Best movie nobody's heard of...

[Olive]

Movies that aren't mainstream but I really like, but I'm not claiming they are unheard of or anything ok:

La Haine - French movie about three kids in the ghettos surounding Paris. Intense as all hell. Black and white, subtitled and seriously anti-cop. Those things may bother you, and if they do don't watch it cos you won't enjoy it. (it was Vincent Cassel's first film - he was in Brotherhood of the Wolf)

and

The Last Days of Disco - really, truely wonderful talky NYC film about two girls who work in publishing and go to nightclubs. And talk in extremely erudite ways all the time. I love it to death. Stars Kate Beckinsale & Chloe Sevigny. Like a less smutty Woody allen film, with out any irritating Woody Allen style characters.

I really want to get that Rbin of Sherwood DVD. Actually I want to rent it, cos my memory has a habit of playing tricks on me when it comes to things I last saw near 20 years ago.

 

[Hypersmurf]

I really want to get that Robin of Sherwood DVD. Actually I want to rent it, cos my memory has a habit of playing tricks on me when it comes to things I last saw near 20 years ago.

That sounds suspiciously like you're thinking that Robin of Sherwood might not actually be an exceptional series.

You take that back!

-Hyp.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Strangely, Cecil B Demented is, along with Pecker, one of the only two John Waters movies I've seen. I want to like his stuff more than I do.

Scratch that -- I saw another of his movies a long time ago. The only thing I remember from it is some guy with a fetish for stomping on women's feet.

Those two films (Cecil B. Demented and Pecker) are, while not his worst, sort of at the bottom of the John Waters barrel.

For early stuff, Desparate Living is good, and Female Trouble is often considered his masterpiece. Pink Flamingos is, from a technical standpoint, his worst film--bad camera work, poor sound, etc. Listening to his commentary in the DVD is pretty funny because he admits how bad the film is on a technical level. Still, it's the one that made him famous and there are scenes in there that will never (and can never) be repeated on screen.

For his "going mainstream" period (the 1980s and early 1990s), Hairspray is his biggest hit, but I like Serial Mom a little better. Polyester is funny for the "Odorama" gimmick (scratch-n-sniff cards that let you "smell" the movie, not just watch it) and a lot of great silly dialogue ("I never wanted to use macrame to kill!"). It's also the film with with the 'Baltimore Foot Stomper' character, Dexter Fishpaw. If you saw the movie without "Odorama" it's really not as good. Cry Baby is pretty unwatchable, despite starring Johnny Depp.

His last two films (the ones you saw & remembered the titles of) are very autobiographical, but unless you know that you miss the references. And how many movie-goers would know his biography well enough to catch all the references? Not many.

I think the problem with John Waters is that his reputation is better than his finished products (and I say this as someone who counts him as his only "Must See" film-maker--maybe that's just a loyalty thing with me). Still, he makes his movies on a shoestring budget (compared to Hollywood, at least), so I guess that's why he continues to get funding.

 

[Olive]

That sounds suspiciously like you're thinking that Robin of Sherwood might not actually be an exceptional series.

You take that back!

No! I shan't!

Actually I remember the 1st two seasons being pretty good (but very few episodes i discovered online today!), but the third with the new robin annoyed me.

 

[Olive]

but I like Serial Mom a little better.

Ohhh that movie is so good!

 

[Mog Elffoe]

Several Hong Kong movies, some already mentioned. One standout is Mr. Vampire. A chinese screwball comedy about hopping vampires (yes, they do indeed hop. And they hop damn fast), a wise man who know how to deal with them, and his two witless assistants.

I love this movie. Love it. If you liked this one you might also want to try Magic Cop. It also stars Lam Ching Ying as a Taoist priest zombie fighter, but he's also a modern day policeman. Pretty cool.

 

[Mallus]

The Last Days of Disco - really, truely wonderful talky NYC film about two girls who work in publishing and go to nightclubs. And talk in extremely erudite ways all the time. I love it to death. Stars Kate Beckinsale & Chloe Sevigny. Like a less smutty Woody allen film, with out any irritating Woody Allen style characters.

Madre del dios... thanks Olive, I forgot all about Whit Stillman's movies [perhaps because he seems to have stopped making them!.

Besides Last Days, he made Metropolitan and Barcelona. Both of which are enormously clever and entertaining films. The former is a bit like a John Hughes movie as written by F. Scott Fitzegerald --or like Fitzgeralds own Basil and Josephine stories set in the early 1980's. The latter concerns two slightly older, equally WASP-y cousins who wind up working in Barcelona in the late 1980's; dealing with life, love and privilage during a turbulent period of anti-Americanism.

I'm not sure any real people speak like Whit Stillman's characters, but everyone I know wishes that they did.

Olive, how do you see Last Days as similar to Woody Allen's films, other than the omnipresent sense of New York City --both as place and as central metaphor-- that hangs over both?

And Woody Allen smutty? Annoying? OK, sure, in his later works, I can see that. But so many of his early works are so good... Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Crimes and Misdeamenors its a little unfair fair to sum it all up as 'smutty with annoying characters'.

 

[Maerdwyn]

I'm going to mention two Iranian films that no one else I know has seen, but which are really GREAT movies.

Leila is about a woman who consents to her husband taking a second wife because she can't have children. Devastating - make sure you rent something like Raising Arizona at the same time.

Children of Heaven is a very high quality family movie (many great Iranian films are family movies - the filmmakers there are restricted in the ways they can show relationships between adults, but not those beween kids. As a result kids often get portrayed with much more complexity than in movies made in some other places.) about a brother and sister who share a pair of shoes so they don't have to tell their father her shoes were lost. More uplifting than it might sound

 

[barsoomcore]

Thanks for those recommendations, Maerdwyn. I just saw The Circle -- which was AMAZING (about a set of vaguely interconnected women -- sort of Slackers in Tehran with middle-aged women) and am looking for more Iranian films.

 

[Tanager]

Children of Heaven is a very high quality family movie (many great Iranian films are family movies - the filmmakers there are restricted in the ways they can show relationships between adults, but not those beween kids. As a result kids often get portrayed with much more complexity than in movies made in some other places.) about a brother and sister who share a pair of shoes so they don't have to tell their father her shoes were lost. More uplifting than it might sound

Well said.