Dewey_Finn

Well, I’ve never seen the miniseries version of Cold Comfort Farm and I was referring to and liked the 1995 film version starring Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell and others.

Me, too. I didn’t know about the miniseries. This one was pretty good (I thought).

[Spoons]

@TriPolar

The second one, set in the post-war years is 84 Charing Cross Road. This is a very talky movie that wouldn’t appeal to some. It recounts the relationship between a woman in New York and the manager of a book store in London told through their written correspondence. The emergence of a real relationship starting out with basic cordiality and turns into much more including the other employees of the store and their families. Perhaps it originally appealed to me while stuck in a hotel room with nothing but infomercials, televangelists, and this movie on the TV, so don’t spend too much time watching if it’s not your kind of movie.

This one, definitely. Anne Bancroft is perfectly cast, and breaks the fourth wall effortlessly, dragging the viewer into the story, whether the viewer wants to or not. Anthony Hopkins is perfect–indeed, when I saw The Silence of the Lambs, I had a hard time reconciling the animal Hannibal Lecter with the gentle and kind Frank Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road. That guy has a range.

[Slow_Moving_Vehicle]

My go-to for these sort of threads is A River Runs Through It, a1992 adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella of the same name, directed by Robert Redford and starring Tom Skerritt, Craig Shaffer, and a very young Brad Pitt. (I convinced my roommate to see it by telling hom that Pitt had a nude scene. He was very disappointed.) A moving meditation on family and the ways we can and cannot understand them, set and beautifully shot in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. Redford wisely used as much of Maclean’s prose as he could, and the result was a film that is almost as good as the story it’s based on. And since Maclean’s novella is one of the masterpieces of American literature, that’s a high achievement.

The last scene, an old man fishing alone in the half-light of the canyon, while the narrator reads Maclean’s haunting final lines, is one of the most beautiful pieces of filmmaking to ever come out of Hollywood.

[carrps]

@Dewey_Finn

Well, I’ve never seen the miniseries version of Cold Comfort Farm and I was referring to and liked the 1995 film version starring Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell and others.

I’m all confused! It’s this movie I meant. I’ve never seen the miniseries. I hadn’t realized they’d made one. The imdb listing doesn’t make it look very appealing.

@Slow_Moving_Vehicle

The last scene, an old man fishing alone in the half-light of the canyon, while the narrator reads Maclean’s haunting final lines, is one of the most beautiful pieces of filmmaking to ever come out of Hollywood.

I just got chills remembering that scene. Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is another classic, but they never made a movie of it. It would be very difficult.

[Dewey_Finn]

Apparently @ftg thought the 1995 movie version was terrible compared to an earlier miniseries version.

[mbh]

According to Wikipedia’s page for the novel,

In 1968 a television serial was made, dramatised by David Turner in three 45 minute episodes. It starred Alastair Sim as Amos, Fay Compton as Aunt Ada, Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Rosalie Crutchley as Judith, Brian Blessed as Reuben and Peter Egan as Seth. [15] Joan Bakewell was the narrator. This BBC adaptation was released on VHS but as of April 2014 is no longer available commercially, but can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AP0t3hUQKo.

[Tarataratara]

Zathura, a companion movie to Jumanji, was fun to watch. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0406375/

[carrps]

Yeah, plus it benefited from the more advanced special effects from the time of the first Jumanji. Although I enjoyed both, I have no interest in watching the new Jumanji movies.

[rippingtons_fan]

Circle of Iron, written by Bruce Lee and starring David Carradine and Jeff Cooper, deserves some recognition.

[Voyager]

@CalMeacham

The Day of the Triffids (1981 BBC) – Not the 1961 movie or the awful 2009 version, this one is pretty low budget, but very faithful to John Wyndham’s novel, with believable-looking triffids. Worth digging up a copy of.

I saw this one because the 1962 version was on my eternal Netflix queue. Not bad, but I was not impressed by the triffids. Special effects budgets were on the order of the early Dr. Who.
I just discovered the 1962 version is on BritBox, so I’ll be watching that at last.

[Voyager]

And while I’m at it, I nominate
The Harder They Come one of those movies which played at the Orson Welles in Cambridge forever. No Bob Marley on the soundtrack but a great soundtrack nonetheless. It introduced Reggae to a lot of people back in 1972.

[carrps]

I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve had the soundtrack on vinyl, cassette, and cd.

[TreacherousCretin]

@beowulff

OK, here’s the deal.
On the SDMB, a movie that came out in 1932 and starred Wallace Beery, is considered “well known.”
In the real world, if you walked down the street and asked 100 people if they had ever seen, let alone heard of Starman, I would suspect that only a few percent would say “yes.”
That’s the definition of “little known.”

I take your point.

[Didi44]

Wrong Then, Right Now and On the Beach at Night Alone by Hong Sang Soo.

Life imitates art or art imitates life.

Right Now, Wrong Then is about a movie director visiting a town to speak a festival of his films. He meets a young artist (played by Kim Min Hee) and despite being married attempts to have an affair with her. The movie is split into two parts, each depicting what could have happened.

Like most of Hong’s films, the movie is brilliant. But it’s especially noteworthy because following the release of the film in 2015, rumors began that he was having an affair with Kim Min Hee, whom he met for the first time during the filming.

Throughout 2016, he and Min Hee denied the affair, but in 2017 during the premiere of his next movie starring Min Hee in Seoul, they admitted they were in love, but have never acknowledged they were actually having a physical relationship. The movie is On the Beach Alone at Night where Min Hee plays an actress having traveled to Hamburg to await her married director love to arrive.

Min Hee, best know to international audiences for Park Chan Wook’s The Handmaiden, ended her agency contract in 2016 reportedly due to the rumors of her affair, and in 2017 lost all her endorsement contracts following her admission of her affair.

Since 2017, Min Hee has starred or appeared in almost all of Hong’s movies, which Hong claims aren’t based on reality, but some of the parallels with real life is often blurred.

Two more most see Min Hee “movies” are Lee Je Yong’s Actresses and Behind the Camera. Both films are shot in mockucumentary style, but it’s unclear what is and isn’t scripted. In “Actresses”, six actresses ranging from veterans to newcomers come together to do a magazine photoshoot. Tensions and truths?* rise as the day goes on.

*There’s a scene where Go Hyun Jung and Choi Ji Woo get into a verbal fight and Hyun Jung acknowledged what she said wasn’t scripted.

In Behind the Camera, Min Hee again plays herself. Again, the movie is shot in mockumentary style and it’s even more again it’s unclear what and what isn’t as the cast of the movie waits for the director who has decided to do his direction from a remote location.

[The_Stainless_Steel_Rat]

Several come to mind:

The most obvious is Go Tell the Spartans, about the early part of the US Intervention in South Vietnam. Starring Burt Lancaster, it won a lot of critical acclaim but it’s anti-war stance wasn’t a big hit and more ‘glamorous’ films (Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter) coming around the same time overshadowed it, but for my money the gritty tale it tells is better than any of the others.

Two others that did get critical raves but are hard to find now: The Gods Must be Crazy and Chocolat. The first has had questions raised about it depictions of race, but for my money the ‘primitive’ San people are the real stars of this often side-splitting comedy, and the other is a rather slow-paced French-style film but is beautifully acted and staged.

[DocCathode]

@The_Stainless_Steel_Rat

The Gods Must be Crazy

I love this movie. The bush people defiinitely come off as smarter and more with it than the ‘civilized folks’.

[outlierrn]

How about
Six-String Samurai (1998) - IMDb
this is kind of a tough movie to describe, not to everyone’s taste, I’m sure, but worth a look.