The Best Films You Never Saw
I guess the confluence of listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention doing stuff like Ravel's Bolero and Ring of Fire ("Johnny Cash couldn't be here tonight...do you want us to sing it anyway?") on The Best Band You Never Heard, and spending the evening watching an old favorite which nobody on the planet other than myself seems to have seen, I thought I'd have a go at recommending ten films that you're highly unlikely (at a guess, admittedly; this is more than a little subjective) to have seen or heard of. Come on, prove me wrong. I've tried to stay away from films I've mentioned elsewhere. So, in no particular order...
  • F/X--This is the film I was watching this evening, a 1986 thriller from Robert Mandel, who's done not much noteworthy otherwise (although 1991's The Substitute was moderately entertaining). Bryan Brown plays a special effects man who is enlisted by the Justice Department's Witness Protection Program to fake the murder of a mob boss. Except that maybe it wasn't fake, and suddenly everyone in sight is trying to kill him. A bunch of good performances, including Brian Dennehy and Martha Gehman, and lots of tricky fun. Watch for a dialog-free John Malkovich.
  • Young Sherlock Homes--Produced by Steven Spielberg et alia, and directed by Barry Levinson, this film posits (with the blessing of Dame Jean Conan-Doyle) a universe in which Holmes and Watson had met as teenagers, only to find themselves knee-deep in killer Egyptian cultists, flying machines and mystery. Nicholas Rowe (who can also be seen as the dope-grower who gets his toes blown off in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) gives a flawless rendition in the title role, and deserves a big chunk of the credit for making this movie as much fun as it is.
  • The Navigator--This is one of my very favorite time-travel fantasies. In 14th century Britain, the plague is raging, and a small group of miners are led by the visions of a young boy to dig deeper and deeper into the earth, in hopes of ending the scourge. They emerge, somehow, on the other side of the planet and 600 years in the future, in modern-day New Zealand, where they attempt to complete their quest. A quirky and warm movie, whose director Vincent Ward, was also responsible for Map of the Human Heart and What Dreams May Come.
  • The Brother from Another Planet--A 1984 film written and directed by John Sayles, the stand-out here is Joe Morton's performance, throughout which he doesn't utter a single word, in the title role. Morton plays an (mostly) humanoid alien, apparently a slave, who's somehow managed to land in Harlem and is on the run from some other evil aliens who look like people, too, but squawk like chickens when enraged and know kung-fu. Tell me that these guys aren't the prototypes for the Agents in The Matrix. Best moment: when the white guys wander into the bar and ask Morton whether he can tell them where the subway is. Touching and funny.
  • The Hudsucker Proxy--This, for some reason, seems to be the Coen Brothers film that nobody's seen. Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. This is probably the lightest comedy that the Coens have made, involving a plot by the board of directors of a company whose CEO has just committed suicide by taking a dive from the 44th floor ("Forty-five, counting the mezzanine..."). They hope to take over by putting a brand new hire from the mailroom in charge of the company to drive the stock price down. Tim Robbins is the poor schmoe with big ideas who winds up in charge, and Jennifer Jason-Leigh comes close to out-Katherine-Hepburning Katherine Hepburn as the tough girl reporter who's determined to get to the bottom of what's going on. Bruce Campbell appears momentarily, and Jim True is great as "Buzz", the wisecracking elevator operator. Another favorite bit: Tim Robbins' "orientation"--"...and they dock ya!"
  • Lady in White--Frank LaLoggia, who hasn't done jackshit worth talking about otherwise, put together this tight and effective 1988 ghost story. Lukas Haas is Frankie, a sixth-grader who gets locked into the school's coatroom overnight, where he witnesses the ghost of a little girl re-enacting her own murder there, ten years previously. Now Frankie knows too much, and soon the killer's after him... Given the theme, there's a lot more originality, both in plot and execution, than one might have expected. Might have just been the law of averages as far as LaLoggia was concerned, but when you're sitting in the audience, who cares, eh?
  • Shattered--Another neat suspense film, this one features Tom Berenger as the victim of a terrible car crash, in which his face was destroyed and his memory wiped out. His doctors work to reconstruct his face, and his wife (Great Scacchi) is devoted to helping him recover, but as he gets better, disturbing memories begin to surface, and puzzling facts begin to emerge. A nifty performance by Bob Hoskins as a pet store owner/private detective, and some great twisty turns before you get to the bottom of things. Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot and The Perfect Storm) kept me guessing with this one.
  • Nick of Time--This seems to be the Johnny Depp movie that no one's ever seen (again, maybe it's just the people I know). Depp plays Gene Watson, an accountant who suddenly finds himself pulled into an assassination plot, and he's slated to be the (expendable) assassin. The real killers are holding his daughter hostage, and he's got exactly ninety minutes to do the killing. One of the neat features of this film is that it's one of the few movies around to have been done in "real time", that is to say that the action on screen takes just as long to watch as it's supposed to have taken to happen. Another example (sort of--Hitchcock fudged things a bit) is Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 Rope. Direction is by John Badham.
  • Killing Zoe--Roger Avary (who did some uncredited scripting on True Romance) wrote and directed this neat little character-driven caper flick. Erik Stoltz (who you're maybe more likely to have seen in The Prophecy or Mask) plays Zed, a safecracker who's come to Paris to help an old friend pull off a big bank job. The incredibly lovely Julie Delpy is the title character, a hooker who manages to get in the way of a smooth operation. John-Hugues Anglade, the nice boyfriend in La Femme Nikita shows that he can do "No More Mr. Nice Guy" as well here.
  • Nomads--Yes, it's a Pierce Brosnan movie. No, don't let that put you off. It's based on a terrific (and inexplicably out-of-print) Chelsea Quinn Yarbro novel, and concerns an anthropologist who seems to have discovered an urban, yet nomadic, tribe. As he learns more about them, it becomes apparent that they're not precisely human. John McTiernan (Predator and Die Hard) did the screen adaptation and direction here. This is a film that you need to pay attention to, but the atmosphere and constant edge make it worth the effort.
Lots o' runners-up and honorable mentions: Dust Devil (again), The Ruling Class, Night of the Comet (again), The Stuntman, The Frighteners (again), Tampopo, The Lathe of Heaven, The Bedroom Window, Changeling, Deep Rising (again), Fallen, Time After Time and Silent Running came to mind...