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The Indy Film Canon

Empire Online lists the 50 greatest Independent Films of all time. Which, to me, says that it’s once again time for the film canon game. Onwards!

Note that I don’t really see value in the forced 1-50 ranking. I like the bag-of-movies approach much more. However, this is how they were originally presented, so I’ll stick with it.

  • El Mariachi
  • Ron Lola Run
  • Cube
  • Blood Feast
  • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
  • Mad Max
  • Amores Perros
  • Shadows
  • Swingers
  • Dead Man’s Shoes
  • The Descent
  • The Passion Of The Christ
  • Grosse Point Blank
  • Being John Malkovich
  • Buffalo ’66
  • THX-1138
  • The Blair Witch Project
  • Shallow Grave
  • Two Lane Blacktop
  • Pink Flamingos
  • Sweet Sweetback Baadasss’
  • Bad Lieutenant
  • In The Company Of Men
  • Dark Star
  • Lost in Translation
  • Drugstore Cowboy
  • Happiness
  • The Evil Dead
  • Nosferatu
  • Roger And Me I’m not a Michael Moore fan, but I loved this film
  • Slacker
  • Lone Star
  • Withnail And I
  • City of God
  • She’s Gotta Have It
  • Blood Simple
  • Stranger Than Paradise
  • Memento
  • Eraserhead
  • Bad Taste Huge thanks to Robert and Kasia for introducing me to this one
  • Mean Streets
  • Sideways
  • The Usual Suspects
  • Sex, Lies and Videotape
  • Night of the Living Dead
  • Monty Python’s Life Of Brian
  • Clerks
  • The Terminator Seeing this movie at #3 is definitely the surprise of the list for me
  • Donnie Darko One of my favorite movies that I don’t own a copy of
  • Reservoir Dogs

Films Whose Presence in the Canon I’m Particularly Gratified to See (pick up to five): Lost in Translation, Bad Taste, Donnie Darko.

Films in the Canon Whose Presence Should Not Be (pick up to five): Sideways.

Films I’d Pick to Replace Them (pick up to five): The Limey.

Previously: The Comedy Canon, SciFi Film Canon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 9:47 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Indy Film Canon”

  1. Jill Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 2:07 pm

    Hmmm. I’d have considered many of these to be mainstream flicks, not independents. Bad Taste is on my netflix queue, btw.

  2. cp Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 2:20 pm

    Yeah, some of them surprised me as well, but they’re all apparently independently financed and “made with an independent spirit” (to weed out things like “Phantom Menace”).

    Bad Taste rocks astoundingly hard. Pencil in time to watch it twice: once after a few rounds and once sober. It has majesty a-plenty for both screenings.

  3. Robert Says:
    November 15th, 2005 at 7:46 am

    And after watching Bad Taste, be sure to see Peter Jackson’s next film, Dead Alive. The gore and wackiness are taken to the next level. Perhaps only Peter Jackson could pull off a successful horror-comedy-romance film so well.

    Man, sorry Corey but I really thought Lost in Translation was overhyped. A bit dry and pretentious I thought. I liked the Steve Zissou movie though except it was too long.

    The Limey was a great movie.

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