I found this through Fearnet on onDemand. I put it on without high hopes and pretty much fell in love with it from the opening sequence. It is genuinely funny, very gory, and surprisingly well done. I even like the premise–the geeks who couldn’t get dates to the prom are the only ones who can save the school from zombies. If you like zombie flicks, you should check it out.
Always dangerous to post a title like this on the Board – too many people with esoteric interests, who have probably seen these films (I’ve seen several of the ones listed). Besides, I’ve probably posted many of these before.
Le Dernier Combat – French post-apocalyptic film that feels like a low-budget Road Warrior. The hero has some sort of ultralight plane. One group of guys is running around the postapocalypse in full business suits. The whole thing is in black and white. There are no subtitles, because there’s no dialogue! Interesting, offbeat flick.
the Adventures of Mark Twain – A feature film done by Will Vinton’s studios in Claymation (the REAL Claymation – Vinton trademarked the term). It tells several of Twain’s lesser-known stories in clay, and some well-known ones – “Extracts from Adam and Eve’s Diary”, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven”, “The Mysterious Stranger”, and the better-known “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Definitely deserves viewing.
Edifice – an animated short telling the history of civilization in the form of a single building. It used to be on YouTube, but it’s been taken down.
The Royal Hunt of the Sun – surprisingly little-known film based on a play by Peter Schaffer, who went on to write Equus and Amadeus. It’s nominally about Pizarro encountering the Incan emperor Atahuallpa, but, like all of Schaffer’s plays and films, it’s really about Man and God, and sacrifices accurate history to that end. Christopher Plummer (who plated Pizarry in the stage version) plays Atahuallpa. Robert Shaw is Pizarro. A lot of people from A Man for All Seasons in other parts.
Kings of the Sun —What would happen if North American Indians fought againsyt Aztecs? Yul Brynner and George Chakiris play the leaders in this film by J. Lee Thompson (who made The Guns of Navarone, among other films.
The Long Ships – Vikings vs. Arabs, in a movie based on part of Frans Bengtsson’s Red Orm, featuring Richard Widmark and Russ Tamblyn as Viking, Sidney Poitier as the arab leader, and featuring the biggest freakin’ bell you’ve ever seen.
It’s only fair for people to gloat over which ones they’ve seen, just because I want confirmation that other people have seen and loved Moolade. (My boyfriend wouldn’t watch it with me, because I unwisely led with that whole “female circumcision in Africa” thing. He currently isn’t watching Nanking with me either. I even brought up the Nazi aspect!)
Dogville.
Nicole Kidman, John Hurt, James Caan, Lauren Becall.
Like a really, really dark version of Our Town(in that the set is a bunch of chalk outlines on the floor to represent buildings and there’s a few scattered props). Starts with a young women being chased to a remote town by Gangsters, who she convinces to take her in and hide her. They oblige, but it doesn’t take long before they start resenting her for it. It only gets worse from there.
The ending will probably make you feel like a horrible person if you cheered(and you will be tempted).
Enchanted April just came out on DVD. It is the beautiful story of 4 english women who take a vacation in Italy and find out the difference love can make.
The Journey of August King is a gem of a movie that it seems no one but me has ever seen. August King (Jason Patric) is a farmer in pre-Civil War era NC who has shut down emotionally after the deaths of his wife and child. During a trip to purchase supplies, he discovers a runaway slave girl named Annalees (Thandi Newton) has stowed away in his wagon.
It was my wife’s favorite film of that year. She had seen it in the theater and took me to see it with her a second time. I came out of that film wanting to murder that prick of a filmmaker, ranting and pissed off. It’s an obnoxious and anti-human film, and is the template for the worst aspects of “independent” film-making. And no, saying “that was the director’s intent” does not excuse the director from being such a colossal asshole for wanting to make the terrible thing in the first place.
That said, it was graphically interesting, much like the films of that other giant prick, Peter Greenaway.
The Reflecting Skin The Reflecting Skin (1990) - Plot - IMDb
Disturbing, beautiful, strange, sad…all balled together in a truly memorable film.
Being Cyrus A black comedy set in the Parsi community in India. Quite funny in its first half but gets darker and some neat twists near the end.
It’s tough to predict how many people have seen it, but I’m guessing the number is small. Neil Young’s film Human Highway starring Devo, Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn and others. I own it on V.H.S., which is the most recent format for this one.
That movie is truly messed up. Exploding frogs, radiation poisoning and all.
This one’s perhaps not as obscure as called for, but Isle of the Dead is an absolutely astonishing film from RKO’s B-unit in the 1940s. If you’re a fan of Boris Karloff, psychological horror, and/or the Balkan Wars, check it out.
Human Traffic - an amusing comedy about a bunch of UK clubbers with some cool visual effects.
Also seconding Dogville from above. The unappreciated Paul Bettany plays a significant part.
Marjoe
Marjoe (1972) - IMDb from 1972. Marjoe Gortner, before becoming an actor, was a child evangalist preacher. When he got tired of fleecing the sheep, he let a documentary crew film what was really going on.
Primer. A really interesting, complex time-travel movie. Not sure how well known this movie is. It may be popular among the SF community. I only know one other person who’s seen it.
Answering myself (as we demented folk are apt to do). Indeed, Desperate Remedies has been released as a DVD. In Region 4; do DVD’s revolve in the opposite direction below the equator?
I’m sorely tempted to order this, then try to hack it. Perhaps the image at this linkwill explain my interest…
And there was a sequel!
It’s called Manderlay, and Bryce Dallas Howard takes on the role played by Kidman in Dogville, picking up where that story ended. It uses the same visual style, is set on a farm, and is about black/white race relations. Worth watching if you liked Dogville, though I’d say it’s not as good.
American Movie A hapless amateur filmmaker struggles to produce his latest horror film, “Coven.” And no, it’s not pronounced like oven – it’s CO-ven. Hilarious.
We saw this in the theater, as part of the Chicago International Film Festival. Mark and Mike were there, as were Chris Smith and Mark’s mom. And we saw it not knowing if it were a real documentary or a spoof of one like Spinal Tap. We wound up buying the tape of CO-ven.
Saw it, again as part of the Film Festival. The filmmakers were there. Can’t say I loved it, but it was interesting how they made it. They used short ends, the unexposed, partial rolls of film left over from major productions. So they planned each scene based on the length of each short end and rehearsed each scene over and over (film costs money, actor and crew time was free). And they tried to shoot in sequence. The end result was that you could see the actors visibly exhausted and befuddled, which seemed to work for the film.
My wife and I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see that one, and to our shock it was sold out, and there was a large crowd outside in the same boat as us! Who knew that a film about a font would be so popular. The I recalled that the other side of the block was the world headquarters of the ad agency Leo Burnett, and there were probably 100 other agencies and graphic design firms in a 12 block radius. Basically every type geek in Chicago and a significant percentage of all the type geeks in the world were there.
Eventually I saw it on DVD.
My boyfriend watches that every Thanksgiving! And get a load of this - you know Fate magazine, the one with all the “I was anally probed by aliens” stories? I was processing it (I’m a periodicals librarian, and I do physical processing of magazines only when the assistant isn’t in, so it’s just chance that I saw this) and I idly flipped through the thing and saw a story sent in by Mike Schenck. The same one from the movie! It was about a deer, IIRC, that looked at him.
Romance and Cigarettes
Musical Comedy/drama James Gandolfini, Christopher Walken, Susan Sarandon
Fantastic acting, tragic and heart warming.