News > 16 Films To See Before You...DIE!

Written by John Lichman

Kaiju Shakedown's Grady Hendrix, posting over at Twitch, has a list of 16 films you must watch. Why? Because they run the gamut of unknown, never-to-grace-a-multiplex or…The Wicker Man remake (see! He must've seen the Scatman video too.)

THE BAXTER (2005) – coming out in the summer of THE WEDDING CRASHERS probably didn’t help Michael Showalter’s slight, romantic comedy and that’s a shame. Showalter’s directorial debut imported the gang from TV sketch comedy “The State” as well as many of the folks involved in WET, HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and it’s a charming, mild-mannered labor of love. The words “charming” and “mild-mannered” aren’t generally used as high praise, but Mr. Showalter and Co. have made a movie that embraces both of those traits with a near-religious zeal and turns them into superlatives. The Baxter of the title is the guy in rom coms who doesn’t get the girl, the one who isn’t passionate about anything, the guy who the woman almost settles for before her true love shows up at the wedding and gives a passionate speech that saves her from walking up the aisle with this piece of dry, human toast. It doesn’t generate constant laughs, but when they do come they’re surprising, original and never cheap. This is fairy tale set in a storybook New York, where everyone speaks in complete sentences and with a supernatural precision that precludes contractions. It’s also a movie about WASPs. From their fussy table settings, to their blah chic clothes, their ridiculous pronunciation of exotic locales, and their withered senses of humor this is a movie that does for the frozen Anglo-Saxon souls of the Northeast what “Annie Hall” did for the Jews. Being a romantic comedy, there’s a final chase (this one on foot from Brooklyn to Washington Heights, via Chinatown – roughly the distance of a marathon), a confession of feelings, and a happy ending, but stick around for the end credits where a final footnote reveals the eternal injustice of being a Baxter. Wherever there are two lovers, there’s always a guy who doesn’t get the girl. And that’s Mr. Showalter’s message: love hurts, but you don’t have to be so rude about it.

 

CRANK (2006) – written in four and a half days by two camera operators turned director, CRANK was much maligned by sniffy, humorless critics with dust for blood on its release. Problem is, it’s not an action movie (very little onscreen fighting) and it’s not a thriller (nothing very thrilling about Jason Statham), it’s a comedy. And it’s a great, raucous crowd-pleasing one that likes punching people in the mouth. The kind of movie that absolutely requires a six-pack, this story of a hitman who has to keep his adrenaline pumping or he’ll die from a toxin that’s been injected into his system starts out with four on the floor and keeps the needle in the red all the way through the closing credits. It’s go-for-broke b-list entertainment at its best, full of the kind of twitchy camera tricks that would drive you crazy if it took itself seriously for a minute. Instead, it’s a pulpy comic book of a movie with unexpected smarts in strange little places. If you invite your friends over, supply them with plenty of beer and put this movie on and you all don’t have a blast then group suicide is highly recommended because life obviously holds no more joy for you.

DARKON (2007) - There is great upheaval in the realm. The peoples of Darkon grow weary of war. To stop the relentless spread of the cruel Mordomian Empire, Bannor of Laconia faces the armies of Keldar on the field of battle. The air trembles with the clash of arms. Challenges are issued. Treachery is done. And there will be duct tape. Lots of duct tape. This excruciatingly intimate documentary about LARP-ers (Google it!) looks like it was shot through a dirty windshield, which is too bad because it’s full of majestic helicopter and crane shots, kinetic tracking shots and a symphonic soundtrack, all of it intended to make you as interested in the outcome of the battle between Mordom and Laconia (which is mostly fought on Sunday mornings on soccer fields) as you were when Frodo went to try to get rid of that nasty ring. And it works. The directors (it took two of them, for some reason) manage to keep the personal drama high while also making the game-playing interesting and the LARP-ers approach their interviews with the kind of unguarded honesty that’s downright brutal in its disregard for the lines of personal revelation that most of us would never dream of crossing. When an overweight kid stares into the camera and says “I hope that the game gives me the confidence to one day maybe, you know, go up and start talking to…*gulp*…a girl,” he’s being braver than a warrior leading a charge into a battle he knows he cannot win.
(Will have a TV premiere on November 14 on the IFC Channel)

THE DISAPPOINTMENT OR THE FORCE OF CREDULITY (2007) – like going through a junk pile of DVDs and coming across an early work by Errol Morris or Ross McElwee, THE DISAPPOINTMENT is that much more amazing because it’s so unknown. A documentary about an obsessive treasure hunter made by his son, this personal history maps a psychic landscape that’s been lost. A cave rumored to hold buried treasure. A farm owned by an early American anarchist whose diaries are missing. A mysterious rock carving. A fraudulent Indian artifact. THE DISAPPOINTMENT uses these four elements to tell an all-American story about napalm, spirit possession, Korea, Vietnam, Indian massacres, early American opera, lynching, fanatical obsessions, 200 tons of dirt and the way mothers try to protect their families from wounds that never heal. There are some serious missteps on display (not the least of which is the narrator) but this is so deeply felt and the connections it makes are so surreal and inevitable that you can’t help but call it something of a small, strange masterpiece.
(Playing at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater in NYC this October)

and finally…

 

 

THE WICKER MAN (2006) – yes, it’s as good as the YouTube clips. Better, actually. While Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES remake should inspire a chain of theme restaurants serving gorilla burgers, THE WICKER MAN should inspire producers to reunite their creative team and attempt even grander things: an I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE remake starring Nic Cage? If it’s a slab of dumbsteak this bloody ridiculous then I’m there.

 

To see the rest, read the article, darn it. But first, this gives me an excuse to repost this video.