The Five Best Movies You've Never Seen

With the writer’s strike damming up the floodgates of new creative material, the time may come when we may actually be forced to do something instead of watch something. If you’re not willing to go cold turkey, I thought I’d recommend some of my favorite movies, which I’m betting many of you have never seen. (I was going to talk vouchers, but that would bore you, wouldn’t it? Philistines!)

I’ve watched a lot of crap in my time. Much of it was cinematic junk food, but a good chunk of it was “important” filmmaking - obscure, independent, pretentious bilge that I had to “appreciate” in order to maintain my reputation as an artiste. Now that I’m old and fat, I don’t pretend to like movies I don’t like. These aren't artsy-fartsy flicks - these five movies are mainstream, studio releases that, for some reason, never quite caught on. If you haven’t seen them, check ‘em out.

#5) QUICK CHANGE

The plot centers around Bill Murray’s daring robbery of a large Manhattan bank in broad daylight, which involves Murray dressing up as a clown and taking a bunch of hostages. The first three hostages he releases are Randy Quaid and Geena Davis, his two accomplices, and Murray himself, who has shed his clown makeup and is all but unrecognizable as the gunman. Together, the three of them stroll out of the bank with a total of a million dollars strapped to their backs.

To date, I consider this the perfect blueprint of how to rob a bank.

The cast is note perfect, especially Jason Robards as the crusty cop close to retirement who hunts Murray down. It also has great cameos from Phil Hartman and Tony Shalhoub. Watch for the sequence where Murray is waiting behind a lady at a convenience store – it may be the most exquisitely suspenseful moment ever committed to film.

This is certainly one of Bill Murray’s best movies, released about six years after Ghostbusters. It’s also the only movie Murray ever directed – or at least co-directed with Howard Franklin. It should have been a smash. I have no idea why it didn’t set the box office on fire.

#4) Kenneth Branagh’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Shakespeare movies don’t usually work well, because Shakespeare, for all his talent, wasn’t much of a screenwriter. Film is a visual medium – people need to do things, not just talk about them. In contrast, Shakespeare had no scenery, so he had to dress the stage with his words. His plays are filled with speeches that describe places and landscapes in the minutest detail. That’s part of the reason why an unedited Shakespeare play can run for well over four hours.

In this movie, Branagh slices and dices the original text without mercy. I’d bet that only about a tenth of Shakespeare’s original language survives into the screenplay. That’s not to say Branagh doesn’t have respect for his source material. Instead, he understands the differences between film and the stage, and he somehow manages to lift the essence of the play into the new medium essentially unaltered. It’s an accomplishment equivalent to what Peter Jackson did with the unwieldy Lord of the Rings books. In both cases, the adaptation is worthy of the original work.

Of course, by saying that, I make this film sound hoity-toity, which it definitely is not. It’s bawdy, silly, and funny as all crap. It moves. You don’t have to like Shakespeare to enjoy this, and it’s not at all difficult for a modern audience to understand. The cast is phenomenal – Denzel Washington, Emma Thompson, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, and Branagh himself – everyone except Keanu Reeves, who, for some reason, keeps getting cast in epic period pieces while still sounding like Ted “Theodore” Logan. Whoa.

I think this film just got lost in the Branagh Shakespeare shuffle. Instead, his audacious debut in Henry V usually gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, as does his bloated, tedious Hamlet, which makes all the self-important Shakespearean movie mistakes that Much Ado scrupulously avoids. It reverently uses all of the original Hamlet script without a single edit, and it’s a four-hour snoozefest. If you really want to see Hamlet on film, the Mel Gibson movie isn’t bad. But the Much Ado movie is much, much better.

#3) THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS

Steve Martin has been a fixture in the mainstream movie firmament for so long that it’s easy to forget that at the beginning of his film career, he was a box office disaster four times in a row. After the starmaking success of his film debut in The Jerk, Martin made a series of really weird movies. There was the lip synch musical Pennies from Heaven, the film noir parody Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and a study in self flagellation called The Lonely Guy.

And then there was The Man With Two Brains.

This is certainly one of the strangest movies ever released by a major studio. It’s filled with glorious non sequiters, from Martin’s character name – Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr – to the surreal “murmur” sequence to its climactic Merv Griffin cameo. From beginning to end, it dares to be majestically odd. It presumably failed because it was written specifically to entertain me, so it’s no surprise that no one else gets it.

#2) WAITING FOR GUFFMAN

Also known as Spinal Tap for Theatre Geeks, this Christopher Guest mockumentary is the first and best of the improv, pseudo-Tap ensemble films that followed. The same cast appears in Best In Show and A Mighty Wind, both of which are also pretty funny, and For Your Consideration, which, in my considered opinion, blows.

Yet Guffman remains Guest’s comedy gold standard, with laughs aplenty. Don’t get me started on beans! You want me to strike this? There ain’t no swimmin’ in my show. My wife, Bonnie – I buy most of her clothes. Midnight at the Oasis! Backdraft – the Musical! Gather ‘round, for I have news! Working! Working! Never stopping, never sleeping! Working! Making! Some for selling, some for keeping!

If none of those lines made you laugh, then you need to see this movie. Trust me, they will.

It also has a hysterical soundtrack, written by Guest and his Spinal Tap compadres. You get all this and some My Dinner with Andre action figures and a Remains of the Day lunchbox besides! Only Spinal Tap is a funnier Guest comedy, but I don’t need to recommend that one, because you’ve already seen it.

#1) SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER

This is at the top of my list of the best movies you’ve never seen, but it’s also very close to the top of my list of best movies, period. (So is Foodleking’s choice of Chariots of Fire, but, again, you’ve seen that one, so it doesn’t make this list.)

This is a sweet, gentle movie that explores the inherent tension between excellence and decency. Can you be really, really good at something and still be a good person? It poses this dilemma without being remotely preachy, and the lesson comes against the unlikeliest of backdrops – the world of children’s competitive chess tournaments. That sounds excruciatingly boring, yet it never is. I know next to nothing about chess, but this movie managed to keep me enthralled. Along with everything else, it’s a classic Rocky-style sports movie with a minimum of schmaltz. It’s heartfelt without being sentimental, which is something that only a handful of movies has ever achieved.

Great performances from a great cast – Joe Montegna, Joan Allen, Laurence Fishburne, and a transcendent Ben Kingsley in his finest role. Yes, you heard me. That includes Gandhi. (Although I think the Gandhi movie was overrated, but that’s a story for another day.) This movie also boasts something exceptionally rare in a Hollywood film – credible children’s performances. Young Max Pomeranc, as child chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, could not be any further removed from Macauley Culkin. That’s one of the main reasons this movie works so well.

And, for those of you who go in for this sort of thing, it’s probably the most beautifully photographed movie I’ve ever seen. You don’t have to know anything about cinematography to recognize just how visually brilliant this picture is.

I first saw this movie before I became a father. Now, over a decade and five children later, the father-son relationship at the center of this movie is far more poignant to me than it was when I first saw the film.

If you haven’t seen it, put this at the top of your Netflix queue. Or, better yet, go buy it. You’ll want to watch it more than once.

________

POST-SCRIPT

Reviewing this list, I discover I’ve recommended three R-rated films to you. That actually helps explain why these movies failed, as R-rated movies are far more likely to underperform at the box office. Since most Mormons – including me – tend to avoid R-rated movies as a rule, some further explanation is necessary.

I remember an interview with Bill Murray about Quick Change, where he complained that the movie should have gotten a PG-13 rating, since it has no sex and no real violence to speak of. The ratings board told him if he’d just drop one of the F-words – I think the movie has three of them – he could drop the R. He debated whether or not to change Jason Robards line “It’s a f%$#ing car horn” to “it’s a car horn,” and decided the cleaner line wouldn’t have been as funny. I think he was wrong – the line isn’t that funny either way – and that extra F gave him the R which cost him a hit.

Guffman is a G-rated movie except for two scenes – one where Catharine O’Hara gets drunk and starts talking about her husband’s penis-size-reduction operation, which would push the rating up to a PG-13 at most – and then a ten-second audition scene where an unassuming local schlub tries out for the community play with a wildly profane excerpt from the movie Taxi Driver, much to the horror of everyone watching. It’s a very funny scene precisely because the profanity is so inappropriate to the situation. It’s also an easy scene to skip. As soon as the guy announces his monologue, just press the fast forward for a couple of seconds and you’ll be fine.

The last time I saw The Man With Two Brains was on television with all the naughty bits edited out. That’s probably the best way to watch this movie. When I first saw it, I wasn’t too concerned about morality in movies. Now that I’m an old prude, I’d likely be more offended. I honestly don’t remember the stuff the TV version left out, and it’s probably better that way.

Both Much Ado About Nothing and Searching for Bobby Fischer are PG-rated movies, not even PG-13, yet Bobby Fischer is the more family friendly of the two. The thing people in Much Ado are making much ado about is a suspicion of sexual infidelity, which turns out to be nothing. (Hence the title.) It contains the line “She knows the heat of a luxurious bed!” which went clear over the heads of young’uns and the MPAA ratings board.

You can watch Searching for Bobby Fischer with your priest, rabbi, or bishop without feeling remotely embarrassed.

That is all.