In search of quirky movies

In December, I blogged two separate lists of movies from the past decade -- my least favorite movies that I saw because they were critically acclaimed (my mom's meme), and my favorite movies from the decade (all of which happened to be critically acclaimed).

Looking at these two lists got me thinking: there's a highly idiosyncratic niche of movies I tend to like. It's difficult to label or even describe, but it's something. So I decided to ask AskMetafilter for help finding more movies like this. (I wasn't restricting it to the past decade this time.)

First I listed the movies in this category that I liked a lot (* = movies I absolutely loved):

Ghost World*
Boogie Nights*
My Dinner with Andre*
Slacker*
After Hours*
Sideways
About Schmidt
Being John Malkovich
Run Lola Run
Zazie dans le Metro
Happiness
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Truman Show
Man on the Moon
The People vs. Larry Flynt
Heathers
American Movie
Crumb
Fargo
Heavenly Creatures
What Happened Was...

...then I listed the ones I was disappointed by (* = movies I particularly disliked):

Election
Waking Life
Punch-Drunk Love
The Ice Storm
Amelie
Away We Go
Coffee and Cigarettes
Metropolitan
Lost in Translation*
Life is Beautiful*
High Fidelity*
American Beauty*
I Heart Huckabees*
Magnolia*

Then I suggested a few amorphous criteria:

GENRE: Most of them probably get filed under "comedy," but this label often seems insufficient. Others might be officially "drama" but seem too funny to merit that label. I apparently like movies that belong in a grey area between comedy and drama, though I don't know if I'd want to pigeonhole them as "dramedies."

PLOT: Most if not all of these movies have an unusually loose, open-minded sensibility about plot. Sometimes this is overtly radical (Slacker, My Dinner with Andre), while some of the other movies have semi-conventional plots that unexpectedly end with tantalizing question marks. (Though I disliked Lost in Translation, I didn't dislike it for the same reasons some people did. That is, I didn't say: "This movie's terrible -- almost nothing happens and the ending is ambiguous." On the contrary, I said: "Wow, almost nothing happens in this movie and the ending is ambiguous -- I can't believe I didn't like it!")

CONTENT: They might focus on dating/love/sex (Sideways), or they might be virtually devoid of traditional romance (Slacker). Many of them have an intellectual or philosophical or makes-you-think quality, but the message isn't necessarily obvious (can you sum up the "meaning" of Ghost World?).

Here are the recommendations from the AskMetafilter commenters.

There are about 60 responses, some of which include several movies, so it'll take me a long time to get through them all. Just to start out, it's clear I need to watch Welcome to the Doll House, Adaptation, The Limey, Rushmore, Before Sunrise, Repo Man, Something Wild, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brazil, Mulholland Drive, A Serious Man,* Sex Lies and Videotape,** Paper Moon, Claire's Knee...

The whole thing felt shamelessly self-indulgent -- having 60 people help me build up my Netflix queue and analyze my taste. But if your cinematic tastes are similarly quirky, maybe the AskMetafilter thread will prompt you to see a movie you wouldn't have otherwise seen.

* This used to say "Barton Fink," but I changed it in response to the comments.

** You'll have to imagine the appropriate commas -- I didn't want to have to separate all the movies by semicolons.