I like Save The Last Dance, but classic? Although I like Julia Stiles...she reminds me of myself if I could look elfin, that is.

erika, don't limit yourself to potatohead Stiles. Aim higher.

Interesting list. My favs on there would be:

Petulia (mod San Francisco, Julie Christie at her most radiant)
I Wanna Hold Your Hand (I bet Scrappy likes this)
Ace in the Hole (Jan Sterling has two all-time great noir lines in this movie. Billy Wilder scripted, 'natch.)
Top Secret (I desperately want the "Skeet Surfing" song. Val's unreasonably charismatic in this. His perfect trilogy is Top Secret, Real Genius and Tombstone.)
3 Women (Altman does Bergman's Persona. Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek are both fantastic)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (as JZ notes I'm a fan. And as usual Frank and I share a movie brain. Sheryl Lee's performance ought to be legendary.)
A New Leaf (I love this movie and hardly anybody ever sees it. A great, quirky character driven comedy. If you love Walter Matthau you should watch this. If you don't love Walter Matthau - ptooie!)
Dreamchild (supercreepy Henson puppets. Young Peter Gallagher. Old Coral Browne. Rheumy and tortured Ian Holm. Coral Browne (Vincent Price's wife) had one of the all-time great put-downs: "Don't talk to me about writing! He couldn't write 'Fuck' on a dusty venetian blind!")
Breathless (of course, I love the original best, but this is an excellent pop art rock and roll version. It's got the Silver Surfer and X! C'mon. Tarantino is a big fan of this as well.)
Cutter's Way (Excellent 70s post-Watergate noir. It's on cable a lot. Do check it out)
Narrow Margin (Just saw this on TCM last week. Very taut cheapy thriller, with our favorite noir ballbuster, Marie Windsor.)
Wise Blood (Brad Dourif's greatest role! Perfectly cast. Doesn't quite get all the way to the book, because as Huston himself lamented, he didn't have Flannery's faith. Shot on the cheap and looks it. Awesome cast though).
Robin Hood (the Disney version is the ur-text for Furries, incidentally)

DH's interview wtih Guillermo del Toro is up! It's a really good interview, too -- he got to sit down one-on-one in person (as opposed to the usual press junket round-table situation), and Guillermo del Toro is made of so much awesome you just can't believe it. I want to live inside his head.

My favorite quote:

"People tend to think of genre as a lower form [of filmmaking] and I really don't. I believe genre movies are pure cinema, even the bad ones. In the history of film, George Méliès is more important than the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison to me. They made moving pictures, Méliès made films. Let me put it this way: Take all the motherfuckers that don't like genre movies, tie them to a chair for eternity and tell them, 'Do you want to watch the fucking train arriving at the station for the rest of your life or do you want to watch A Trip to the Moon?' I bet you'd find that they would pick Méliès."

What I particularly love about Beautiful Girls is that none of the actors in it were Big! Stars! at the time, although some have gone on to some level of Big! Stardom! since then (and then drifted back out). It's just such a nice little self-contained movie.

And I agree that it's still probably Natalie Portman's best performance to date.

What I particularly love about Beautiful Girls is that none of the actors in it were Big! Stars! at the time, although some have gone on to some level of Big! Stardom! since then (and then drifted back out). It's just such a nice little self-contained movie.

And Rosie's monologue/rant is a thing of beauty.

What I particularly love about Beautiful Girls is that none of the actors in it were Big! Stars! at the time, although some have gone on to some level of Big! Stardom! since then (and then drifted back out).

Or they had been pretty big stars, but were no longer on the A-list (I'm thinking Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon here)

It's just such a nice little self-contained movie.

I love it because it reminds me a bit of where I grew up (though Brunswick was a bigger town), and I knew/know people like those characters.

One of the other good ones on the list is THE PARALLAX VIEW, which is great 70's conpiracy thriller. Definitely good at inducing paranoia.

Sheryl Lee's performance ought to be legendary.

nods vigoroursly in agreement

So has anybody seen A New Leaf?

Theo - you'd love it, I think. Scrappy too. It's about a bumbling nerd girl who falls for a playboy cad who's only in it for her money.

So has anybody seen A New Leaf?

Yes.

To expand, Matthau had a real gift for a certain kind of comedy. Unfortunately, A New Leaf didn't exploit it nearly as well as a lot of other movies (starting with, to state the obvious, The Odd Couple).

So has anybody seen A New Leaf?

Yes. Loved it!