Movies you can't help but love more than the world finds acceptable

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

The subject is a modified version of a phrase plucked from a polkablues post in the favorite movies thread.  A lot of movies I love fit the description.  It's an easy list for me to make:

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, José Mojica Marins 1964
Eating Raoul, Paul Bartel 1982
Lady Terminator, H. Tjut Djalil 1989
Truck Turner, Jonathan Kaplan 1974
Lord Love a Duck, George Axelrod 1966
House by the River, Fritz Lang 1950
Above the Law, Corey Yuen 1986
Tony Manero, Pablo Larraín 2008
Joysticks, Greydon Clark 1983
Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Kazuo Hara 1987
Risky Business, Paul Brickman 1983
It, Clarence G. Badger 1927
Hysterical Blindness, Mira Nair 2002
The Hidden, Jack Sholder 1987
Sparrow, Johnnie To 2008

Love to see your list.  I guess any movie you love but don't usually list or find fits typical list criteria works well.  Doesn't have to be mostly trashy like mine.  I personally find personal lists more interesting than critical arm-wrestling type lists.

[Pas]

To make this a really epic thread there would have to be covers or images or something, because Drunk Pas can't be bothered to look up what these movies are.

Above the Law if it's the Steven SEagal one wawaoui good film. Motherfucking good even. The others I know nothing of but would be VERY intrigued to check out if I wasn't so drunk or if they're be images.

Mine is : Weatherman with Nic Cage. Nobody gives a shit about this film except me and Neil I think. GT too maybe. I think what I love so much about it that very few people can understand is when Nic Cage tells Hope Davies how important blowjobs were to him. When she stopped giving them to him it was really awful. That is also how I feel. The frequency of blowjobs is a serious issue in my life. I'm being quite serious.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

Love it.

[Pubrick]

To make this a really epic thread there would have to be covers or images or something, because Drunk Pas can't be bothered to look up what these movies are.

Above the Law if it's the Steven SEagal one wawaoui good film. Motherfucking good even. The others I know nothing of but would be VERY intrigued to check out if I wasn't so drunk or if they're be images.

Mine is : Weatherman with Nic Cage. Nobody gives a shit about this film except me and Neil I think. GT too maybe. I think what I love so much about it that very few people can understand is when Nic Cage tells Hope Davies how important blowjobs were to him. When she stopped giving them to him it was really awful. That is also how I feel. The frequency of blowjobs is a serious issue in my life. I'm being quite serious.

Quoted for posterity.

But seriously sundown, add some pictures will you, those titles mean nothing to anyone (I only recognize manero, risky biz, and the name fritz lang). If you really love those movies you won't mind adding maybe even a trailer or scene clip.

[polkablues]

Eating Raoul is great.  I'm pretty much over my head beyond that.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, José Mojica Marins 1964
4:10 mark in this YouTube:  
That's hand-glued glitter meant to represent a death aura in this cemetery scene.  José Mojica Marins is a fantastic and sincere personality who makes outrageous material with total conviction, including this great early one.  Supposedly the actor hired to play the lead role quit because he thought the movie was too stupid so Marins took over.

Eating Raoul, Paul Bartel 1982
A cannibalistic black comedy passion project, Paul Bartel shot this over a two plus year span, with b-movie cohort Mary Woronov as supporting lead.  They lure people into their homes through sex ads in local papers and then murder them to sell their bodies to a local Mexican restaurant for taco filling.  Everyone wins.  It's my favorite zany Los Angeles movie.  

Lady Terminator, H. Tjut Djalil 1989
Djalil is my favorite Indonesian genre filmmaker.  His concept of outrageous is totally different from mine, which I really love.  This is a kind of full-throttle Terminator riff, inspired as well by aspects of the Queen of the South Sea myth.


Truck Turner, Jonathan Kaplan 1974
There's so much of this movie in Jackie Brown.  The trailer's fun in that grindhouse way but doesn't express how good the movie is.  Isaac Hayes plays a badass, and sings too.

Lord Love a Duck, George Axelrod 1966
George Axelrod was huge in his time?  I've never asked anyone or confirmed it, but his name is attached to The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Manchurian Candidate.  This is one of two works as a director.  It's one of those great 60s satires like The Loved One, in fact maybe The Loved One is better because Paul Williams has that great role.  But I think this one is sexier and more fun.


House by the River, Fritz Lang 1950
Fritz Lang does murder in a southern gothic tone, including some great New Orleans atmosphere.

Above the Law, Corey Yuen 1986
This has my #1 favorite guy-through-windshield scene.  I chose it because I wanted to choose Corey Yuen's The Legend but that seemed too obvious.  Yuen has terrific action film instincts.

Tony Manero, Pablo Larraín 2008
It's a completely serious movie about an utterly absurd life.  In that sense I could have chosen an Ulrich Seidl film instead but this one is more fun.  It's more sad too.  There's real pain and disappointment in this manic story of a Travolta impersonator's quest for pride.

Joysticks, Greydon Clark 1983
Don't watch this.  I can't even explain.  It's a tasteless 80s boob comedy.   Set in an arcade.

Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Kazuo Hara 1987
Okay, this ex-army Japanese guy wants retributions for horrible war crimes committed during WWII.  He at least wants other people to admit cannibalism occurred, which no one will do.  There's a veil of respectability that's pretty much impenetrable.  So what this guy in the documentary does, now that he's way too old, is try to beat the truth out of people, sometimes while members of the family watch.  It's an extreme testimony to personal integrity.


Risky Business, Paul Brickman 1983
You know the movie, but I bet you don't take it very seriously.  I think it's a great movie with the wrong kind of reputation.  Really sexy young Cruise stuff that PT Anderson surely appreciated, and a weird teenage dream atmosphere that works.

It, Clarence G. Badger 1927
Maybe this is underappreciated. I don't know a lot of people who watch a lot of silent movies.  This is pure social-climbing escapism, with expressive camerawork and shameless depictions of fun-having.

Hysterical Blindness, Mira Nair 2002
Kind of like if the sisters in The Fighter had their own movie.  My favorite New Jersey movie.

The Hidden, Jack Sholder 1987

There are a lot of great 80s genre movies.  This is my personal favorite.  Kyle MacLachlan plays ... if I remember correctly he's an alien posing as an FBI agent or something, and he drives fancy sports cars.  Everyone thinks he's weird in a usual FBI way, however, more and more you know it's because he's an alien.

Sparrow, Johnnie To 2008
Johnnie To makes tonally specific movies.  This one was inspired by the French New Wave.  That means great late-night convertible rides through the city, and an expertly choreographed murder beneath a canopy of umbrellas on a rainy night.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

This is a low pressure topic by the way.  In terms of what I think qualifies.  Really the less you've thought about it and the more instinctive and purely loved based your movie selection the better.  Nostalgia works really well too.  Like:

Jingle All the Way, Brian Levant 1996
I took a girl to see this movie.  Earlier we had seen The Santa Clause, and l later saw Dante's Peak with her as well.  We became best friends.  Somehow I thought love and movies had so much to do with each other.  She did not think this, or maybe she watched sexier movies with sexier men.

Kazaam, Paul Michael Glaser, and The Stupids, John Landis, both 1996
Ahh yes.  My friend Robby, now Robert.  We haven't talked to each other much as adults.

Flipper, Alan Shapiro, and The Nutty Professor, Tom Shadyac, both 1996
It really looks I discovered cinema in a very adult way during what was apparently the great year of 1996.  I took Kim to see these movies; she was the first girl I knew to wear a bra.  I made fun of her friend Ashley who became this tall beautiful woman, and Kim suffered from teenage anorexia.  She used to say such terribly sad things about herself.  Now they're both married with kids.  I wonder if they show their kids these movies and think of me (Ashley was only along for Flipper, The Nutty Professor was a little more of a date if you know what I mean).

[Pas]

I'm almost afraid of posting this i don't want to break your flow 

sweet thread, i'll get in when i feel melancholic

[children with angels]

American Pie 2 (2001) - For a year after finishing school I worked in my town's local cinema. This movie must have ran for five or six weeks, and I saw it countless times. So many times that I grew to deeply love it, slowly making it intermingle with my experiences and memories of the time: it was about kids coming back after their first year of college - I'd just seen lots of my friends go away to college, and would be going myself in a year. I began relating the characters to people in my life, fell in love with Alyson Hannigan, etc. I was something of a film snob already at the time, but this movie caught me completely off guard by weedling itself into my brain, making me think that if you simply experience a work of art enough times you're bound to grow to love it, because you won't be able to help but project yourself into it. I don't know if that's true across the board, but I think there's an element of fact there, and it certainly describes my experience with American Pie 2.

[Pas]

The Substitute (1996)


This will always be one of my favorite movie. I remember seeing it when it came out and renting it at least 4 times in the summer, watching it multiple times each shot. Showing it to my friends, explaining to them what a mercenary is, what the CIA is, what are black ops... all the things my father had just explained to me as we were watching it. I was 11 and my dad was about 32. Back then he liked action movies a lot and we were always watching them together. He and my mom never gave a fuck about ratings and took me with them to every film they saw at the theater. I was their only son for 10 years.

At 18 I met a guy who would very suddenly become my best friend. We liked the same things, we had the same humor (though he was infinitely funnier than me). We hung out in his basement to the point that his parents feared we were gay. Because his brother was a huge gaylord.

The point is that his favorite movie was The Substitute and the movie had been part of his life the same way as it had been in mine. We both watched it every year, laughing at the same parts and loving the same sequences.

At 19 I met my girlfriend and at 20 she dumped me for this guy. I must admit I have a full share of responsibility in this. Maybe 90% of it because I was a terrible asshole to her.

But really what kind of depraved motherfucker steals his best friend's girl?

A couple of months later I got back together with my girlfriend and because I am some kind of Gandhi type I forgave my friend and started hanging out with him again. The first time we hung out again we did mushrooms while watching The Substitute. We were just hanging out together, never with my gf. It was a bit awkward but manageable.

One year later, he calls me and tells me: ''Dude I'm so depressed blah blah blah I wanna die. I have to settle things with your girlfriends I'm still in love with her after all this time.'' Sure enough I tell him to call her. One month later she dumps me again for him. This time though it's all her fault, I was super nice.

I got back with her after a couple weeks. It's been 5 years since then and we are now super fine and it's all in the past. I'm happy the way it turned out because these months apart gave me the chance to fuck other girls which I would've wanted to do anyway.

The end is that I would like to stick an icepick in this guy's throat and that I never watch the Substitute anymore.

btw: my gf sounds like a huge cunt but she's really a nice shy girl and was young as I back then.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

I also saw The Substitute sometime during the great year of 1996.  But I never stole your girlfriend.  And your post and children with angels's post really made my day.

[pete]

I cried so hard at Powder.

ps pas: "above the law" is also the name of an 80s actioner from hong kong.
a quick little snippet:

the film's pretty brutal and high octane, pretty memorable in terms of high-impact stunts.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

"Showdown in Little Tokyo"
starring Brandon Lee and Dolph Lundgren

I can't speak for Reinhold, but this is one of my all time guilty pleasures and we used to watch this far too often together.  Sometimes with larger groups who I don't think were enjoying it nearly as much as we do.  He introduced me to it, but I don't know if he jokingly loves his movie or despises it outright.  I think I straddle that middle ground.

[socketlevel]

ya i saw that too, i think it came out around the time of the crow right?

lasers man.

[pete]

I really liked rapid fire. good fighting. ripping off jackie chan, but it was before everyone did it.