Gummo, it’s strange and after I saw it I remember thinking it would have been worth a deeper analysis.
The City of Lost Children, It’s in French so it’s subtitled, but the plot is good and it’s visually incredible. It should be easy to find in a medium sized video rental store.
The Sand Pebbles also might spike worthwhile discussion.
I don’t know the others. But if this is the one I’m thinking it is, it could be a little… gruesome? terrifying? disturbing on a whole 'nother level? for a group that has someone voting for Beauty and the Beast. (Not that I didn’t love BatB, mind you.)
I recently saw Midnight Cowboy for the first time with my father. I thought that it was excellent, plus we found plenty to discuss about it afterwords.
Delicatessen - French with subtitles, but well worth the effort.
Amelie - also French with subtitles (and featuring a few of the same actors) - more fun to watch than Delicatessen.
Both films are quite beautiful in terms of cinematography.
Oh, I have a fondness for it, too. Back in the pre-VCR 1960s, the only way you could watch your favorite films was to have them on film. I had an 8 mm black and white REALLY short “Castle Films” version of This Island Earth called “Battle of the Planets” (imdb actually gives this its own page, aside from TIE). I watched it over and over, pausing it, running it backwards, and so on.
eventually the film came out to our theater and I saw a matinee. It was in color. With sound. And it was a heckuva lot longer. To a kid, it was great. Evebtually it showed up on TV, and I watched it a lot.
As I got older, though, I realizede that it was DUMB. The actions of the aliens made little sense. The scientists were pretty stupid, too (“We named him (the cat) “neutron” because he’s so positive.” ---- ARRRRRRGH! They couldn’t be bothered to check for bltant goofs like this?). And why the hell do aliens that can build space-travelling flying saucers need our pitiful help?
Eventualy I read Raymond F. Jones’ novel that it was based on. It’s a great little book (finally back in print), but they jettisoned most of it altogether, and made up their own plot using imagery from SF pulp covers. I read an interview with one of the screenplay writers, and he actually bragged about how they improved the story.
as an example of how wrong they got it, consider the one part of the story they kept – the part at the beginning where Cal Meacham* orders the parts for the Interociter and puts it together. They send him the plans in the movie, from which he builds it.
This reduces the Interociter to an interplanetary HeathKit, and the Test of cal to a trivial test for a good technician – that’s not how you find research lab talent (as the aftermath implies). In the book 9and the short story that started it all), Jones’ hero DOESN’T get the plans – he has to figure it out from clues in the catalog. And he has to repair broken parts himself, even though it’s alien technology. THAT’S a test.
There’s more – no bug-eyed alien mutants, no Metaluna turning into a sun. No planet under aplanetary shell (an image that seems to have inspired the Heaven’s Gate cultists).
This Island earth is the polar opposite of Forbidden Planet – it’s the antithesis of good 1940s pulp SF, all flash and gee-whiz imagery with no thought or substance, of ilogical episodes strung together to look impressive, but with no semblance of reality behind it. The characters are totally cardboard. The science is laughable (The ship has to bank to miss an asteroid? It’s even sadder that they used this in verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, but it was dumb even in the 1950s.) But it looks cool.
Ooh, did someone say that one yet? Starship Troopers can be a LOT of fun to analyze, depending on how you wish to interpret the movie. I like the theory that it is a propaganda film, making it a sort of film-within-a-film (which also goes to explain various stuff in the movie that doesn’t make sense, like the lack of any kind of armor (powered suits or plain ol’ tanks) and poor use of the tools they had (the nukezookas, for instance). For bonus points, watch a campaign or two of Roughnecks: The Starship Trooper Chronicles, and compare/contrast the show with the movie and book (the campaigns are each right around 2-2.5 hours long, making them self-contained episodic movies, pretty much).
Magnolia
Children of Men
Pan’s Labyrinth
Three Kings
Hedwig and The Angry Inch
Forgot to add the footnote:
*No Relation
Grizzly Man is likely to provoke interesting conversation.
I enjoy comparing different adaptations of the same work. Two that come to mind are Manhunter/Red Dragon and Valmont/Dangerous Liasons. I expect that Capote/Infamous would be interesting as well.
The Prestige is a fun movie to talk about.
Breaking the Waves is not a fun movie, but would certainly generate a lot of talking points.
Japanese (only go for them if you can find subtitled versions–and I mean that seriously as the English dubbings really killed the films):
Perfect Blue
Princess Mononoke
Wings of Honneamise
American:
Punch Drunk Love
Cobb
My Life without Me
Birdy
Movies not yet mentioned but which can provoke discussion:
The Lives of Others
The Devil’s Backbone
Angel Heart
Men With Guns
The Science of Sleep is a 2006 French film that I think will work well. Gael Garcia Bernal stars as a young half-French/half-Mexican* artist without a whole lot of talent or ambition who is increasingly losing his ability to tell his dreams from his waking life. They intertwine beautifully throughout the film, especially when he finds out that he’s come to Paris from Mexico for what turns out to be a shitty and not-at-all-artistic job and his feeling of out-of-placeness grows. He meets two Frenchwomen who take a liking to him, played by the more conventionally beautiful Emma de Caunes and the deeper (and more appealing to me and Garcia’s Stephane) Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Gainsbourg’s Stephanie proves to be almost as elusive and troubled as he is. One of my all-time favorites. And yes, it’s available on DVD; in fact, it’s one of the few DVDs I own.
He’s also played a Brazilian in Dot the I, a Mexican in Babel and I think a Spaniard in something else.I also recommend Pieces of April, a 2004 film starring a surprising Katie Holmes as black-sheep April Burns who’s invited her white-bread family to her low-rent New York City apartment for Thanksgiving when everything goes wrong. It’s not especially deep, but it’s a great “universal human character” story. Patricia Clarkson is fantastic as April’s disappointed and depressed mother, and Derek Luke as April’s black boyfriend, whose appearance terrifies the family.
Dirty Pretty Things is a British winner from 2002 about illegal immigrants who bite off more than they can chew in London. Audrey Tautou shines as Senay Gelik, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as her Nigerian partner-in-crime (figuratively speaking) Okwe.
Fido is a hilarious Canadian film from this summer about life in 1950s small-town America after the living have won the war against the Romero zombies of the original Night of the Living Dead. A giant corporation has domesticated zombies with a collar that kills their hunger for flesh, and can be remotely controlled. A malfunctioning collar endangers the whole town and pits families against each other.
Logan’s Run is a sci-fi classic that was immediately overshadowed by Star Wars. I can’t for the life of me understand why–Logan’s Run is sexier, has a better plot with deeper characters and better actors (classic Jenny Agitter really gets my motor going, too), and has more subtlety and meaning to it as well. It’s about a domed-city dystopia where sex and procreation have been completely separated, hedonism is encouraged and partaken with abandon, and citizens are killed on their 28th birthday in a ceremony that they and their friends believe reincarnates them. A small underground of “Runners” are determined to beat the system; Michael Logan is a “Sandman”, a member of the police force that catches and kills Runners, who finds himself questioning the government he’s pledged his short life to.
American Psycho is a 2000 satire of consumerism, an adaptation of the classic Bret Easton Ellis novel about a wealthy young yuppie and psychopathic serial killer in late 1980s Manhattan who gradually loses his sanity and his ability to control his id, indulging in the pleasures of cocaine, loose women, inappropriate sexual relationships, prostitution, violent sex and gruesome murders. Absolutely a classic. Another one of the few movies I’ve liked enough to get on DVD, along with Pieces of April and the Science of Sleep.
Consider Memento seconded. If you choose it–and you really should–implore everyone in your group to watch it at least three times. Each new viewing reveals more. Same for Fight Club. And I second Big Fish and Twelve Monkeys as well, (Twelve Monkeys has some of the best casting I’ve ever seen. Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis’s roles in those movies feel like they were written for them.) plus American Beauty. awldune is right about The Prestige: fun movie to talk about.
You ought to add A Clockwork Orange, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, too.
I couldn’t get through more than 20 minutes of Birth of a Nation. If any of your group’s members are black or Jewish, I would strongly recommend NOT bringing it up. (I’m Jewish, FTR.)
Raguleader, I’ll see your Dogma and raise you a Saved. Mangetout, Amelie is in the list of movies they’ve already seen.
I’m all for the watch-and-discuss series, BTW, if anyone wants to start the thread.
You mean “I, Robot”, which as far as I’m concerned is a steaming dump on Isaac Asimov’s grave.
The same guy made Shortbus, a movie about a Canadian-American sex therapist who can’t have an orgasm and the New York sex-and-raunch club where she finally finds someone to talk to about it. That’s a big oversimplification–there are several great intertwining stories. It’s as openly sexual as hardcore porn, including a gay threesome scene, so your group might be a little too squeamish for it. But if everyone’s open-minded, it’s a must-see.
Interesting movies with things worthy of discussion:
The Last Supper
Bunny Lake Is Missing
Urbania
The Quiet Room
Lulu on the Bridge
3 Needles
Running Scared (it’s a fairytale. no, really)
and as Campion suggested, Brick
Then for a rousing of discussion of what the hell did that mean? There’s:
They Came Back aka Les Revenants (maybe someone will figure out the ending)
The Uninvited Guest aka El Habitante Incierto
Tideland
Nemesis Game
Stranger Than Paradise
Down by Law