The concept is simple: come up with a list of great films that didn’t do well at the box office or ones you’ve been told are great and you’ve said to yourself, “Yeah, I should see that,” but you never get around to it. Originally when I was tinkering with such a list over ten years ago I included The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Hoosiers (1986), and Silverado (1985), but enough people have since discovered those movies on home video that I won’t include them here. But if you still haven’t seen those three or anything on the following list, by all means check them out!
Barton Fink (1991). The Coen brothers’ take on writer’s block and peeling wallpaper won Best Director (Joel Coen), Best Actor (John Turturro), and the grand prize — the Palme d’Or — at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. John Turturro plays a New York playwright hired to write screenplays in 1940s Hollywood. While struggling to write a wrestling picture, the studio puts him up in a run-down hotel where he meets his next-door neighbor, an insurance salesman played by John Goodman. And then, in that typical Coen brothers way, it gets deliciously weird.
Brazil (1985). Think of it as George Orwell meets … well, Terry Gilliam. The director’s take on an Orwellian bureaucracy almost never got released in the U.S. The story is the stuff of Hollywood legend: Universal said the picture was unreleasable. They wanted to completely recut it and change the concept of the entire ending, so Terry Gilliam conducted private screenings against the studio’s wishes. Members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association attended one of the screenings and voted Brazil best film of the year. Universal then relented and gave it a theatrical release, albeit reluctantly. But beware — the abbreviated, 94-minute cut of Brazil is sometimes shown in syndication, so if you’ve only seen it on TV, chances are you’ve seen the screwed-up version.
California Split (1974). This often overlooked Robert Altman film is a character study of two compulsive gamblers, wonderfully played by Elliott Gould and George Segal. There’s a lot of poker playing in this movie, yet in typical Altman fashion, not one actual hand of poker is shown — the focus is on the people, not the cards. All this plus the usual Altman touches (improv, long takes, and overlapping dialogue) make California Split the most realistic account of gambling I’ve ever seen.
