Movies I love, that don't get enough love

I’m all about love right now. Maybe it’s the spring weather finally kicking in and seasonal affective disorder kicking out. Maybe it’s that I just finished a midterm that I feel good about. Maybe it’s a lot of things. But either way I’m feel like spreading the love and what better way to do it then with my first list. I love lists! I love them because lists categorize things and as a future accountant I love categorizing things. I thought my first list was going to be my favorite movies of 2011, but that is taking far too long and will have to wait. Instead I’ve decided to make a list all about love. Specifically, I want to give love to movies that I feel deserve more love than they normally receive. For various reasons these movies more or less fell between the cracks of popular culture, and while they are fantastic, I don’t feel like they get enough love overall. Without further a due here is my list of movies I love that don’t get enough love:

Brick (Rian Johnson 2005, On Netflix instant): This movie is what started this list. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I unabashedly love Brick. It’s a complicated crime mystery involving a guy (loner Brendan Fry played awesomely by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whose ex-girlfriend goes missing and he is on the trail to try and figure out what happened. Its neo-noir at it’s absolutely best as the story twists and turns. The dialogue is so razor sharp that I still am picking things up on my fourth and fifth viewing. Every character talks like they are some sort of closeted literary major who also happens to sell drugs and has read The Art of War. It’s easily one of the most quotable movies ever made. The last half hour is so complex and full of twists that I am utterly useless to society when it’s on still to this day. Oh and it’s all mind blowingly set in high school.

Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg 2010, On Netflix instant): Mark Hogancamp was beaten within an inch of his life outside of a bar. He recovered but is left with serious brain damage. Because of this he was no longer able to have interactions like a normal human being leaving him alone and sad. As the tagline for this movie says “his world was stolen.” As a way to combat this he created his own world in his backyard, with a town he calls Marwencol. Marwencol is a 1/6^th scale town that is inhabited by characters Mark creates using WW2 era dolls. He chronicles these stories with his camera and what comes out of it is unquestionably art. Not only are the dolls and town painstakingly accurate to the real world, but the stories Mark tells with them are better than 90% of the movies being created in Hollywood. Everything about Mark’s world is fascinating and this documentary does a great job of exploring everything. From Mark’s accident, to Marwencol, to Mark’s oddities, and it all culminates triumphantly in Mark’s first showcase.

Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach 1995, On Netflix instant): First off this isn’t the Will Ferrell movie of the same title. Instead, this is defining movie that any recent or about to be college graduate should watch. It’s about a group of recently graduated friends who struggle to figure out their place post-college. It’s not a particularly original premise and nothing really happens, but for what it lacks in originality climax it more than makes up for with “leaving you questioning your entire life”-ity. It’s the kind of movie you watch and then spend an hour or so just sitting there afterwards pondering everything. “I’m having one of those times where my name sounds very weird to me” is one of my all time favorite movie quotes. It also has some extremely 90’s fashion in it, you know if you are nostalgic.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Joon-Ho Bong 2000, On Netflix instant): This is the first foreign film on this list. I contemplated not putting foreign films on here because it’s hard to tell if they were sufficiently loved in their home country, but I put this in because I have a hunch it never did. This is because the director Joon-Ho Bong is a very successful director over in South Korea. He’s best known over in the states for The Host (ironically probably his least favorite of my films, but still enjoyable) and I have to imagine his other more high profile films (Memories of Murder and Mother) got more attention over there, but my favorite film of his is his first feature length film Barking Dogs Never Bite. Like most of his movies it’s a simple premise, a young college professor is at his wits end with a local dog that keeps yapping so he decides to try and shut it up. What ends up happening is both strangely dark and really quirky as he finds it more difficult than he thought to take this dog out. Throughout though it’s all really fun and manic, staples of Joon-Ho’s films.

The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy 2007, Not on instant): I could have just as easily written about another great film from Thomas McCarthy called The Station Agent as both came out to little attention, but I feel like The Visitor is overlooked even more. The Station Agent sometimes gets some attention as people remember it when talking about how much they love Peter Dinklage, but The Visitor is almost never brought up. It’s too bad too because Richard Jenkins (who was nominated for an Oscar for this film) gives just as great of a performance. The movie revolves around a college professor (Jenkins) who goes to his apartment in New York (that he rarely goes to because of his work in another city) for a conference only to find that an immigrant couple has moved in. Rather than kick them out he decides to let them stay. Just as they are forming a great connection the male immigrant is sent to a detention center where Jenkins and his wife try to help get him free. It’s also kind of a hard movie to fully describe but the best way is to just say that it is beautiful and sad.

Four Lions (Christopher Morris 2010, On Netflix instant): It’s early in this movie’s life so there is still time for it to hit cult status but Four Lions is easily one of the funniest movies of the last ten years and nobody knows about it. It’s also not the easiest movie to sell someone on as it’s very dark humor about a group of idiot British Jihadists who are planning a terrorist act, but seriously it’s ridiculously funny. Imagine if the manic rants of Always Sunny in Philadelphia were mixed with the dumb logic and lack of self awareness from Anchorman all set up around overzealous religious absurdity. If that makes any sense, it’s sort of like that. Almost every line and scene is spot on parody, and more importantly it avoids the easy jokes. It could be real easy for someone to make a parody about terrorists that makes racially generalized and religiously ignorant jokes over and over again, but this movie never falls for that crutch. It’s simply hilarious.

So there you go six movies I love that I hope someday you will too. Or maybe you already love some of these movies and you are reading this while nodding along and thinking “Gosh I heart that movie so much!  I should go watch it again.” Either way, you should probably watch them.