I am not talking about straight to video specials or obscure indies.
I mean serious productions.
Academy Award nominations, major actors or early appearances of ones that became big stars, etc.
What ones can you name?
A movie I saw in the early 90s during a college class comes to mind.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar
The lead actress is very famous. I never thought they were attractive or a great actress but they have a ton of prominent roles. Richard Gere. Tom Berenger, LeVar Burton, etc.
Yet there is no collector blu Ray, recent release, or anything along those lines.
Like many 70s movies it is a slap in the face to conventions, mores, and the American Dream. Unlike most, it shows what a mess that becomes.
I think it has fallen off the face of the earth for that reason. Black people deal drugs. Affluent New York Jews are decadent. Women doing a bunch of drugs and recreational sex with strangers and having abortions have messed up lives. The homosexual community is a mess of psyc issues and violence. Blowing off a Job and potential husband and your family may not be greener grass.
It, like other movies such as Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point and others, are the slap in the face to convention types, but unlike a simple death or wrongly being done in by The Man, shows the backlash of that slap and the grim reality of being their own undoing vs at the hands of the man.
It had an Academy Award winning director. An ambitious soundtrack for the era. The box office was a success. The equivalent today would be something like a 100 million box office on a 10 million budget.
Strangely, the shocking events in the movie, are no longer the sole realm of the grim underbelly of a decaying pre-Giuliani New York City. They are a common city, suburban, and even rural series of events and behaviors.
My abnormal psychology class was taught by a professor emeritus and former department head. He had been president of the APA during the near 50/50 split in the era where homosexuality was narrowly deemed not a psychological disorder. He never stated his opinion on that. But once a week we got a movie highlighting a psychological diagnosis or personality disorder. The movie was shown to depict the lead as a Borderline Personality Disorder.
In an American where everyone has become accustomed to doing whatever they want with no shame and no consequences, the harsh, politically incorrect consequences of this movie seem to make it a third rail nobody wants to touch. While some movies famously have no blu ray or recent dvd due to various costs, reluctance of the director, etc. I think this one is just too harsh.
Off the top of my head,
I can’t name another movie with so many prominent associated individuals being left on the back burner.
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Originally Posted by Firefly
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