The most famous film you've never seen

[Lang Spoon]

I wish I’d never sat through all of Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, second act of Full Metal Jacket of course. Kubrick really must have been trolling us with his approach to actors and dialogue. I can get making the humans deliberately boring in 2001 so the only human character is a homicidal robot, but he seemed to do the same in Barry Lyndon while making each fucking scene exquisite to look at and dull as a post, or let his leading men get away with hysterical camp overacting (Clockwork Orange/Shining).

The last scenes in Full Metal Jacket just seem dull/cliched and really fucking silly given how England Vietnam looks. Fuck seeing War therough the Eyes of Matthew Modine. Kinda wished he’d get shot before the end.

I’ve never seen Gone With the Wind, or just about any big Oscar film these past 5 years or so.

[Lang Spoon]

I’ve so far managed to avoid Love Actually. Though I fear I will soon be made to succumb.

[Snake Plissken]

It's manipulative as fuck, but when you are in the right mood it gets you. Other times, it is such an annoying film. (And as the excellent SMERSHPod episode on it pointed out, it really should be called "I Want To Fuck The Help".)

[Lang Spoon]

I’ll probably start crying by the end despite myself.

[Sam]

The top two on the adjusted for inflation list (which is to say, the top one on each of the adjusted and unadjusted lists). Avatar and Gone With The Wind.

In total I've seen three of the top ten on the adjusted list, and sixteen of the fifty on the unadjusted one (I am making the assumption that the first Harry Potter one is on that list, because I've seen it but can't remember what it's called. So if it's not there, then I've seen fifteen of them).

Those lists obviously provide a pretty good indicator of what the 'most famous' films are (in English, at least), but I wonder whether there's an alternative conversation about others which are barely less famous but aren't on that list, and are probably known more for artistic merit. Citizen Kane (which I have seen) isn't on that all-time unadjusted top fifty, for example. In that category the 'biggest' one I've not seen is probably Metropolis. But it's difficult to say, what with not having seen it.

Of that massive list of highest-grossing films by year, I've seen 38, thanks largely to Disney up until 1992 (and indeed including 1992, but what I mean is that Aladdin is the first one I actually saw in the cinema when it was released. Probably).

[imp]

Back to the Future. I feel it's gone far past the point where I can see it, like when a relative has been doing the same job for at least a decade, you don't know or can't remember what it is, and it's now way too late to ask. Even asking someone "What's it actually about?" would be like asking another relative, "What does Bob do again?"

[Jah Womble]

I've seen most of the stonewall classics, but I still haven't seen Citizen Kane.

(The original Jurassic Park was ace.)

[slackster]

From that top grossing wiki list, Avatar really stands out. I’m not exactly avoiding it, but I guess I’ve just not spotted it on telly/streaming when I fancied a peek.

The Hobbit series and Star Wars 4 onwards I’ve no interest in watching at all.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Back to the Future. I feel it's gone far past the point where I can see it, like when a relative has been doing the same job for at least a decade, you don't know or can't remember what it is, and it's now way too late to ask. Even asking someone "What's it actually about?" would be like asking another relative, "What does Bob do again?"

You can't have watched Channel 4 on a Sunday afternoon in about 12 years. Which is probably quite a positive thing to be able to say about your life.

[Ginger Yellow]

Back to the Future. I feel it's gone far past the point where I can see it, like when a relative has been doing the same job for at least a decade, you don't know or can't remember what it is, and it's now way too late to ask.

Dude, you should totally watch it, and Part 2. Not least because you can giggle at the vision of the distant future of... 2015.

[Disco Child Ballads]

The only Rocky film I've seen is Rocky IV.

[elguapo4]

Avatar in financial terms is the biggest film I haven't seen, I've no interest in Marvel/DC stuff so haven't seen any Batman since the second one with DeVito and Pfeifer, in culturally important stakes I haven't seen Laurence of Arabia or Citizen Kane.

[Hot Pepsi]

I haven't seen Lawrence of Arabia. I probably should.

Other than "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," Gone With the Wind is shit and contributes to our collective amnesia about slavery and the confederacy.

Citizen Kane is worth watching, but given that it's regularly pitched as the greatest film of all time, you may find it underwhelming.

I have seen Avatar. It's fine. I do not understand why that, among so many other CGI-driven spectacles, did so well commercially or why James Cameron is making a bunch of sequels so long after the original. I think he imagines that it's like Star Wars or Tolkien in its cultural-resonance, but I just don't see that. Maybe in some other country it's huge?

[WOM]

Citizen Kane is worth watching, but given that it's regularly pitched as the greatest film of all time, you may find it underwhelming.

Probably the most insightful thing I've read about Citizen Kane is that it's difficult today to see just how revolutionary it was for its time. When it was made, it used techniques that no other film had yet used. And not just one or two...but ten or twelve.

It's like Sargeant Pepper's in that it changed what music sounded like, but from a distance, it's hard to put yourself into the headspace of hearing that sound for the first time.

[Amor de Cosmos]

That applies to Birth of a Nation too. In 1920 it was probably like 2001 in 1968, at least by contemporary accounts. Now it's just "The KKK!... WTF!!!"

[tracteurgarcon]

Home Alone or any of the sequels.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Come to think of it, there are several 'classic' 80s films I've still never seen. Particularly Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Goonies, Footloose and The Breakfast Club.

[Lang Spoon]

You’ve has a lucky escape so. First saw the goonies as an adult and my god it was pish.

[Ginger Yellow]

Ferris Bueller is great though. Well, Ferris is an arsehole, but the film's great.

[WOM]

Ferris Bueller is great. Breakfast Club is worth watching. Footloose is a bit shit, and Goonies is still fine if you're a kid. It's a bit like Stranger Things, but not 'retro'.

[Patrick Thistle]

.
Star Wars 4 onwards I’ve no interest in watching at all.

Now we might be on a different numbering system here but Star Wars 4, 5 and 6 are the good* ones.


*cf other Star Wars

[Hot Pepsi]

Probably the most insightful thing I've read about Citizen Kane is that it's difficult today to see just how revolutionary it was for its time. When it was made, it used techniques that no other film had yet used. And not just one or two...but ten or twelve.

It's like Sargeant Pepper's in that it changed what music sounded like, but from a distance, it's hard to put yourself into the headspace of hearing that sound for the first time.

Correct. In an interview about his book about being obsessed with movies, Patton Oswalt said that most of us have more film-making tools in our pocket than were available to Orson Welles. That's probably true.

[Hot Pepsi]

Now we might be on a different numbering system here but Star Wars 4, 5 and 6 are the good* ones.


*cf other Star Wars

The most recent Star Wars films, 7, 8, Rogue One and Solo are actually very good genre films - especially The Last Jedi (VIII) - but nobody seems able to see that. I think the problem is that the hard-core fans are expecting to feel the same way they did when they watched the originals when they were a kid and are blaming the filmmakers for failing to create that feeling rather than the more obvious fact that they're no longer seven years old.

The prequels show that George Lucas is good at inventing ideas for his universe, but a bad film-director.

But if the Star Wars thing, for lack of a better word, didn't imprint on your brain when you were a kid, I don't see how you'd start to like it as an adult. Same with comic books, fantasy, etc. That doesn't mean all of that is merely *for* kids, exactly, but it appears to be very hard to just jump into that kind of stuff as an adult.

I suppose horror and enjoying reality show schlock semi-ironically is like that for me. I didn't get into doing that as a kid and now I never will.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Ferris Bueller is great though. Well, Ferris is an arsehole, but the film's great.

Always worth dragging this factoid out cos we like a fact about time/age on here - the actor (Alan Ruck) who played his mate (Cameron) is now 62, having been at the time a 29 year old playing a high school student.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yeah. I recently saw the-making-of/oral-history-of doc. Broderick had acted with Ruck on Broadway and they had a good report so he convinced the producers to hire him. Mia Sara was the only real teenager in the group.

But by then, audiences had shown that they'd accept people near 30 as teenagers in film - perhaps not unlike the way Elizabethan audiences excepted boys or young men playing women. It's not like we didn't notice, we just went with it. The ultimate example of this is, I think, James Spader in Pretty In Pink. He was 26 playing 17-18, but appeared to be about 35 in the film.