Archives of Others' Lists, Part 7: sidehacker

I have made a lot of lists on this blog, but in the words of Confucius I am not an originator but a transmitter. All my lists are nothing more than a compilation of interesting stuff I've found by perusing other lists on various forums and sites. When lists are of particular value to me, I tend to save them on a document, and I'd like to share them here as an extension of my archive, since the originals of these lists are long, long gone at this point. Most of the originals had great images along with them, but oh well. Sacrifices will have to be made. Unless stated otherwise, the lists are one-film-per-director, as was tradition.

I had these up on ICheckMovies but I kinda hate that site.

The primary place I have lists from is two forums, YMDb and its re-incarnation The Life Cinematic. I browsed from 2008 onward and posted between 2010 and 2013 when the forum finally died.

I have only one list from sidehacker. His list reveals a very distinct aesthetic running through a number of films from very different places and different cultural backgrounds. sidehacker was a huge fan of emotional films that focused on alienation and tender romances. There is a general feeling to a “sidehacker movie” that I can always just barely detect beneath the surface even if the form the movie takes is greatly varied. Me and him disagreed on quite a lot but I could always count on a very definite, individual “type” of story and content that he liked whether it was an old Japanese film (what united us the most), a new wave film, a modern work of contemplative cinema, or even an old Hollywood film. sidehacker had a humorous phrase that he used to describe an invented genre that he had a special soft spot for called the “glue-sniffing” genre. Named after famous scenes from Gummo where the two main characters huff glue, he used this phrase to describe films that centered around children or teens who were delinquents, troublemakers, or dropouts of society and depicted them in a spontaneous, unfettered manner. While the atmosphere and context of this content varies greatly, films like I Was Born, But…, Tobacco Road, The Champ, L’Enfance nue, If I Had a Gun, Nowhere, and Unknown Pleasures all loosely feel like they belong in this theme. There are also many about doomed, tragic love stories of lost individuals like The Beekeeper, Ossos, Maldone, The Wayward Cloud, Boy Meets Girl, etc. sidehacker loved movies about loners and people outside of their time and place, and he was amazing at finding something abstract and lingering beneath the surface. His response to certain moods and themes was almost "musical" in that it was something much more about tones and abstract shades of emotion than concrete things you could put into words. The awareness of that was something impressive. We probably differed more in opinion than any other posters here, but in a way that made him so much more appealing to me because of how individualistically authentic to an inner light his taste was.

List 1: sidehacker's Favorite Films

1. I Was Born, But... (Yasujirou Ozu, 1932)

2. Passing Summer (Angela Schanelec, 2001)

3. Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941)

4. Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

5. Tobacco Road (John Ford, 1941)

6. Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1941)

7. Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

8. Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)

9. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)

10. Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984)

Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1929)

Maldone (Jean Grémillon, 1929)

The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)

Man’s Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)

Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937)

They Drive by Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940)

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, 1955)

God’s Little Acre (Anthony Mann, 1958)

Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)

The Insect Woman (Shouhei Imamura, 1963)

Before the Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)

Diamonds of the Night (Jan Němec, 1964)

Under Your Skin (Mikko Niskanen, 1966)

L’Enfance nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, 1970)

If I Had a Gun (Štefan Uher, 1971)

Home from the Sea (Youji Yamada, 1972)

My Little Loves (Jean Eustache, 1974)

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, 1976)

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

Abigail’s Party (Mike Leigh, 1977)

The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

The Beekeeper (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1986)

Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1988)

Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

Ossos (Pedro Costa, 1997)

L'Amour, l'Argent, l'Amour (Philip Gröning, 2000)

Bungalow (Ulrich Köhler, 2002)

Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhangke, 2002)

Quiet City (Aaron Katz, 2007)

Yumurta (Semih Kaplanoğlu, 2007)

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)

Finally, Lillian and Dan (Mike Gibisser, 2008)