Category: Underappreciated Movies

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: Keeping the Faith

I’m on a roll with the underappreciated rom coms. Keeping the Faith is a comedy about a pair of boys and their childhood tomboy friend who grow up to be a Catholic Priest (Edward Norton) and a Jewish Rabbi (Ben Stiller), along with their type A hot-but-driven friend Jenna Elfman. I will watch stupid, bland rom coms at least once (I like to eat ice cream after derby practice and veg) – but this one is neither bland, nor stupid. First off, Edward Norton directs, and he has a light touch to match his dry comedic timing. This is also one of the few films where I find Ben Stiller to be completely likeable and attractive – generally, he uses his considerable charisma to play neurotics of some sort. Both men play sincere men of faith who nevertheless wrestle with exactly what that faith costs them and how to be true to themselves while being true to their beliefs. Also – it’s a total love letter to Manhattan. And a great supporting cast (Anne Bancroft, Eli Wallach, Lisa Edelstein, Ron Rifkin, Milos Foreman) doesn’t hurt either.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Wake in Fright

Wake in Fright came to cinematic life in Australia in 1971, but was barely heard from since. That is because the negative vanished. An international search eventually located the negative in 2004, inside a warehouse in Pittsburgh, inside a box marked for destruction. So it’s sheer luck we get to see it today.

And what luck! Wake in Fright is an excellent example of the amazing, edgy filmmaking that was happening in Australia in the 1970s. It also has what may be the greatest Donald Pleasance performance I’ve ever seen.

Wake in Fright is the story of a young bonded teacher who has a teaching assignment in a desolate, remote town in the middle of the Australian outback. He is determined to buy his way out of his assignment someday so he can live a fuller life, but for the time being, he just wants to go on vacation in Sydney. On the way to catch a plane, he winds up stranded in another remote outback town, out of money and out of luck thanks to a local gambling ring, booze, guns, and a hypnotic Donald Pleasance. The rest of the film spirals downward in a horrific haze, sort of like a dusty, no-budget, 100%-more-kangaroos version of Apocalypse Now.

If you have a taste for the dark films of the 1970s and/or the late great Donald Pleasance, this one is a real treat!

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Dororo

Okay, let’s see if I can do this… This is a movie about a baby whose body parts were cut into 48 pieces and sold to 48 different demons, but his eyeless squirmy head and torso were taken in by a kind man who built him fake body parts (outfitted with swords, naturally) so the boy could grow up into a samurai who goes on a quest to slay all the demons and regain his body parts one by one. Oh, and there’s a woman who insists she’s a man who goes on this quest with the samurai. (Did I mention that this movie was Japanese?)

The film Dororo is based on a manga of the same name, and I hear there is also a video game (oh my). I’ve only seen the film, and I can tell you that the film is a hearty helping of entertaining weirdness. It’s also easily available on Netflix streaming right now. Get thee some popcorn!

Windy’s Pick of the Week: Demolition Man

So, I noticed that my latest picks for this category of “underappreciated” are all movies with a strong vein of tongue-in-cheek wit and a heavy dose of social satire.

Also, I like action flicks.

Sandra Bullock stars in her breakout role – and she stood out immediately in this film! – as a young cop in the future where there hasn’t been a violent crime in at least a generation and “all restaurants are Taco Bell.”  The action is satisfying – it is Sly Stallone and Wesley Snipes, after all – but it’s the social commentary and satire that makes this a movie to add to your permanent collection.  Denis Leary also has a small, ranty part that is great.  A more subtle dystopian story than most, this is a movie that reminds us why “the nanny state” could be a very bad thing.

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: Wimbledon

This is the movie every “rom com” wishes it could be. Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany raise the profile of the lowly rom-com, but it’s the script that carries a delightful story about redemption and re-imagining just what we thought we wanted from our life. The romance is real and lovely – but best of all, the conflict (which is so often contrived in rom-coms) is believable and true to who these characters are.

Also – it’s an underdog sports flick.  And so it’s a double win.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Joe Versus the Volcano

The first time I saw this film, it opened Ebertfest, Roger Ebert’s annual film festival in Champaign, IL. When I saw it on the schedule, I said, “…really?” because all I knew of it were all the jokes made about it when it was released in 1990. And when I said on Twitter that it was the first film of the festival, everyone who’d never seen it went, “…really?” And then the four people who had seen it said, “OMG WOW YES YES YES.”

A few hours later, I realized what the folks in the know were talking about. Joe Versus the Volcano isn’t a dumb late-1980s Tom Hanks comedy, which is what most Tom Hanks comedies were in the late 1980s. Joe Versus the Volcano is a weirdly surreal, candy-colored, bizarrely artsy, Capra-flavored comedy featuring Funny Tom Hanks and Early Meg Ryan at the height of their powers. Tom Hanks plays a guy who learns that he is dying, so he accepts an invitation to throw himself into a volcano as a sacrifice to save a primitive tribe, and somehow Meg Ryan gets sucked along for the ride. It’s sweet and weird and it contains people like Abe Vigoda and Robert Stack and Amanda Plummer and Ossie Davis.

I saw the newly restored print of the film, and it was nothing short of dazzling; I am told it’s the same transfer that was used to create the Blu-Ray. Definitely worth seeking out.

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: I Bury the Living

This no-budget 1958 gem is a favorite discovery of mine, since it feels like a lost Twilight Zone episode and occasionally reaches moments of true ingenuity. The plot involves a guy who manages to inherit a job at the local cemetery. While being trained in, he is introduced to a giant map of all the plots in the place, and to how white pins mark plots that belong to living people, and black pins mark dead bodies in residence. One day, he accidentally replaces a white pin with a black one, and that’s when the crazy begins.

I Bury the Living was directed by Albert Band, one of the legendary B-movie creators of the era. The film is also in the public domain, which means you can watch it completely legally right here.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

I love this film so much. It helps that it has Paul Bettany, of course. And it’s got Russell Crowe in one of his “I’ll be charming and charismatic without being a jerk” moods. But what it mostly has is tall ships. And a look at a life and a culture that has gone. And danger, derring-do, and a central relationship – the friendship between a doctor and a captain – that is intriguing and satisfying.

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: The Core

This is my go to “over the top sci fi disaster movie”. You don’t have a whole category full of “over the top sci fi disaster movies”?

How do you LIVE??!

Aaron Eckhart proves that he is so charming and charismatic, you’ll forgive the ridiculous science he is spouting. Alfre Woodard has so much screen presence, it’ll make you start a petition to get her more roles. But best of all – STANLEY TUCCI. And a plot so wrong that it takes three left turns and becomes a RIGHT.

Plot: The earth’s core has stopped spinning and we’re all dead unless our intrepid heroes travel to the center of the earth and jump start the core spinning again.

See? Told you.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: The Emperor’s New Groove

BOOM, BABY. This may be the only Disney feature that I love down to the very core of my being. It baffles me that Disney still has no clue what a gem this thing was.

Emperor’s New Groove scraps nearly all of the Disney tropes and instead serves up something that may have been the result of the creators getting high and watching a bunch of Warner Brothers’ animated shorts and Crosby/Hope road movies. Here we have David Spade in a role that is actually well-crafted to his usually-annoying presence, Patrick Warburton as a dunderheaded henchman, John Goodman being John Goodman, and the ever-amazing EARTHA KITT. Also present: the first pregnant woman ever seen in a Disney animated feature, llamas, and Tom Jones.

I worked many years at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, and during my tenure there, I must have watched this film over fifty times. We kept a tape of it in the back for whenever we couldn’t stand the other movies playing in the store. I can attest that it never, ever gets old.

Why does Disney pretend this film doesn’t exist? By all accounts, it doesn’t make sense.

(By the way, I did an entire podcast about this film over at A Reel Education. If you want to learn more about this oddball film, have a listen!)