The 10 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, Part II

You know how when you start trying to think of stuff, days later more stuff keep popping into your head?  It’s the cousin phenomena to thinking of a clever comeback the day after the party when it’s way too late to use it.

The first few movie I thought of after the fact were added as ‘honorable mentions’ to my first list of The 10 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, but in the weeks that followed, I was able to come up with ten more, some equally as good as on the first list.  Which I guess makes the first list bunk.  But I don’t know how official these rankings really are.

Again, I know it’s audacious of me to suggest you haven’t seen these.  I hope you have.  And if you haven’t, I hope these become some of your new favorite movies!

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10.  The Karate Kid, Part III (1989) | Dir. John G. Avildsen | 112 min.

Okay, this is on here because you all think you’ve seen this, but you haven’t.  The Karate Kid Part III is NOT the one with Hillary Swank.  That’s the fourth one.  That one is called The Next Karate Kid, and it isn’t good.
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An Interview With Jeff Krulik, Documentarian Extraordinaire

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There was a period in film history, after the advent of the VCR and before the Generation Y takeover, where people traded VHS copies of their movies on an underground circuit that spread all over the world.  The modern incarnation of this is the ‘viral’ video, or, a video that racks up a lot of views on YouTube.  But, if you’re old enough, you can remember a time when this was essentially done by hand (or, if you’re a Y-er, you can Google it).  

There’s something romantic about it really.  Each video had to be copied with noisy machines that spooled magnetic tape around heads that needed to be cleaned and would break after so many revolutions.  Each tape was an artifact adorned with the fingerprints of the previous owner, or in many cases, the filmmaker himself.  It was personal and exclusive and you had to be in the know to be blessed with a particular video’s presence.
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Pieta: How To Pander To A New Audience Without Losing Your Soul

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Pieta (2012)
Written and Directed by Kim Ki-duk
104 min.

Spoiler-free.

Kim Ki-duk is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers. And I only even like about half his movies. Some of them are just awful. But the ones I like, I really like. And a few of them, I fucking love. 

A lot of people use the word ‘love’ lightly when it comes to movies. These people have most likely never truly been in love with a movie. When you truly love a movie, it becomes a part of your body. The movie finishes, and you look down, and suddenly you have another arm or something. And you’re like, ‘Well, that’s there now.’ You have no impulse to amputate it. It’s truly a part of you, just like every other part that makes up your whole. To rid yourself of it would be to rid yourself of yourself.
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How ‘Parenthood’ Saved My Life

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When I was three or four years old, my mom took my infant brother to visit her family in New York and left me in Michigan with my dad for the weekend. While she was away, I was riding my bike and somehow managed to fall over my handle bars and scrape my face on the pavement. I was pretty distraught until my dad gathered me up, gave me ice cream, and put on the movie Parenthood. I calmed down pretty quickly, lulled by sugar and the quiet and familiar drama of family life. I’ve always enjoyed that memory; it’s a perfect vignette of my ideal childhood and the loving father figure who shaped it.

We all grew up bathed in the flickering blue glow of Saturday night movie rentals. These moments are primal, as if the light coming out of our living room windows was telegraphed by our ancestors gathered around their fires. These moments penetrate us deeply and shape our lives—in my case, in a way I never could’ve imagined.
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Michael Bay is Andy Warhol

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Let me preface this by saying that Michael Bay has not only never made a good movie, he’s basically a bad director.  And yet, I have a real affection for him.  Probably more than I do for any other crappy director.  And here’s why.
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