Alphaville is Godard's worst movie??? Clean your eyeballs, son! Haven't you seen Sympathy For the Devil?? Alphaville is awesome. He just walks around and films new-ish technology and corporate architecture and assigns them Bladerunner/Noir narration so that regular boring stuff is assigned futuristic status. What's not to love? Fucking executions at an indoor swimming pool. It's like something you'd make when you were twelve mixed with something you would make when you were a genius.
This is a great description, John Junk. Sorry, Colin, I do actually love this film although
Masculin Feminin remains my favorite Godard film. I think I had to write a paper on it or something.
But yeah,
Alphaville doesn't really belong on that list. It's more of a science fiction movie since it takes place in a futuristic city on another planet where an evil scientist has outlawed love and self expression. The l'etranger character, Lemmy Caution, does have some great lines in it though, like, "I refuse to become what you call normal", and "Fuck logic". It's also highly stylized and includes comic violence, features that remind me of
Doom Generation.
Easy Rider also stands out as not belonging. It does have the road movie, alienated youth and outlaw qualities that define
Doom Generation, and it is a low budget film (I watched a short on the making of it where the cinematographer talked about the fact that he had to use really primitive methods for shooting various scenes and almost lost an eye capturing the scene where the Dennis Hopper character gets shot by the rednecks in that pickup), but it actually became a popular film in its time and entered the mainstream; clips of it being shown in the Academy Awards montages etc. So in that respect, it doesn't really fit as an underground type of thing.
By the way, if you hated
The Man Who Fell To Earth, you don't want to watch
Just A Gigolo, a movie Bowie made that has Marlene Dietrich - ew boy.
Anyway, it's pretty rare to find any of these cult classics at rep theatres nowadays, sadly. These theatres seem to have changed their focus and their schedules right now are listing, pretty much, only foreign and small films made in 2007, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the oldies and obscure things I used to see on the big screen in the early '90s were pretty awesome.
