The Hipster Movie List

What is 'The List?'

Awhile ago I started a list of movies, which I now refer to as the Hipster Movie List. I'm not a hipster, in fact I'm quite the opposite - but when I started to fall in love with film, I became a film hipster.

What in the world do I mean by hipster? Well,  at their core hipsters are anti-culturals. They are people who intentionally reject the norm and go against it - and usually are outspoken enough about it to piss off the people around them.

Example:

Normal person: Have you heard the new Katy Perry Album?

Hipster: I don't listen to mainstream music. It's just a bunch of soul-sucking, dumbed-down, and recycled sex fantasies set to a catchy beat so that they can squeeze a few more dollars out of stupid people without the sense to know better. 

Normal person: I think I'm going to go somewhere less...douchey.

Ironically, if you're looking at this situation with the right lens, you may realize we've all got a little hipster in us.

I became a film hipster when I decided I liked films, and I liked my films intelligent and well-executed. So much so that I began to refuse to watch things that didn't meet that bar. Then, on top of that, when movies were intelligent and well-executed, I would fawn over them and watch them again and again - dissecting every detail.

It made me quite insufferable at parties.

You see, the problem with being a film hipster is that EVERYONE likes movies. I learned early that if I was going to turn preachy every time the topic of movies came up, I would lose a lot of friends (I mean... more than I already had). So, I created the Hipster Movie List as an outlet for how I felt, and started shutting my mouth when people raved about how "The latest Transformers is actually really good!"

Okay, So What is The List?

The Hipster Movie List is a list of movies that are brilliantly executed - enough to make them a cut above other movies. Some of them were successful in the box office, and some weren't - but all of them are amazing. And that's not all. They have to be both amazing and underrated. This is where the hipster part comes in. Hipster movies are movies that had major portions of their executions go unnoticed or unrecognized by mainstream audiences. These are movies that I wish I could shake the modern everyday viewer until they realized they are gems, and that  this kind of film is neither common, nor easy. 

However, that's not to say that all of these movies aren't popular. The Dark Knight is on the list, and that film made over a billion dollars. But of all the people that loved it, they didn't recognize the flawless use of metaphor and the first perfect realization and writing of the Joker character in any film or television adaptation I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). The Avengers, which also brought in over a billion dollars, however is not on the list because as amazing as the film was, I didn't think there was some part of it that was not being openly appreciated by the public. Everyone got how great it was, so there was no need for me to record it as an underappreciated film.

In a nutshell, it's a list of movies that everyone knows are good (or they should), but people don't seem to know just how good they are - and how rare a quality that is in cinema. 

So, having said all that (much more than I originally intended), I now give you The Hipster Movie List - a list of movies since the dawn of film history, that are both amazing and underappreciated in modern discussion:

See the Hipster Movie List