Can you think of any that were done poorly? I must have put them down the memory hole. Let’s see…
The Butterfly Effect was a good idea but an awful movie. Sequels are unspeakable.
Frailty was just okay.
The Forgotten started okay but lol at the reveal.
I love Take Shelter but remain divided about the ending.
Looks like it’s available on several free and paid platforms. It’s been a while since I saw it. Might put it on later.
Saw this many years ago, ~B seems fair. Kinda like a movie-length Twilight Zone ep.
That’s a good list.
Enter the Void is an absolute piece of trash puzzle film. Really every Noe film is pure garbage and all are trying to be clever puzzle films.
I’ve never seen this. Added to my queue
Blue Velvet
Knew after about two minutes that this was going to be approximately 10 billion times better (or at least that much more to my liking) than Eraserhead. Significant bounceback in my exploration of the Lynch catalog.
4/5
Have you seen Mullholland Drive yet?
No. Have just watched his first three now (Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Blue Velvet). Will get to Mulholland Drive.
I can’t wait to hear your first impression. I felt completely lost and yet completely enamored. You’re a smart cinephile so I just wonder where you’ll be when the credits roll.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Took LKJ’s advice and decided to watch this before it left Amazon Prime.
I’m not really into Westerns, but it was on LKJ’s five star list, so it has to be at least very good, right?
At almost 3 hours, it was longer than I was expecting; there was probably some stuff that could have been cut, but I can’t identify anything specific right now. It was a very entertaining movie, especially the last half. The title is a bit of a misnomer, the Clint Eastwood character is certainly one I would not call “good”. He might not even qualify as an anti-hero.
What also caught me by surprise is how much comedy there was in this film. The scene where Tuco and Blondie carry that box labeled “Explosives” was some Wile E Coyote/Road Runner shit.
The extremely poor voice synchronization was very distracting at first, and I never truly got over it.
But overall, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it and is looking for something to do tomorrow before it disappears from streaming.
8/10
Just looked at the list and if I counted right I’ve now seen 30 out of 48 and I think the only one I would give under an 8/10 would be the original Star Wars, which I’ve got as a 7/10.
Thank you for the compliment, of course. I may be smart, I may be a cinephile, but what I am not is a keen and observant movie-watcher. I could also just as easily have been the subject of that Office cold-open where they investigate the question of, “is there any limit to what Stanley will NOT notice?” If I speak intelligently to a movie, it’s almost always because I’ve rewatched it one or more times so that things eventually stuck. All of that is to say: if you got confused, I’m probably getting confused too. But I’ll give it a go all the same. Since that one is later in the Lynch order, it might be a bit, as I’m naturally going to tend to want to watch in some semblance of order to keep up with the upcoming Blank Check schedule.
I’m guessing Casablanca is my favorite movie that you haven’t seen. I already gave it perfect marks absent context, but finding out that it was released in the middle of WWII was such cool context given the content of the film that it elevated it to borderline personal top five films. Rewatched it within the past year and was even more impressed than the already extremely high opinion I already had of it.
I have seen that one. It was on a plane, but I liked it quite a bit. I’m not sure about a 10/10, but certainly a 9/10.
From your list, I’m missing:
Vertigo
The Shining
It’s a Wonderful Life
Goodfellas
Dog Day Afternoon
Singin’ in the Rain
Modern Times
A Few Good Men
Bridge on the River Kwai
Harikiri
Rebecca
All About Eve
Psycho
The Insider
Do the Right Thing
The Thing
Michael Clayton
I’ll add The Sound of Music too, because I haven’t seen it since I was about 8 years old, so I feel like that shouldn’t count.
lol michael clayton hell yeah
Scanning the list, I have exceptional confidence in how you’ll react to Dog Day Afternoon and Do the Right Thing.
The Insider is just criminally never on streaming for the most part. It made a one-month stop a few months ago on the Criterion Channel and that’s as much as I’ve seen it on streaming in a long time. Granted that this is a movie that I go harder for than the wider public necessarily does (and ctr notably didn’t like it), though my take on it is not really a hot take either; it was a Best Picture nominee that carries a 4.1/5 average on Letterboxd. Personally, I’ve got it as Michael Mann’s opus.
This is definitely unavoidably noticeable. Took a look at what the story is on it exactly (I thought at least part of would come from these being Italian movies that had lower budgets). Wiki gives some context:
As an international cast was employed, actors performed in their native languages. Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Wallach spoke English and were dubbed into Italian for their debut release in Rome. For the American version, the lead acting voices were used, but supporting cast members were dubbed into English.[46] The result is noticeable in the bad synchronisation of voices to lip movements on screen; none of the dialogue is completely in sync because Leone rarely shot his scenes with synchronised sound.[47] Various reasons have been cited for this: Leone often liked to play Morricone’s music over a scene and possibly shout things at the actors to get them in the mood. Leone cared more for visuals than dialogue (his English was limited at best). Given the technical limitations of the time, recording the sound cleanly would have been difficult in most of the extremely wide shots Leone frequently used. Also, it was standard practice in Italian films at this time to shoot silently and post-dub. Whatever the actual reason, all dialogue in the film was recorded in postproduction.
Looks like it might happen sooner than I thought, since I went looking for Wild at Heart and it’s totally unstreamable. Like, not even rentable or anything. I’m sure there are underground means to watch it, but I tend to not do that. I didn’t think that was that obscure of a movie.
