Ooops, then I didn’t post with my sig. My bad.
My favorite talk-radio host is compling a list of such movies.
My suggestion (Noises Off) hasn’t made the list yet. Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, Delnholm Elliot, Julie Hagerty, Marilu Henner, Mark Linn-Baker, Christpher Reeve, John Ritter, and Nicolette Sheridan star in this wonderful flick about the trials and tribulations of getting a play from Main Street, USA to Broadway. The silent backstage argument had me in stitches!
Hee. Harold and Maude. Just saw that fairly recently. Funny flick.
101 Rekjavik: Lesbian antics involving a Spanish flamenco dancer against a backdrop of general Icelandic debauchery - soundtracked with some interesting interpretations of The Kinks’ Lola: What more could you want?
I tirelessly champion the now nearly-forgotten Hal Ashby masterpiece The Last Detail. I love the movie for its wonderful dialogue and it understated, theatrical simplicity; it has the parts of a typical “road” picture and yet there’s nothing typical about it. My favorite Jack Nicholson performance ever, as well.
I Was a Zombie for the FBI: It’s not a great movie, but it was made for next to nothing and has some cool stop motion animation, good photography, and spot-on atmosphere. It also includes cowpunk madman Webb Wilder as an FBI agent. It used to be a staple of Night Flight on USA, and I remember it very fondly.
The Poor and Hungry: Please, please, please see this movie. It could be the greatest digital movie ever made.
Hugo Pool : This was the first time I saw Alyssa Milano all growed up. Everytime I see this movie I just swoon with how cute and emotionally fragile her character is. I just want to eat her up. The story is very sweet (despite a very annoying Robert Downey Jr. ) and always makes me cry.
Eclipse : I saw this movie at a very stragne time in my life and it really spoke to me. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. A round of unerotic sexual couplings in Toronto, interspersed with interviews about an impending total eclipse.
**Castle in the Sky ** : With all the recent hoopla about Spirited Away, you would think that Miyazaki’s other films would get more attention. Oh, the short attention span of the American public. This is as good as it gets with animated films, if you ask me. An adventurous plot and visually stunning.
The City of Lost Children: A 1995 French film by the makers of the 2001 hit Amelie. Beautiful sets and great casting. The basic plot is about a man who can’t dream, so he kidnaps children in an un-named futuristic French city in hopes to steal their dreams and make himself younger. Ron Perlman plays One, a circus strongman whose “little brother” is kidnapped. He teams up with Miette, a streetwise nine-year-old girl to try and track down his brother. The cast of characters is wacky as well: Siamese twins, bumbling clones, and a brain in a jar that can see, hear, and talk with mechanical aids.
Here are a few of mine:
Breaker Morant
The Duellists
Under Fire
The Howling
Blood Simple
Bagdad Cafe
Alligator
Lone Star
Empire of the Sun
Deathtrap
(In no particular order, and good for different reasons)
The Twilight of the Golds — midclass suburban family gal gets gene-testing while early-pregnant and finds she’s likely to give birth to a gay boy baby. Her bro is gay.
Miracle Mile — a gentle romantic sitcom morphs out from under you and becomes an impending end-of-world action-adventure thriller, and then a dystopian philosophical tome. Disconcerting and disturbing, especially if you spring it on someone without warning them what’s up with this film.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death — a delightful riff on feminist and postfeminist gender politics. Subtract several stars if you never took a course in feminist theory and didn’t live through the 1970s.
Quoth Magickly Delicious:
That was the one with “Five Hundred Miles” as the theme song, right? Yeah, that was a good movie! After some of the comedic antics, “Did you go to school for that?” “No, I got kicked out of school for that.”
And the movie I always (well, since a couple of years ago when I saw it) nominate in these discussions is Twelve Monkeys. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best time travel movie ever made. But it didn’t have any big explosions, wired fight scenes, or naked women, so Hollywood didn’t know how to advertise it, and it got ignored.
I’ll second **About a Boy[/] (massively underrated) and Bottlerocket, and I’ll add, the one I liked more, Rushmore.
The list cannot be complete, imo, without The Zero Effect.
Have to agree with these, and add Men With Guns by John Sayles.
Nobody has mentioned Wierd Al’s movie U.H.F. yet?
Pure comic genius.
I have not heard of a lot of these movies, and since there is so much crap out now, it looks like it is time for me to play catch up on some of these.
Thanks all!
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t Disney flick from the early 1970’s. Harmless kiddie fare about a college science student (Kurt Russell) who discovers an invisibility formula and, with a bunch of science-geek friends, saves the school from being forclosed on by a crook (Cesar Romero).
It’s not great by any means, but it’s good for quite a few laughs, and it’s pretty close to unknown. (I was shocked to discover that it’s been recently released on DVD. Two years ago, I spotted a VHS of it and grabbed it even though for the most part I’ve stopped buying any VHS, because I was sure this one would be too obscure to make it worth Disney’s bother.)
The Gods Must Be Crazy- Putting the Antichrist up in a tree is a good thing.
The Commitments- (Another nod to Roddy Doyle). I’ll admit that here on the SD, The Commitments would hardly qualify as “unkown,” but I am amazed at the number of people I run into out here IRL who’ve never heard of it. I’d love to find *The Commitments, The Snapper, * and The Van as a boxed set somewhere. Can the Irish Dopers maybe help me out, here?
A Simple Plan
Waking Ned Devine
1941- way underrated, IMO
The Fabulous Newton Boys- the closing title sequence with Johhny Carson and Joe Newton, with the Willis Newton cut-aways, is worth it.
Very Bad Things- very dark comedy; I like it.
Ilsa Lund said:
Heh-heh. I’m gonna say Heaven’s Gate. http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/0/1e63218c67bcee3a88256e7a00646563?OpenDocument
I love this movie. It is beautiful, moving, and well-acted. Damn those to hell who dis this movie.
One that I love: Highway 61, a quirky Canadian road-comedy movie with the best portrayal of Satan ever committed to celluloid. Anyone up for bingo?
One that I don’t love, don’t much even like, but that nevertheless is better than the credit it gets: Martin, the creepiest vampire movie I’ve ever seen. Pudgy unassuming bespectacled little guy sneaks into women’s rooms, drugs them unconscious, rapes them, then kills them and drinks their blood. Is he undead?
Daniel
Second me for MST3K: The Movie, Stand By Me (which I have studied 
), The City of Lost Children (even though I have only played the game) and Waking Ned(No Devine in the UK version)
Stand By Me was an awesome film.
My chosen few are:
Tank Girl
The Lost Boys
Run, Lola, Run
The Last Supper is a wonderful dark comedy that didn’t get near the recognition it deserved. I’m constantly recommending it, and with the exception of ShibbOleth, I don’t know anyone who’s seen it without my first lending it/recommending it.
For Roseanna is a sweet little peice of fluff, I absolutely love it. Again, have yet to meet anyone who’s seen it but me.