<p>Ek, also a young, fit Lancaster in Trapeze.</p>
<p>I loathed Napolean Dynamite too. But loved the Matrix - at least the first one.</p>
<p>Another Pirate Radio fan here. One of those movies we stumbled upon in the DVD markdown bin, and love.</p>
<p>I go out to the movies at LEAST once a week, though sometimes more (last week I saw 3). I know it’s a lot of money, but it’s my treat to myself and my hobby with my friends. Plus my relatives give me gift cards and the free rewards at MJR, so it’s not always expensive. </p>
<p>Anyway, I typically like any movie unless it’s incredibly awful. The first two that come to mind are After Earth and Heaven is For Real. My friend fell asleep 6 times during After Earth and I was struggling to find any kind of core to the plot. Meanwhile, the acting in Heaven is For Real was so cheesy and awful that my friends and I were in tears because we kept laughing at how bad it was. People clapped at the end and we completely lost it. </p>
<p>Ones that I’ve seen recently and loved are The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, Edge of Tomorrow, American Hustle, Kill Your Darlings, Maleficent (hehe, the inner child in me enjoyed it) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. </p>
<p>Ones that were so-so were Neighbors, A Million Ways to Die in the West, That Awkward Moment, Pompeii, and the X-men movie. </p>
<p>A mixed reaction was for Labor Day with Kate Winslet. I’m a huge fan of her acting and own quite a few of her movies, but the whole plot just seemed weird. I liked the actor who played her son and saw some real promise in him and of course Kate was good, but even they couldn’t salvage the writing. </p>
<p>I’m probably missing a good few of the movies I’ve seen recently, but I haven’t experienced too many personal disappointments. I only see the kinds of movies I think I’ll like. </p>
<p>The thread has reminded me of others I particularly disliked - Dead Poets Society and The Matrix. A huge part of hating Dead Poets is that I do not like Robin Williams, but I don’t think a different actor could have saved it from itself. </p>
<p>Hiroshima Mon Amour (and Alain Resnais in general): I get that it’s more a poem than a story. I don’t get the poem. I once heard a then-famous Mitteleuropean film critic give a talk on Red Desert, illustrated with bits from the film. I asked him a question. He said, “Ooof! You are so leeterary!” and took another question. P.S., I am not so sure I get L’avventura, either.</p>
<p>Whit Stillman: Is a god in my house. The kids and I have seen the Metropolitan/Barcelona/Last Days of Disco trilogy at least 6-7 times, and more than that for Metropolitan. We even all liked Damsels In Distress, if not quite as much. (Both my kids also tapped seriously in high school, so there was that.) Like mathmom – pretty much exactly like mathmom – for me the Stillman films portray a world I knew pretty well; unlike mathmon, I don’t mind that at all. (I even lived in Barcelona for a year, and still read and sort of speak Catalan.) </p>
<p>About a decade ago, one of my college friends discovered that a co-worker of his had been Stillman’s roommate at Harvard and was still friends with Stillman. My friend wound up having cocktails with Stillman one evening. I was so jealous!</p>
<p>I always wanted to curate a “Talkies” festival, and to present a triple bill of Metropolitan, Before Sunrise, and Clerks – three different takes on late-adolescent romance and identity with slightly different timeframes and vastly different social settings.</p>
<p>Alain Resnais: I <strong>love</strong> Mon Oncle d’Amerique. One of my favorite French films. I also really liked Providence, which was one of those poems. It has been far too long since I have been in a place where one can routinely see foreign films in a theater, alas.</p>
<p>Antonioni: I must say that Red Desert annoyed the hell out of me. I had to watch it repeatedly in a college film class, and I do not share the director’s interest in Monica Vitti posing affectedly against various backgrounds. L’Avventura does nothing for me either.Blow Up was interesting, perhaps because shots of Vanessa Redgrave posing are more interesting, since she has a living face, not an Etruscan mask, as people were wont to say about Vitti. Also, there was a plot. I found Fellini’s The White Sheik charming, and Antonioni wrote the story. I never watched Zabriskie Point, since friends who also watched a lot of foreign films described it as appallingly bad.</p>
<p>I haven’t been able to watch Damsels in Distress. </p>
<p>L’Avventura was one of my most miserable movie experiences ever. A tiny, stuffy movie theater in Paris sitting next to a guy who reeked of cigarette smoke. Totally affected how I feel about the movie. </p>
<p>Any Erich Rohmer fans out there? He’s one of my faves. </p>
<p>I started off badly with Rohmer. Le genou de Claire is pretty offensive if you don’t take a laissez-faire attitude towards middle-aged men lusting after teenagers. But I tend to find his later movies reliably entertaining and generally inconsequential. They do not over-tax the brain. I remember enjoying L’ami de mon amie, Pauline a la plage, and Les rendezvous de Paris. There are so many of them it is hard to see them all.</p>
<p>
It is not that I mind it, it’s that I was sufficiently clueless not to realize I was surrounded by would be debutantes in high school. The day girl population of my school was much more middle class than the boarders. And it being the late 60s/early 70s we were all madly pretending to be proletarians anyway. As a friend of mine said, when a girl we knew was showing off a diamond ring she’d gotten for her birthday was the first time she realized that the girl came from those Maytags. Alumni events inevitably take place in truly fabulous apartments in Manhattan or estates in Greenwich. Same thing goes for Harvard, but perhaps even more so. Though I attend fewer local events and was even less connected with the wealthy crowd. I’d go to that late adolescent movie festival.</p>
<p>The filmmaker I never got was Bunuel, I saw a bunch of them with a boyfriend who’d spent his junior year of high school in Barcelona. He introduced me to a lot of things I learned to love, but that wasn’t one of them!</p>
<p>I hated Donnie Darko. </p>
<p>I was never a big fan of Fight Club. Or the Matrix. </p>
<p>Avatar had a dumb story, the movie made for its scenery, not for its story telling. I think the same of Benjamin Button, I didn’t really like the story, but I really liked the artistic direction in Benjamin Button. </p>
<p>^ That is the sort of movie that I would have liked more if I didn’t hear all the hype about it beforehand. But maybe that is true for many movies.</p>
<p>Gravity
American Hustle</p>
<p>Sideways
Silver Linings Playbook
Lost in Translation
A Clockwork Orange</p>
<p>Napolean Dynamite was stupid but fun, especially since we had a geeky teen boy at the time. </p>
<p>Bunuel: Adore The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, another of my all-time favorites. Anyone who hasn’t seen it should do so! 
That Obscure Object of Desire was okay. Belle de Jour was great, albeit…unique.</p>
<p>Rohmer: The ones I recall the most clearly are Chloe in the Afternoon and Claire’s Knee. I enjoyed them both, I would happily watch more of them, but I don’t find them compelling. Plot was definitely not his thing, although I enjoy the endless talking. I’ve never seen Pauline at the Beach. I ought to. I know I’ve seen Ma Nuit Chez Maude, but I don’t remember it.</p>
<p>But if you really want to suffer, try the German new wave…</p>
<p>How about the Taviani brothers? Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars are both wonderful.</p>
<p>@VaBlueBird, I liked all four of those films a lot. :)</p>
<p>VaBluebird, why did you dislike Sideways? I recall being so impressed with Sandra Oh, that I watched hr TV show for years. Clockwork Orange was my most disliked pop movie, along with that Burt Reynolds film about the rednecks (only the music was good).</p>
<p>For these older movies, did you all see them when they were released or much later? Some needed to be seen in the context of the times. </p>
<p>What I like about Rohmer is his ability to show how people lie to themselves, and try - unsuccessfully - to play the person they’d prefer to be rather than the person their actions prove them to be.Also, much of his dialogue is ad lib, and because of that, often spoken slowly.Which makes me feel good about how much French I can still understand </p>
<p>Consolation, here’s a gossipy reason to see Pauline at the Beach: the main actress is the longtime secret girlfriend/now wife of the public figure/intellectual (“God is dead but my hair is perfect”) Bernard-Henri Levy… Also, it’s fun. </p>
<p>I was too late to really appreciate 400 Blows – saw it after many later’s Truffaut movies – and his “Pocket Change” (L’argent du poche) remains a favorite. </p>
<p>Love, love, love Stanley Kubrick, but it took me about 30 years to get up my courage to see Clockwork Orange. </p>
<p>My, haven’t we suddenly turned highbrow! Bernard-Henri Levy jokes!</p>
<p>I was all excited to think that Levy was married to Amanda Langlet, who played Pauline, but it turns out that he’s married to the much less interesting actress who played Pauline’s promiscuous aunt.</p>