Okay, admittedly this is a pretty useless list for anyone who doesn’t know me…

With that in mind, people do have expectations on what I like. They see someone who has deep interest in a wide variety of movies, but that also often means that people expect me to like the usual Oscar-bait. I was talking to my students about “important films” and they brought up things like Gladiator and Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was kind of joking when I told that if they want “must-see” movies from me, they should start with Bicycle Thief, Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Jeanne Dielman (you know, the Sight & Sound winners) and people often associate me with these widely acknowledged classics.

Then there’s my friend groups who also have very different understanding of what I like. There’s a group that believes I’m very much into misery porn, while others see me as someone who likes to dig into obscure horror movies. I don’t really hide my love of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, so some people associate me with westerns. Still others know of my love of German Expressionism of 1920s. Still others associate me with all the weirdness out there, like Yorgos Lanthimos, David Lynch and even filmmakers such as Jean Rollin. I’m complicated, okay. Or multifaceted. Whatever.

So, this is list is about all the things people don’t expect me to like. You know, like how Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage discovers the beauty of Paddington 2 in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I guess I can’t put that movie on my list anymore.

I have tried to choose movies that are representative of something larger people don’t generally expect me to like. You’ll see.

In no specific order:

Les parapluies de Cherbourg or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

So, someone like me can like musicals? Actually, I like quite a few. My first choice here was Singin’ in the Rain, but I feel that’s so much better known than this gem which isn’t exactly obscure, but you know 34k vs. 278k ratings does tell a story.

The thing about this movie is that all the dialogue is sung. This is actually just the best known of Jacques Demy’s series of such movies. They weren’t really connected except for the constant singing and some of the actors, mostly the legendary Catherine Deneuve (who is still working regularly despite being in her 80s now and, just so you know, I am never going to call anyone legendary lightly, she is just a true legend).

This is mostly just a very cozy film. Sure, there’s drama, but the colors and the music just make it delightful.

The Princess Bride

I guess this is more historical than anything else. There was a time when people didn’t appreciate this movie the people do now. The 90s were just a different time. You know, everything needed to be edgy and dark, so fun movies like this just didn’t cut it. Some people still question my love for this movie, because in their mind it just doesn’t fit among the movies I like to talk about, but that’s mostly because this movie has been talked about enough and I don’t see much need for that any longer.

Sedmikrásky or Daisies

This kind of represents art films. The fact that people don’t expect me to like this is more about lack of interest in Soviet Bloc mmovies. Not by me, mind you, but others. They just don’t get talked about as much, at least in my circles. Also, this is just very weird.

It’s just about two women, both named Marie, who go out on dates with older men just to use them to pay for dinners. It also got shadowbanned back in the day in Czechoslovakia.

Polite Society

Again, one of those situations where people just don’t expect me to like a specific kind of a movie. This one is a coming-of-age story from a culture that’s very different from my own (transplanted Pakistani culture in the UK), so people just assume I have no interest, when actually I often seek out movies like that.

This one is just fun. While it is coming-of-age, it’s actually mixing a lot of different genres, most prominently kung-fu, because our hero wants to be a stunt performer in her adulthood and is looking to get into that.

Batman Returns

While people expect me to like superhero movies, and I do, because I’m a nerd, this one has always hit me different. It’s like a subversion of the genre that took couple of dozen movies to reach similar movies again. When I was a comic reader back in the day, my favorite issues were always those where they went outside of the usual stories. This is kind of one of those, but it’s also very, very dark, which has always been appealing to me. But then there’s villains of the movie… Catwoman and Penguin are both so great in their own different ways.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Hey, a ballet… Not my favorite thing, but just interesting. You won’t really understand what’s going on here, if you don’t know the story, but the different approach is just great.

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain

This is seen as a chick flick and apparently you are not supposed to like those, even though there are plenty of great chick flicks. People just don’t take them seriously or (sometimes deliberately) misunderstand them.

Kimi no Na wa. or Your Name

Anime is just one of those genres that people don’t take seriously, but when they don’t, they are thinking of something like Pokemon or some other endless series. Of course, there’s the Akira’s and Miyazaki’s of the world that get a pass as kind of transcendent specimens, but there is actually a great number of these wonderful films. Makoto Shinkai seems to be one of the greats. His movies are nice takes on magical realism. In this specific case, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, find themselves switching bodies regularly, so they need to figure out each other’s lives, until finally they realize there is something cataclysmic happening and they need to do something about it.

Kneecap

In many ways I have always been a bit out of my time. In this specific case, a lot of people my age have a very strong disdain for rap, but people just a few years younger than me often have a very different approach to it. I have no problems with it, so I’m not against this movie because of that.

Otherwise, this movie just hits all the right notes. If people still need music biographies, this should be the template… or more like the reason to avoid the template. It’s wild, but also, more importantly, it has it’s heart in the right place despite all the irreverence. Like right now I appreciate how much the band is ready to put themselves on the line in their very open protest of Palestinian genocide.

The People’s Joker

This one people don’t expect me to like, because it looks so cheap. Well, that doesn’t really matter, if you play into it instead of just letting your movie be low quality trash. Yeah, parts of the movie are just that, but at the same time, the way the director, Vera Drew, puts her own identity as a transwoman on the line here is just beautiful. This is so personal and it shines through, even if I’m cis myself.