Movie Recs

[icarus]

It all started when I hit my limit on wildernessguru's action films...

I'm no fragile flower when it comes to movies, but this week while watching Army of Darkness (don't tell me you like it, please, I still want to respect you in the morning) I couldn't take it any more. Partially this is because Army of Darkness is just that bad, and partially it's because the last three weeks' entertainment choices have included:

- A sickeningly sexist brute movie from the 70s where women are drugged and kept in barn stalls as party favors and raped just for shock value, and the "good guy" is just as abusive (WG and I had a talk after that movie; I was angry) (Bad)
- A film where a guy locks himself in an FBI headquarters, takes hostages, and fakes an execution to reveal the fact that he was framed (Good)
- A movie where a hit man loses his memory and gets chased by other hit men while he tries to find out who he is (Good)
- A film set in the Viking era where the Vikings come over to North America, a boat crashes and a native american woman saves a little Viking kid, who later slices and dices the Vikings who rape and pillage the villages -- features a scene with a pungi trap where a bunch of native americans fall in (Bad)
- A film where a guy wakes up in a hospital and finds it completely abandoned; England has been overrun with a virus that turns everyone into zombies and the only effective weapon is burning zombified former family members to death (Bad)
- A hit man and a hit woman marry each other as a cover without realizing their respective professions; then they're contracted to kill each other (Good)
- A man comes over from Cuba to Miami and gets involved in selling cocaine, eventually becoming a drug kingpin; features a scene where a guy gets his arms sawn off with a chainsaw (Bad)
- A bullying wealthy man tries to pressure a cook to sell his restaurant; the situation slowly escalates to an armed stand-off (Good)
- A college kid starts earning extra money by selling marijuana to his friends and, being a savvy businessman, slowly spirals up in the crime world until he's a coke dealer, in way over his head; features such scenes as a friend being tossed out of an airplane (Good)

I've had it.

He's bitched and moaned about my Lord of the Rings marathon, groaned over my I, Claudius (though he got interested enough to ask me about it later), whined at Olivier's King Lear, walked out on and complained from the next room about West Side Story, avoided Evita! (he did love Cabaret), and put out a "get this movie out of my space" vibe when I bought Fantasia.

Now he's just going to have to deal with my kind of movie.

In my post entitled "This is war" I asked you guys to recommend movies of a nature that wildernessguru hates. This includes subtitles, slow-moving dramas, Shakespeare, musicals and... let's just say he fled from the delightful original Japanese Shall We Dance? Light-hearted romance (especially with subtitles).

Some people picked movies that would cause any human to keel over dead (read the descriptions here) and some of those I haven't included because most were movies wildernessguru liked and I hated. Ha.

But many of you recommended movies that sound really cool. I can't wait to see them, I thought I'd share them with you all. (Note: I'm still updating the list.)

The Movie Recs

First a rec for a listing of various foreign films, check 'the screening room'.

Also, check out the Dogme95 movement for the antithesis of the action blockbuster.

Foreign Films

Amelie (in French, as apparently the English is a terrible translation)

Tonari no Totoro (Miyazaki)

Kiki's Delivery Service (Miyazaki)

Nihon No Ichiban Nagai Hi

Sen To Chihiro (not the dubbed version, Miyazaki)

Mononoke Hime (Miyazaki)

Castle in the sky (Miyazaki)

Nausicaa (Miyazaki)

The Pillow Book (Japanese)

Il Mare (Japanese)

La Nuit de Varennes

The Story of Adele H. Camille Claudel

Cousin, Cousine

Peppermint Soda

Mostly Martha <

Truffaut's L'argent de poche

The Spanish Apartment (in Spanish)

Trois couleurs - Bleu, Rouge and Blanc

Krótki film o milosci (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

A Time For Drunken Horses (Iranian art house film)

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (Korean, know this film, love it)

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Brodeuses

Solaris (the original version, Tarkovsky)

Mirror (Tarkovsky)

Italian For Beginners (Danish, romantic comedy)

Allegro non troppo

L'ami de Mon Amie

La Vie En Rose (My Life In Pink)

I Kina spiser de hunde (Danish)

Blinkende lygter (Danish)


Black and White Drama

Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman)

Fanny and Alexander

The African Queen (Katherine Hepburn)

Suddenly, Last Summer (Katherine Hepburn)


Shows wildernessguru hates

The new Battlestar Gallactica (TV)

Oz (TV)


Hello, Shakespeare! (And an adaptation of Bizet)

Henry V (Olivier version)

Henry V (Branagh version)

Hamlet* (Branagh)

Hamlet (Ethan Hawke version)

Twelfth Night (Helena Bonham Carter)

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, adaptation of King Lear)

Carmen (flamenco version of Bizet)

She's the Man (teen adaptation of Twelfth Night)


Peppy Musicals

Sunset Boulevard (musical)

Annie (musical)

Mary Poppins (musical)

Brigadoon (musical)

Man of La Mancha (musical)

My Fair Lady (musical)

Evita (musical)

Victor/Victoria

An American In Paris (musical)

Strictly Ballroom

Xanadu (which I'm not sure I can take as an adult)


Highbrow, starched, and slow-moving

Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 5-hour BBC series)

Upstairs/Downstairs (BBC)

Duchess of Duke Street (BBC)

House of Elliot (BBC)

Brideshead Revisited (BBC)

Mansfield Park

Sense & Sensibility (Austen)


I'll have to look up what category these were in

The Weeping Camel

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Love Me If You Dare (French schmoop)

Muriel's Wedding

Ever After

French Kiss

The Fountain

Two Days In Paris

The Price of Milk (New Zealand)


Bollywood!

Lagaan

Hum Aapke Hain Koun

Taal (great music!)

Dhoom

Dhoom 2




In all fairness, so you can see that WG's not all bloody action all the time, here's what else he's brought home. (Also, I get frustrated in stores of all kinds, too many options, so if I don't bring a list I generally leave. This has left him in charge of the movie selection.)

- A really interesting and beautifully filmed documentary about the history of surfing
- A respectful and touching documentary about paraplegics who play Rugby in wheelchairs
- A painful and sensitive documentary about people who jump off the Golden Gate bridge, with footage of the suicides
- A documentary about the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war and his take on war and politics
- The famous Michael Moore documentary "Bowling for Columbine."
- An illuminating documentary about the credit card industry that made me want to cut up every credit card and send credit card applications back with the words 'fuck you' across the envelope

Comments

[slashpile.livejournal.com]

Combining both the peppy musical and Shakespeare, there's Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labours Lost.

And to throw in a few more possibles:
Girlfight
Gods and Monsters
The Princess Bride for the commentaries