I love Ed and his Dead Mother! One of the funniest zombie movies ever, sort of a light-hearted Dead Alive. You’re right, I’ve mentioned this movie to tons of folks and none of them have ever heard of it.
Manhunter (1986) - IMDb Manhunter was the first Hannibal Lector movie and the best. This movie sucks you in. It star William Peterson of CSI fame.
Greaser's Palace (1972) - IMDb This is as far out as you can get. I love it. Greaser Palace with Jesus coming to earth in a parachute to become a song and dance man.
I have never met anyone who has seen 13 Tzameti. It is available at Netflix. It is an interesting/disturbing movie that I would recommend highly.
I’ll second this one. Lovely, humorous, and dark are the words I would use to describe it as well!
And thanks twickster for the thread. My Netflix queue is beefed up and should last through winter, at which time I cancel it until cold weather returns!
I saw it on TV once a long time ago, and have been surprised that so few people have heard of it.
Oh, wait, wrong Slither. I meant this one. I’ve never seen a black van look so menacing.
Um … what’s a button test? Or is this something a guy my age should even know?
The Button Test:
Sonny: Alright, listen to me. You pull up right where she lives, right? Before you get outta the car, you lock both doors. Then, get outta the car, you walk over to her. You bring her over to the car. Dig out the key, put it in the lock and open the door for her. Then you let her get in. Then you close the door. Then you walk around the back of the car and look through the rear window. If she doesn’t reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in: dump her.
Calogero ‘C’ Anello: Just like that?
Sonny: Listen to me, kid. If she doesn’t reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in, that means she’s a selfish broad and all you’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg. You dump her and you dump her fast.
And if I’m not mistaken Sunrazor, I think we’re the same age (mid-20s). A Bronx Tale was on TV like every day when I was in high school so I watched it a bunch of times. And my friends and I took the button test very seriously.
A really great one. Though I wouldn’t call is sweet exactly – the ending is heartbreaking.
This is such bullshit - I’ve gone through this thread and added loads of titles to I love Film (a UK version of netflix) and about half of them aren’t available - oh they’re in the library but they’re only available for “reserve”, which means they’re not actually there to be rented currently. Sucks big time.
Still, I have another 30 odd titles in my queue, thanks all.
Waking Ned Devine. Hilarious and charming. If you liked Once, you’ll like this other little Irish film.
Italian for Beginners. In Danish, with English subtitles.
Would Kissing Jessica Stein fall under the heading of “not a lot of people have seen”, or have I been living under a rock? Loved this movie!
Two gems of Korean cinema:
The Host: one of the best and most original creature movies in recent years, and a brutally unforgiving one at that. You can make up your mind about this one: cautionary tale about the results of bad parenting, cautionary tale about the dangers of pollution, or cautionary tale about the damage done to Korea by meddlesome military powers… you take your pick.
Oldboy: the best fight scene to ever involve hammers. I’d tell you more, but it would ruin it - all I’m going to say is that when you’re sure that the revenge plot has reached its absolute apex, I assure that it’s only just getting started.
Both are incredibly violent and utterly merciless, so I’d put the kiddies and the easily shocked to bed before watching. Trust me. Korean filmmakers do not observe the same unspoken taboos as Hollywood.
…and if you’ve seen either of the above and found them to be too tame, take the time to get your dirty little paws on a copy of Sukiyaki Western Django by Japanese enfant terrible Takashi Miike. It’s a Western… set in Japan… with phonetic English dialogue… and a mish-mash of every single cliche used in classic samurais and westerns… bathed in blood. (You’ll just have to trust me on this one)
Oh, man, is this the thread for me! I just bought a month of unlimited rentals over at Citizen Video and I’ve been really digging into the obscure stuff lately.
Ossessione (Italy 1943) is often considered the first example of Italian neorealism, despite that genre being almost entirely post-war. (Other things, like its rural setting, set it apart from the later neorealist movement in other ways.) It’s a classic, banned by Mussolini, based on a censored novel that director/screenwriter Luchino Visconti is said to have acquired in France. A drifter winds up at a roadside diner/gas station where he falls in love with the owner’s wife, who is turned off by her husband and looking for a way out. After he gets fed up with his situation there and leaves, he winds up back there due to circumstance and a crime is committed which shakes him. Primarily a story of the effect of his guilt and his lifestyle change on his emotions and his life, Ossessione also turns in fantastic performances by Clara Calamai as the resterateur’s wife and Elio Marcuzzo as “Lo Spagnolo” (“the Spaniard”), an eccentric but street-smart wandering artist who takes in Massimo Girotti’s Gino Costa (the drifter) and has a profound effect on the way he thinks about his situation.
La Notte (Italy 1961) is the late Michelangelo Antonioni’s answer to neorealism’s despondent lowlifes and gritty Roman streets. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau turn in absolutely stunning and incredibly nuanced performances as Giovanni and Lidia Pontano, respectively. Giovanni is a successful writer who lives on Lidia’s family’s fortune; the childless and loveless Milan couple visits a friend on the brink of death and then attends a high-society function where they both contemplate infidelity and they are forced to reconsider their lives and their obligations to each other. Moreau could–and often did, judging from this film–convey more information in a look than many current stars can in paragraphs of dialogue. That performance is a microcosm of the movie itself, which uses dialogue sparingly, but devastatingly. Every shot in the movie gives the impression of being carefully calibrated to move the story forward by leaps and bounds. The only time dialogue seems to play an incredibly important role is in the beginning and in the end, where Antonioni ties the whole thing up beautifully.
Roma Città Libera (Italy 1946) is a classically neorealist film, if not a neorealist classic (lacking a strong lead, among other things). It’s a story of a cross-section of postwar Romans who turn to vice and crime in free (but uncertain) liberated Rome. Incompetence (on the part of the police), moral relativism (on the part of the citizens) and honor among thieves (on the part of the main characters) rule the day. Newly-lowered lowlifes are pushed together by circumstance and bond over cognac while dodging cops, dragging each other into and out of trouble, exchanging a pearl necklace that ties their stories together throughout the movie, and desperately seeking a way out of their respective predicaments. Vittorio de Sica (also an accomplished director) is an especially bright spot as an esteemed academic afflicted by amnesia desperately trying to find out his name in the face of an entirely apathetic Rome.
I’ll be back with more, probably for the lifetime of this thread, but for now I’ve got to run. Ta-ta!
Ossessione is based on the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. It wasn’t credited to it though. Maybe the filmmakers though they could get away with not giving credit to Cain since it was made in Italy during World War II.
I’ve gotta post the same one I always do in these threads: Cold Feet, starring Keith Carradine, Tom Waits, Sally Kirkland, Bill Pullman and Rip Torn. Waits is Kenny, a small-time crook who hides a batch of stolen emeralds inside a horse and tries to get it back from Carradine and Kirkland, who have the horse on Pullman’s ranch. You’ll want a bag a figs to nosh on during the film.
Christopher Nolan made a movie called Following a few years before he gave us the gift of Memento.
Following is about a penniless artist who gets inspiration by following random people he sees on the street or in the cafe. Throughout the film the main character is talking to an unseen interviewer, explaining his life, his “rules” about following people to prevent getting to attatched to them, and why he eventually broke those rules.
The wiki article is really interesting, too. I won’t link to it because it has unboxed, unwarned spoilers, so I’ll just copy the relevant lines here.
Yeah, I swear I meant to mention that in my post… :smack:
There’s an American film adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, though. BTW, one of Visconti’s issues was that he didn’t (couldn’t, really) have the rights to the book at the time, so the movie wasn’t released internationally until the 1970s.
One of my top films. I came for Brad Pitt, I stayed for the whole enchilada…
You can call me Susan if it makes you happy.
The whole movie is quoteable.
*So the biblical scholars mis-translated the Hebrew word for “young woman” into the Greek word for “virgin,” which was a pretty easy mistake to make, since there is only a subtle difference in the spelling. But back then it was the “virgin” that caught people’s attention. It’s not every day a virgin conceives and bears a son. So you keep that for a couple of hundred years, and the next thing you know, you have the Roman Catholic church.
*
I hate you twickster, and anyone else who suggested Cashback. I put that in my queue and moved it to the top, and it was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Actually, it’s still on but I don’t want to finish it, which is VERY rare for me, even for really bad movies. I’m just not that masochistic.
This movie has no point, no likable characters at all, and an extremely annoying and dull protagonist.
Here’s Cashback for you. First 20 minutes is the main character, a student in art school, feeling depressed because his girlfriend broke up with him. She broke up with him because he suggested they break up. He has a friend who is the typical horny dumb sidekick buddy from a thousand movies, only not funny at all. He can’t sleep because he’s so depressed over getting dumped. 75% of the script is dull monologues from this protagonist about his childhood experiences with girls and how seeing a naked girl as a child led him to appreciate beauty. There is an extended sequence where he fantasizes about stopping time and stripping the women in the grocery store and drawing them, with more 9th grade pseudophilosophy about beauty. I think the sole reason they made the character an art student is so they could justify to themselves tons of gratuitous and exploitative nudity that would be even more creepy if he was just a guy who likes naked girls. Actually, being a typical pervert voyeur would make his character more interesting.
There is no plot. He has three male coworkers, two of which are IDENTICAL in personality and rarely say anything and just goof off. The third hardly ever speaks and just does stupid kung-fu moves. He has a female coworker that he gets a crush on for no reason, as there is nothing interesting about her at all except she likes to hide watches and clocks so she doesn’t realize how slow time is passing. His boss is a typical asshole boss, with the unintentional twist that he’s a little more likable than the other characters because you sympathize with him for having to deal with his underlings.
This movie says absolutely nothing except about how unlikable and stupid the person who wrote it must be. I guess it also says a lot about people who enjoy the movie or relate in any way to the protagonist. There is nothing to the movie itself…I don’t mean that this movie has a meandering plot, or gets lost or pointless - it has no plot at all. God, there is a musical montage playing right now with the unlikable, undistinguishable characters mugging for the camera and dancing around…while we were watching this, my wife mentioned that there was a joke in a Scooby Doo episode from one of the kid’s videotapes that she got for the first time today (Shaggy flipping a coin with Scooby and saying “Heads I win, tails you lose”). It says a lot that we laughed harder reminiscing about a stale joke in a Scooby Doo episode than in any part of this “comedy”.
I’m going to stop here, just thinking about this waste of celluloid is making me angrier and angrier. I would rather watch Armageddon than this, or any bad SNL-skit based comedy. I hate Adam Sandler and any of his films is 10 times the movie this is. If I had a choice between watching this movie one more time or watching Little Nicky ten times, I wouldn’t think twice about choosing Little Nicky.
One of the worst movies I have ever experienced.
Being There starring Peter Sellers is a wonderful movie about a sheltered gardener who is mistaken for a deeply and profoundly intelligent gentleman. He appears on talk shows, advises presidents and all the while he really is only talking about … his garden.
A must see.