Sweet Five Alive tidings, Hooo's Hooo at the Zooo, to play your wax paper kazoo to, chewin' on that kudzu...
I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended I knew things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know truth and the truth shall set you free.
- Donald Barthelme, "Brain Damage"
The pool hall was important, especially on Sundays at noon, after church. I got kicked out of high school seventeen times.
- Nicholas Ray, I Was Interrupted
Crazed Fruit (Kō Nakahira, 1956)
Black Peter (Miloš Forman, 1964)
La chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
Passe ton bac d’abord... (Maurice Pialat, 1978)
Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980)
O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)
Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick Baby (Matthew Bright, 1999)


























2 comments:
Considering that this is a list of unsung films by the man who was the internet before the internet, I'm sort of proud to announce that I have seen 14 of those (and 2 out of the 3 Canadian films!). I approve of the bold (yet entirely justified) Pialat double bill. Surprisingly I haven't seen 'Navajeros' (what kind of Spanish person am I?????).
One very curious aspect of your list is the start date (while it is true that teenagers did not figure a lot in classic cinema, I think I would have included some favourites with children from the 30s-40s—though, perhaps, the 'unsung' tag would have been debatable in those cases).
Oh, and I like that you put the Brisseau film in your list, but I absolutely love that you went with THE WHITE BALLOON. It is the sweetest choice. And this lady ADORED this film when she watched it in a videotape recorded from Canal+ in the 90s.
I saw THE WHITE BALLOON first run at the Plaza Theatre in Calgary when I was really, really young and I loved it soooooo much.
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