JeffTheAlpaca

The Matrix and Mission Impossible movies

Double_Oh_7

Blade Fucking Runner. The most tedious 2 hours ever.

Hazel Motes

The American Friend
Dogville
Dancer in the Dark
The Element of Crime
The Searchers
Elephant (Van Sant & Clarke)
Last Days
Psycho (1998)
Morvern Callar
Gone With the Wind
Most Guy Maddin films
Most Larry Clark films
Most Jean Luc Godard films post 1972

Rebel Without a Cause. I get the movie. I like the movie. I think Dean was a very talented actor. What eludes me is why Dean played it so very over the top.

The careers of Milton Berle and Bob Hope.

GoldenJCJ

You may not like his films but you have to admit he captained the hell out of the USS Enterprise!

Ash Ketchum

Hope made a lot of funny movies--you just need to see the right ones (e.g. THE GHOST BREAKERS, THE PRINCESS AND THE PIRATE, ROAD TO UTOPIA, MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE, SON OF PALEFACE, CASANOVA'S BIG NIGHT).

Berle I never found funny. He became "Mr. Television" in the post-war era simply because he was the only thing on television at the time!!! It was that or a test pattern.

The only time I thought Berle was good in anything was IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, where he's playing a distinct character and not doing his usual Berle schtick.

Goonies85

Basically agree with everyone about 2001.

I'll add Gus Van Sant's Gerry...I generally like his movies but that one left me cold...Don't get the point of it...and yet I loved Elephant and The Last Days...

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a movie I still consider pointless, plotless, and boring...Although I'll probably give it another spin one day to see if I've changed my mind...

Another Kubrick movie, Barry Lyndon...Have no idea why some consider this such a great movie...I find it colossally boring...

I also don't get the appeal of Hal Ashby's Being There. I think that's one of the worst movies he ever made...

JoeySeven

Been awhile since I watched most of these films.

Eraserhead (1977) This is kind of how I feel,not sure what I watched.

Both Andrei Tarkovsky films.
Solaris (1971) I plan to re watch this one soon.
Stalker

Ash Ketchum

I can understand your reaction to BARRY LYNDON, so I'll try to explain why I found the film fascinating. It's about life in the 1700s as lived by various social strata in England. We see a callow young man climb up the social ladder through a combination of guile and dumb luck, so we get to see life lived on the ground rather than from high up or through a monarch's eyes, as most historical films set in England are positioned. And I like the way the film is paced, just following this guy leisurely from one situation to another over a period of years. I daresay this may be the Kubrick film I like the most after THE KILLING. It's unforced and, unlike pretty much every other Kubrick film, avoids any sense of urgency, which makes it, to me, his most playful.

kd5

Can anyone explain the ending of 12 Monkeys to me? It's a good movie but the ending makes my brain hurt. I've searched but most of it is speculation. Possible outcomes. It makes me leery of watching it again.

Like others, 2001: A Space Odyssey has a similarly confusing ending. I like the movie, and I can understand an alien civilzation influencing our evolution, but what's the infant in the planet supposed to mean? Evolved into a planet? Wait, what?

PatD

The ending of Taxi Driver eluded me. Did Travis Bickle massacre all the people to save Jodie Foster or was that in his head? If it was real, why wasn't he in jail or at least a fugitive? Was the lady he was talking to in the end also a figment of his imagination or real?

andicus

^It was real.

Mabuse

Yeah, he becomes a media hero by accident has always been my reading.

Regarding Barry Lyndon, two things:
1. It’s a very rich recreation of the 18th century. Real buildings, as little artificial light as possible, compositions inspired by art from that period. It’s not a slapped together invocation of period, but instead an actual (almost) reality.
2. It’s very funny. And while the film is long, it’s made up of a lot of short scenes. So it’s never boring. And the final dueling scene is incredibly suspenseful.

Paff

RE: Taxi Driver

I've always considered it a comparison of two acts that were the exact same thing in Travis Bickle's mind: The attempted assassination of Palentine, and the actual assassination of Sport. Palentine was who he felt was keeping him from Betsy, and Sport was who was keeping him from Iris. But one of the acts made him a hero (killing someone who pimps pre-teen girls), the other a monster. It's a lot to digest. Brilliant film.

And about the Japanese thing. While I was taking Japanese 101, I went to a double feature of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Stray Dog. Yeah, on 35mm too, suckers. Anyway, I understood a lot of the spoken dialogue of Stray Dog, but not a single word of Throne of Blood. Same actor and director too, Mifune/Kurosawa. Asked my instructor about it, and she told me that old Japanese is indeed quite different from modern dialect.

Paff

Yeah. Cole whiffs in his attempt to find the unmutated virus. It was preordained, as he witnessed his own death as a child. However, his travels to the 20th century provided enough information for someone else to make the trip back in time, and we assume, find a pure sample. She was in "insurance".

One thing 12 Monkeys does (and this is absolutely central to the film) is insist that one cannot travel back in time and change the past. Furthermore, if you do travel back in time, all your actions will be in our history books NOW (The photo of Cole in WWI that Dr. Railley has been familiar with her entire life)

Hokeyboy

I thought it was completely easy and straightforward. No big mystery.

As a child in the 1980s, Young Cole was at the airport where he witnessed a a man in a Hawaiian shirt being shot. Decades later, almost all of the world's population is decimated by a plague, allegedly spread by the "Army of the 12 Monkeys". Adult Cole is sent back in time to get a sample of the plague. Lots of things happen (Is he insane and making this all up in his head? Is the "Army of the 12 Monkeys" group really responsible for the end of the world?) but in the end (due to whatever plot machinations) Adult Cole ends up getting shot and killed at the airport while wearing a Hawaiian shirt... an act witnessed by his own younger self.

Destiny is inexorable.

Ash Ketchum

I found something on the internet recently where Kubrick offered a pretty concise, maybe even prosaic, explanation of the ending. I can't remember whether it was a video piece, a print interview or an audio interview. You should be able to find it easily enough. Something about the aliens putting Bowman up as a specimen, possibly even in their version of a zoo, and giving him an environment that they thought would be familiar to him so they could observe him before he finally dies and goes into the afterlife as...the star child. Or something.

Ask Kubrick, he'll straighten it all out for you. Not that it makes the film any better, mind you.

rennervision

The one movie that comes to my mind that is highly respected but I just can't enjoy is Once Upon a Time in the West. I like westerns. I like Sergio Leone. But there's something about this movie that is so pretentious and dull to me.

Jay G.

For 2001 and Blade Runner, one argument for both that I've heard in their favor is that they're very different experiences on the big screen. Now, I've never seen 2001 in a theater, but I've seen Blade Runner twice in a theater (once the Director's Cut, once the Final Cut), and even though I liked the film before, in a theater is a very different experience. Something about the mix of having no distractions and the incredible visuals and score make for an intoxicating cinematic cocktail.

For The Big Lebowski, that film was a massive disappointment the first time I saw it, but it grows on you on repeat viewings. One thing I've argued is that the first time through you're too involved with the mystery, trying to figure things out, while scenes, characters, and plot often come out of nowhere, disorientating you. The second time through, you already know the end so you can appreciate the craftsmanship of the film and each individual scene.

For Citizen Kane, a friend who watched it in a film class mentioned how he knew intellectually how it was this groundbreaking film that introduced a lot of techniques we now take for granted, but since they're so common now and taken for granted, to him Citizen Kane didn't look like anything new because he'd seen it all before. For me, I found the film a lot funnier than I thought it'd be, and I think it's still very well crafted. But if you don't put it in its historical context and the outsized influence it had, it may be hard to understand why some call it the greatest movie ever.


One film I personally don't understand the love for is Waking Life by Richard Linklater. I actually turned it off halfway through. The animation, while occasionally incredible, often seemed to be fairly lazy rotoscoping without much imagination put into it, and the dialogue I felt often devolved into the sort of psuedo-intellectual BS stoned high school students would spout. I found Linklater's A Scanner Darkly to be a far better film.

GoldenJCJ

Good one. I bought the 2 disc DVD back in the day, have tried watching it at least 5 times and turn it off before the halfway point each time. I don’t know what it is, I just can’t get through it.

rennervision

Citizen Kane is a movie I didn't appreciate at all until I watched it with the Roger Ebert commentary. And now I totally get why some critics say it's the best movie ever made.

Paff

I agree, and I also felt the exact same way about Repo Man. If you spend your time trying to follow the plot, you'll just end up confused. Instead, just watch the interactions between the characters.

Hokeyboy

I always liked, perhaps near-loved Citizen Kane, but I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it.

Then I saw it on the big screen.

Holy cow. What an achievement. I now love it as much as I appreciate it. A magnificent beast of a film.

Paul_SD

Chris Lee's Dracula films- I just watched "...Has Risen From The Grave" last night and the net result was the same as with all the other Lee Drac movies I've seen.

I just can't get why his performance of the character, or his films, are held in such high esteem.
The Dracula character in these movies is one note and boring AF. There's nothing there to become invested in. It's all just menacing posing with no particularly interesting agenda. In each film he rarely has more than one page of dialogue.

He's a cipher in his own movies.

Nick Danger

I managed to catch 2001 on the big screen, and it was hypnotic. Literally. I walked out of the theater in a light trance. I do not get that experience on a small screen.

That's interesting that Japanese has changed so much. I never would have thought it.

I can understand Shakespeare, but I doubt he would understand me. He never downloaded new apps on his phone.

Once Upon a Time in the West is concentrated Sergio Leone. If you like his overblown westerns, it's the MOST OVERBLOWN WESTERN IN THE WORLD! I like it. I get sucked in from the first scene where assassins wait around for eight minutes doing nothing.

GoldenJCJ

I like the way you think! I did the same thing with the Ebert commentary. His observations definitely elevate the movie for me.

After listening to Ebert’s commentary on Citizen Kane I actually went out and bought the Dark City blu-ray solely for his commentary.