Everybody has at least one minor, hard-to-find film as a personal favorite, one that their friends haven’t heard of and Blockbuster probably wouldn’t stock their shelf with. Mega-epics like Lord Of The Rings are cool, indeed…but there is something sublime about discovering those obscure, little-known movies that have to succeed or fail on the basis of their chutpah and storytelling, not their 40 million dollar advertising budgets and McDonald’s tie-ins.
My faves:
**Christiane F. **
German-made 80’s film about a 14-year old girl who becomes a heroin addict and eventually a homeless prostitute. Great, grimy, realistic filmmaking that first gives the viewer a touching, otherworldly picture of teenage life and then hammers the viewer with images of degradation and misery.
**Ms. 45 **
Arthouse exploitation film about a mute garment worker who is raped twice in the same day by two different attackers and goes on a vigilante spree against slimeballs.
Flaming Creatures
Surrealistic-depressive art porno film from the 60’s that was busted for obscenity several times.
**The Mystery Of Rampo **
Japanese film about a novelist so immersed in his fiction that he begins to live in it.
**Opera **
Dario Argento-helmed horror/mystery that plays out purely on the level of irrationality…mood, atmosphere, and image take priority over story and plot, and the result are suspense sequences and setpiece bloodletting that is fascinating.
Keith, Rampo is excellent! A good companion-piece to Cronenburg’s Naked Lunch, and Kafka. Have you ever read any of his work?
Long before the movie came out, I found a couple of volumes of his short stories. (I loved The Human Chair Creepy as hell.) I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was a long time before I “got” the pun in the psuedonym of Edogawa Rampo – even with the broad hint in the title of Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination :smack:
One of my favourite obscure movies is a Japanese Star Wars rip-off (I like the Magnificent Seven-like closure of the circle, there,) called Warlord. (In Canada, anyway.) Surreal and beautiful. And the “Robo-Ninjas” are the coolest thing, ever.
Alejandro Jodorowski’s Holy Mountain is waaay up there on my list of favourite movies, but it’s definitely not for everyone.
Mahler is one of my favourite Ken Russell movies, second only to Performance. It irks me that it’s not commonly known. I guess the snobbier classical-music lovers found it offensive, and folks who don’t have a clue a Mahler didn’t give it a chance. I sure would have liked the opportunity to sit down and have a long discussion with Philip K. Dick about what he made of that movie.
Speaking of Philip K. Dick, the only thing there ever (in my opinion,) came close to being a faithful adaptation of one of his novels is a french movie – Confessions d’un Barjo. (From Confessions of a Crap Artist.) It’s bizarre, but it feels much more like PKD than any of the other adaptations, even in french.
Fandango. It was written by Kevin Reynols about his college experiences at my alma mater and is an enjoyable right of passage tale with plenty of comedic twists.
Costner and Judd what’s his name from the brat pack do a nice job as it’s still too early in their careers for them to be overly arrogant.
It’s consistently quotable throughout and enjoyable even in it’s 30th showing.
Local Hero, with Peter Reigert (Animal House) and Burt Lancaster. One of my favorite “small” movies.
Highway 61, about a Canadian barber and trumpet player who’s conned into driving a woman to New Orleans with a corpse she claims is her brother, which is full of cocaine. The scene at the border is excellent.
My fave is Escanaba in da Moonlight with Jeff Daniels.
It is a thoroughly pointless slap at the people of Michigan’s Upper peninsula, and generally unflattering characterization of Michigeese in general, but it is hilarious and Jimmer McGominy from Menominee provides enough obscure film quotes to last a lifetime.
Anna to the Infinite Power, a story about cloning
Saw it on HBO many years ago and haven’t seen anything about it since. I know a few other Dopers have heard of it, but no one I know around where I live has.
I Wake up Screaming - Betty Grable’s only non musical - a gripping noir. Children of Fate - documentary set in a Sicilian ghetto. The Dark Backward - not too obscure, but still hard to find.
I’m also not sure how obscure these are considered but here you go…
Donnie Darko: Mentally unstable teen with visions of a demon bunny rabit who warns of approaching doom.
The Loan Star State: Comedy about a nice guy has who has to save his girlfriends slow witted brother from a bunch of moronic drug selling gangsters - Freakin’ Hillarious!
Paperback Hero, an Australian independent film starring Hugh Jackman as a trucker who writes romance novels on the side under a feminine penname. When one of his novels hits the bestseller list, he is… very embrassed and asks a friend to pretend to be him… er, her, er, the author and make celebrity appearances, etc. Romantic comedy ensues.
There are a lot of movies with this title, but this one is by far the best. (Yes, even better than the one by the Cohen Brothers-- and that’s going some!)
One of the most original movies ever made.
The action is set in the early 60’s and revolves around an aspiring screenwriter who’s trying to write a noirish crime movie. He’s an “aspiring” a screenwriter as ever lived. (He is a boarder in some nice nuclear family’s garage, and an object of considerable mystery and admiration to the familiy’s pre-teen daughter.)
He’s got a few quirks, too. Foremost is his inability to write under any light but that of a streetlight which filters in through the garage window-- He sits there, poised at the keyboard, staring at that light and waiting for it to come on so he can get to work. When it does, we see that he has some other limitations, too. He can only write beginnings and endings. He can’t quite figure out how it is that people get from A to B. Did I mention that he doesn’t utter a single line in the entire movie?
And of course, things in the ‘real’ world begin to spiral out of control for our hero.
One of the things that knocks you out about this film is its unique look: It was shot entirely on expired Kodak 16mm colour film. The colours! Oh my god. And lots in in-jokes for film-geeks, too.
Find this movie! You’ll be glad you did.
There are lots of nice pics from Crime Wave at this page. (Beware of Popups, it’s hosted at Angelfire.)
The Delicate Art of the Rifle, a surreal comedy about a sniper on a college campus featuring a cameo by author Bruce Sterling as a weatherman discussing chaos theory.
The Red Violin is a great Italian/Canadian/British film that draws you into the story of the owners of a particular violin over 3 centuries or so. It was so good that my husband, who usually runs shrieking from foreign language/subtitled films, was suckered by it as well.
I’m not sure if it would be considered obscure (certainly not in Australia and it received an Oscar Best Pic Nomination), but Picnic at Hanging Rock is also an old favourite that tells the story of three girls who go missing in the Australian bush during the 1800s. Although with this one, we never find out where the girls went missing to, or why one student who returned saw something so dreadful that she went barking mad. Some people loathe these kinds of stories where the audience is left guessing as to what actually happened, but I find this film quite fascinating.
Shall We Dance, a Japanese movie about an ordinary Japanese businessman who takes up ballroom dancing, in part because the instructor’s so beautiful. The closest thing to profanity in the movie is “Your dancing creeps me out!” in the subtitles. The original Japanese isn’t any worse, but it tells a very moving and interesting story. It also turns out the finale is set in a dance hall in Blackpool, England, where my father, as he put it, “misspent part of his youth.”
I’ve also borrowed Eddie and the Cruisers from the local library. I haven’t seen it in years, so I don’t know if I’ll love it as much as I used to, but it’s about a rock band whose lead singer was supposed to have been killed twenty years earlier. Or was he?
Finally, does Brassed Off count as obscure? I’m also the granddaughter of a horn player in a top British brass band, so I’ve always liked it, even if I don’t play horn, and, what’s worse, I don’t know anyone who looks like Ewan McGregor.
