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What's The Best Film Most People Have Never Seen?

Has anyone said 'Idiot Box'? Really funny dark low-budget Aussie comedy that has the worst ever sex scene in it.

Great film.
 
NVP said:
Has anyone said 'Idiot Box'? Really funny dark low-budget Aussie comedy that has the worst ever sex scene in it.

Great film.
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Yes it's quite dark and funny. I always fancied myself as a bank robber too :D

The Boys is another set in the same area of Sydney but much much darker.
 
I'd like to nominate a few of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser known (well, lesser than Psycho, North By Northwest, Marnie, Vertigo etc) films:

The Trouble With Harry - A very funny Hitchcock film about a small rural community and how its residents collectively deal with the appearance of a dead body.
Lifeboat - One of Hitch's less frequently seen flicks, about a small group of survivors of a torpedo attack adrift in the middle of the ocean.
Shadow Of A Doubt - Another Hitchcock, about a girl who comes to suspect her uncle is a serial killer.

A few more flicks which I think are worth seeing if you haven't already:

The Crimson Pirate - "Gather round, lads and lasses!" Exuberant Technicolor buccaneering with Burt Lancaster and former circus buddy Nick Cravat.
Conspiracy - a very good, sober dramatisation of the Wannsee conference on the 'final solution', in near enough real time. The fate of eleven million people decided in ninety minutes by fifteen men.
The Hot Spot - A Dennis Hopper-directed neo-noir, with Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly and a whole lot of sexual tension.
I Went Down - Irish mob comedy, with Brendan Gleeson.
Utu - Bloody revisionist Western, only with a vengeance-seeking Māori in Aotearoa/NZ, with a powerful central performance from Anzac Wallace.
Dobermann - Fun French heist movie, with glossy, comic book style, and sexy performances from Vincent Cassel and Monica Belluci.
Pirates Of Silicon Valley - Entertaining TV movie about the emerging behemoths of personal computing, with the geek from The Breakfast Club as Bill Gates, and the whiny rich kid doctor from ER as Steve Jobs.
 
How about some Alan Clarke? Best known for Scum, Made In Britain, The Firm and perhaps Rita, Sue And Bob Too, he has left behind a legacy of provocative, sometimes tender, sometimes angry television plays.

I would particularly recommend:

  • Elephant - Conflict in Northern Ireland, represented only by virtually wordless killings - twenty in under forty minutes.
  • Road - Unemployment, urban decay, hopelessness; Thatcher's Britain with extremely long Steadicam shots, soliloquies, Bure Baruta-style character interconnections and a lingering sense of betrayal.
  • Christine - Portraying the mundanity of a (not so) healthy heroin addiction, as we follow the titular young teenager as she pops rounds her friends time after time to deliver their smack.
  • Contact - A British patrol in the Bandit Country of South Armagh during the Troubles. Again, this is mostly about mundanity, except there are occasional bouts of exhilarating, scary action.
  • Psy-Warriors - The stageiest, least naturalistic of this selection, this play considers psychological warfare, and resonates strongly in these Guantanamo days.
 
I've been reading Alex Cox's guides to the films he (and producer Nick Jones) selected for the BBC Moviedrome strand, which he has put on his website as PDFs.

Moviedrome was an excellent way to discover films you might never otherwise hear about, or think you were interested in, before the internet, IMDb and Wikipedia helped free us from the tyranny of things like Halliwell's.

Some of the films broadcast might now be considered quite orthodox, but perhaps that will inspire confidence in trying out some of the ones you haven't heard of too.

Looking through the Kurtodrome fan page chronology of films shown on Moviedrome, I can remember the excitement I felt on seeing many of them for the first time.

Alex Cox introduced me to Assault On Precinct 13, Get Carter, Yojimbo, Il Grande Silenzio, The Beguiled and Knightriders; I think I'd already seen Something Wild, but Alex made me feel less guilty for enjoying it.

I also distinctly remember the creature feature double bill (Alligator and Q - The Winged Serpent), and the Cronenberg night (Dead Ringers & Rabid - though I only watched the second film).

Then there's Django, Play Misty For Me, The Hill, Lenny, Darkman, House Of Games, the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers remake, The Long Riders, Get Carter (AGAIN) and Escape From New York (which he didn't really like, but instead used as a springboard to talk about They Live!)

In his final year alone, he took me by the hand and showed me The Andromeda Strain, Carny, The People Under The Stairs, Talk Radio, Salvador, Coogan's Bluff, The Narrow Margin, Detour, Race With The Devil, Naked Tango and Apartment Zero (that was a good night!), Major Dundee and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (and so was that!), before ending on Kiss Me Deadly, about which he was always going on about anyway.

Alex Cox opened my eyes to Kurosawa, spaghetti westerns, Don Siegel, film noir and to John Carpenter, amongst other things. He also made Walker, about American imperialism and the Monroe Doctrine, sending helicopter gunships back to nineteenth century Nicaragua, just in case you didn't catch the subtleties of his message.

Even the later Mark Cousins seasons had some interesting stuff - Spanking The Monkey, White Of The Eye, The Killers, Trespass, Clubbed To Death, Demon Seed...

So I'd strongly recommend looking through the guides (which cover the 1988-1993 years), and through the chronology (1988-2000, with IMDb links), because I'd sure there's plenty there to interest anybody wanting to try out a flick or two they've not yet seen.
 
I'm sorting through my DVDs so a few more films have come to mind:

  • Code 46 - Michael Winterbottom/Frank Cottrell Boyce film, near future dystopia/utopia deal, focusing on genetic control, love, that sort of thing. Imaginatively realised, Samantha Morton is impressive, Tim Robbins not so annoying.
  • Scarecrows - Low budget heist/horror movie. Full of brio and/or vim.
  • Night Of The Comet - Unpretentious end-of-the-world SF thriller, with comic touches, and Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney as likeable Valley Girl survivors dodging zombies.
  • A Canterbury Tale - A classic Home Front-set wartime morale booster from Powell & Pressburger, centred around a British soldier, an American GI and a Land Girl. There's not much in terms of big plot moments, but it is a very enjoyable two hours of interesting characters and memorable lines.
  • The Ninth Configuration - William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist) writes and directs this oddity about a castle full of psychologically damaged US war veterans. Stacy Keach is the military shrink posted there.
  • Le Professionnel - Jean-Paul Belmondo as an ageing French spook who comes back from a far-off prison to wreak revenge on his former political masters who abandoned him. Funny, with good action sequences, and J-PB playing himself up.
  • Suburbia - Punk kids create their own family in squatted tract homes in suburban California; it can't (and doesn't) last.
  • The Doom Generation - Sexy, transgressive, fun killers-on-the-road movie by Gregg Araki.
  • Taps - Military cadets take over their academy when it's threatened with closure; sort of a sons-versus-their-fathers Oedipal struggle meets middle class Red Dawn, very Reagen era, but with good performances from, Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, George C Scott etc.
  • Three Days Of The Condor - Sydney Pollack directed, Lorenzo Semple Jr (The Parallax View) scripted - by no means the best of the 70s paranoia/conspiracy thrillers, but still a good film well realised. Robert Redford is a CIA technician who is forced to turn into a self-made field agent when his office is attacked.
  • The Bridge - Powerful documentary about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Footage from the bridge is intermixed with interviews with the friends and family members of people who have taken their own life there.
  • Swimming To Cambodia - Jonathan Demme's rather creative filming of Spalding Gray's one man show about the filming of The Killing Fields, in which he had a small part. Basically one long monologue, with a handful of props and lots of anecdotes.
  • The Beast Must Die - Cheap and cheerful British horror, with a gimmick - a group of people have been lured to rich big game hunter Calvin Lockhart's mansion, so he may discern which of them is a werewolf - the audience gets the chance to figure out which of them it is in a special 'werewolf break' towards the end of the movie.
  • Kanał - Andrzej Wajda's grimy, grim film about the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, set in the sewers beneath the city as the Nazis close in on those who resisted them. Unsettling, sad, inspiring.
 
DaveCinzano said:
[*]A Canterbury Tale - A classic Home Front-set wartime morale booster from Powell & Pressburger, centred around a British soldier, an American GI and a Land Girl. There's not much in terms of big plot moments, but it is a very enjoyable two hours of interesting characters and memorable lines.
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the first Bukkake movie, and another of my faves

I think I'll just mention the marvellous The Seventh Victim] - a film noir about lesbianism and satanism, who could ask for more?
 
I'm seriously trying to make that my great contribution to Powell & Pressburger scholarship. Not that much success so far.
 
Not enough people have seen training day. Or at least not enough peop[le relaise i'm paraphrasing satuff from there.

Which is handy.

dave
 
belboid said:
me too, I'm downloading it from karagarga now. I see the same bloke made the excellent The Quiet Earth] too, tho we'll have to overlook the fact he then did Freejack.
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Never seen Quiet Earth either. I want to see The Good, the Bad, and the Weird as well. The trailer for that looked ace.

Is karagarga invite only?
 
Reading the Shadowplay blog this morning has made me want to watch Polish SF film Na Srebrnym Globie/On The Silver Globe.

vlcsnap-710136.png


A group of space researchers leaves earth to find freedom. Their spaceship crashes on the dark side of the moon. Shortly afterwards, all are dead save for the children and one adult. They create their own society, characterized by shamanism and the worship of fire. The last adult survivor is called the Old Man, who is both worshipped and loathed. The Old Man leaves the group of children for the mountains and sends his video diary in a rocket back to Earth. A space researcher named Marek (Andrzej Seweryn) receives the video diary and travels to the moon. When he arrives he is welcomed by the group of children as the messiah, seeing him as the reincarnation of the Old Man.
 
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