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The most famous film you've never seen

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    The most famous film you've never seen

    I'm sure we've done it before, but...

    Jurassic Park and Titanic for me. The former just looked too silly, and the latter I just had no emotional interest in the storyline.

    #2
    The Shining along with just about every other Stephen King film
    Any of the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street or any other slasher horror classics
    Moonlight
    Terms of Endearment
    12 Years a Slave
    Slumdog Millionaire
    Psycho. I have heard too much about it to be surprised or interested
    Get Out. I stopped watching when the deer got killed.
    Full Metal Jacket
    I've never got past the first hour of The Deer Hunter
    Same with Clockwork Orange

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      #3
      Forrest Gump. Somehow never got around to it.
      Titanic. By all accounts went on longer than the voyage would have done and any way I knew the ending.

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        #4
        I have never seen Star Wars, as the saying goes.

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          #5
          Anything that's come out in the last quarter of a century. Except for Curse Of The Were Rabbit...

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            #6
            Oh tons. Not having a good metric for famous to hand, I decided to have a look at Wikipedia's list(s) of the highest-grossing films of all time. Of the top 50 I've seen one. Of the top 10 adjusted for inflation, I've seen two. Of the highest-grossing films per year since 1915, I do a bit better with a whopping total of twelve.

            It's an occasional matter of personal and professional embarrassment for me, considering I went to school with a load of film studies nerds and now work as a film archivist. Pretty much once a week I have to confess that I've either never seen a film I know is an all-time classic, or that I've never heard of something apparently incredibly famous amongst cinephiles.

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              #7
              Jurassic Park and Titanic were both milestones in the application of CGI and that was a big part of their appeal at the time. As far as that goes, they don't seem very impressive now - not so much because the CGI in them looks especially bad, but there are way fewer CGI shots in them than in a typical blockbuster film in 2018.

              Titanic is silly and yet very watchable and rewatchable somehow. As I've said before, for those of us in our 20s in the 90s - when everyone seemed to be trying so hard to be ironic and yet there was nothing less cool than trying hard - there was something really refreshing about anything that was so shamelessly sentimental and guileless.

              Oh tons. Not having a good metric for famous to hand, I decided to have a look at Wikipedia's list(s) of the highest-grossing films of all time. Of the top 50 I've seen one. Of the top 10 adjusted for inflation, I've seen two. Of the highest-grossing films per year since 1915, I do a bit better with a whopping total of twelve.
              I've seen almost all of those except I don't think I saw all of Doctor Zhivago. It was on AMC a while back but I didn't catch it all. I should try to see that. I've also seen most on that list of biggest grossing films of each year back to about 1950. Before that, my rate gets a lot spottier largely because those haven't been on cable much and I'm not sure many are available on streaming services.

              On the unadjusted list, I've seen all but Furious 7 (I tried to watch one of those films and just couldn't get past the bad dialogue) and not the most recent Jurassic Park. I just can't be bothered after not being super impressed with the previous one. I can't remember which Transformers films I've seen, but it's more than enough for one lifetime so I don't need to try to see them all.

              My big blind spot is anything not in English. So all of those b&w Italian and French films that one is supposed to see on the Criterion Collection are largely unknown to me. I've seen a few Kurosawa films, but not all of them.

              I have made an effort to see a lot of highly influential films even if they don't hold-up particularly well, just so I know what critics are talking about. But some are just a "tough sit" and some, like all the horror films, just repel me.
              Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 05-12-2018, 16:13.

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                #8
                The Empire Strikes Back
                The Princess Bride
                Ghostbusters
                Ferris Bueller's Day Off
                The Goonies
                Any superhero/Marvel/DC rubbish from the last 20 years.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by dogbeak View Post
                  Oh tons. Not having a good metric for famous to hand, I decided to have a look at Wikipedia's list(s) of the highest-grossing films of all time. Of the top 50 I've seen one. Of the top 10 adjusted for inflation, I've seen two. Of the highest-grossing films per year since 1915, I do a bit better with a whopping total of twelve.
                  I don't do much better on that list - it's very heavy on franchise films and/or kids' films and it's been a good few years since I've taken the kids to the cinema regularly. I've tended to avoid Marvel movies, Harry Potter, modern James Bond, Fast and the Furious, the newer Star Wars, the Hobbit (though did see all LOTR films at the cinema), and between them the account for a lot of that list.

                  However at a Christmas quiz night earlier this week our team did get 17 out of 19 on the festive movie photo round, missing only Carol and Meet Me in St Louis, neither of which I'd seen.

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                    #10
                    Films I feel I should have seen:

                    Lawrence of Arabia
                    Seven Samurai
                    Rashomon
                    The Seventh Seal
                    Frozen
                    The Red Shoes

                    Bicycle Thieves
                    La Dolce Vita

                    Films I didn't finish:

                    Citizen Kane
                    Metropolis

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                      #11
                      Sophie's Choice

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                        #12
                        Realistically, one of the recent Marvel movies.

                        Classically: Gone With The Wind

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                          #13
                          Yeah Gone With the Wind for me too. Or at least the last hour or so of it.

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                            #14
                            Avatar
                            Titanic
                            Gone With The Wind (all of)
                            Gladiator
                            Schindlers List
                            Saving Private Ryan
                            Almost all the Marvel and DC nonsense
                            4 Weddings and a Funeral

                            Myriad others.

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                              #15
                              There are some films that are so goddamn long it's no surprise several of us have never made it through. Gone With The Wind, Dr Zhivago, Lawrence Of Arabia, etc. You should see Lawrence Of Arabia if you haven't though, it's a blast.

                              HP, good observation with CGI; Avatar was mindboggling successful, but I don't know if it's even repeated frequently, as it feels little more than a fad.

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                                #16
                                SB, I also have seen none of those in your list. I suppose I watched about 45 minutes of Gladiator, it was laughably bad.

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                                  #17
                                  Surprised to find that I've seen one on the all-time list. Other than that, I haven't seen any other film mentioned so far.

                                  edit: Oh hang on. The one in the list was a remake of the one I've seen. So none of them.
                                  Last edited by Capybara; 05-12-2018, 16:35.

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                                    #18
                                    Gone With The Wind. That film, that book, have a lot to answer for.

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                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by adams house cat View Post
                                      Gone With The Wind. That film, that book, have a lot to answer for.
                                      Maybe not quite as much as Birth of a Nation but I know what you mean.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                                        Avatar
                                        Titanic
                                        Gone With The Wind (all of)
                                        Gladiator
                                        Schindlers List
                                        Saving Private Ryan
                                        Almost all the Marvel and DC nonsense
                                        4 Weddings and a Funeral

                                        Myriad others.
                                        How do you know its nonsense if you've never seen them?

                                        (Much of it is, of course)

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                                          #21
                                          I've not seen none of them. I've seen a small handful. An early Batman, an Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, maybe a couple of others. I keep trying with the ones people rave about and they keep being shit.

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                                            #22
                                            If you didn't like Black Panther or The Dark Knight then you're not going to like any of the others. Not because they're "shit," but because somehow your brain just doesn't work that way, likely due to differences in acculturation. There's nothing wrong with that.

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                                              #23
                                              There are some films that are so goddamn long it's no surprise several of us have never made it through.
                                              A lot of my favourite films are very long. The Godfather 1 and 2, Seven Samurai, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, Lawrence of Arabia. For that matter, Shoah. But yeah, a lot of films could do with shaving off half an hour or more.

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                                                #24
                                                I've seen almost all of the top-grossing films and most of the top-grossing films in a given year going back about 50 years.

                                                I make some effort to see anything influential or "classic" just so I know what critics are talking about, but there are big holes in what I've seen - especially films not in English, horror, westerns, and war films. I'm increasingly avoiding films by directors who seem to do violence for it's own sake.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Like GO, pretty much everything from the last 25 years.

                                                  Also:

                                                  Die Hard + follow ups
                                                  All the Rocky films
                                                  All the Rambo films
                                                  The Bourne Identity + follow ups

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