I saw The Gentlemen recently, and a thought struck me. I haven't seen any other of writer-director Guy Ritchie's other signature British crime movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the ones that really made his name. I've seen some of Ritchie's other films (Sherlock Holmes, Aladdin, The Man from UNCLE) but to judge him from those is a bit like watching Psycho and The Birds and no other Alfred Hitchcocks and assuming he only made horror movies, or a few John Ford westerns and assuming that's all he did.
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It's not something I am proud of, but as with anyone else, there are big gaps in my moviegoing experience - because of accessibility, personal preferences and time.
Take non-English-language films. I've only seen two Ingmar Bergman movies, for example, albeit two of the classics: The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal. I'm steeling myself for other movies in this brilliant but heavy going filmmaker's oeuvre including the "Trilogy of Faith". Federico Fellini? La Strada (which I loved) and Eight and a Half (which I admired rather than loved). But no La Dolce Vita (yet).
As for Italian neo-realism, I've seen Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D, but need to explore further. And I've seen nothing by Satyajit Ray. That's just to name a few.
I grew up in the era of 1980s teen comedy but I haven't seen some of the classics - I've got gaps in my John Hughes viewing (no 16 Candles or Some Kind of Wonderful, none of the original Vacation movies) and in some of the lower-level but well-known movies (Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds).
Silent films are another big gap I'm trying to fill. I want to see Wings (I'm trying to see all the Best Picture Oscar winners), for example, and am going to get into F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans). But, of course, there's a lot more than that to explore.
Some genres don't interest me - porn is obviously a big part of the film industry, but I haven't even seen the "porn chic" Deep Throat: the hard-core segments of Caligula were enough icky tedium for me.
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I like the better action movies - like Speed and the first two Die Hard films - but have felt no particular urgency to sample, say, the films of Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. And I'm fine with that.
My foray into the "Mondo" shockumentaries began and ended with the seminal Mondo Cane.
However, I've enjoyed other types of exploitation, from the naive antidrug film Reefer Madness to the various "Don't have sex!" scarefests.
I usually enjoy horror movies, whatever their quality - there's more fun to be had with a bad horror movie than a bad comedy or a bad drama.
But I haven't seen the early Wes Craven films The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, or Italian giallo films apart from the original Suspiria.
Nor have I explored spaghetti westerns beyond the Sergio Leone Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.
And, I must confess, I've seen relatively little anime, even the films of Studio Ghibli (though I did enjoy Arriety and Spirited Away). I'd like to see more of the latter.
But that's one of the things about loving movies: there are always more to see and to discover, going backwards as well as forwards.