Do you lean toward Sundance / Indie movies or mainsteam?

Question

Examples are good.

Quite an interesting sampling of movie titles. Basically all good answers - and I like seeing an obscure movie now and then.

Answer 1

How can you not go with Sundance or Indie.....

Bottle Rocket -- previously indie now mainstream
Run Lola Run -- previously indie now mainstream
Swingers -- prev. indie now mainstream
Love Liza --
Napolean Dynamite
Cemetary Man
Donnie Darko
etc etc

Answer 2

I love THE GREAT Hollywood movie. For example, I thought that Spielberg's War of the Worlds was unfairly underrated - very intelligent movie with Spielberg trying to avoid all stereotypes. A film with such a 'look' can only be made with the big money. But I'm fed up with all this sequel, tv adaptation, etc., etc. and teenage comedy stuff. Most of the silly teenage comedies were produced by semi-independent studios which have either been grown too big to be called independent any more (e.g. Fine Line) or have been bought or established by major studios (e.g. Sony Pictures Classic, Fox Searchlight, Weinstein). Many of these semi-independent studios are a playground for their parent corpporation - they produce cheeper films, genre films or films that address a certain audience group. The term Indie in this regard is only a brand: Clerks II (Weinstein), American Pie (Newmarket/Universal) but also Monster (a.o. Newmarket) or Boys Don't Cry (a.o. Fox Searchlight) are in this category.
Unluckily the majority of films shown at the Sundance Festival meanwhile have to be rated under the label semi-independent. Since the success of directors such as Soderberg, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez, Sundance has become a showcase for Hollywood headhunters. 'Really' independent, no/low budget, experimental, challenging films are clearly underrepresented. Most films in the programme are produced by semi-indie corporations.
There are many semi-independent films I like very much, for example Donnie Darko (a.o. Newmarket), Memento (dito) or the brilliant A History of Violence (New Line).
But then there are films that are really independent that try to revolutionise 'seeing' habits or challenge stereotypes, that are visibly cheap (but you forget after a while), that have extraordinary characters, strange stories, or are completely unaccessible, etc. etc. - those are my favourite films, ranging from Charles Laughton's (commercially failed, he never directed another film) masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, to the French Nouvelle Vague, Derek Jarman, Richard Kern's Underground movies, to Lynch's Eraserhead, Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise or Amok Kollek's Sue.
But Hollywood will change as it has always been changing (think of Coppola, Altman, Hopper, Scorcese, etc. conquering Hollywood for a decade) - that's its strength. Mainstream studios learn from foreign film revolutions, from semi-independents, from real independents - and create something new as long as it promises to be successful at the box office. Capote, for instance, is a (a.o.) United Artists production. In the 1980s it would have been unimagible that a major studio would have produced such a movie.
To cut a very, very, very long story short: Indie, but then again....

Answer 3

Oh,gosh,I like all kinds of movies.I watch Sundance Channel all the time,but right at the moment my mind is-wait-Welcome to the Dollhouse;Pecker; Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself;-darn!-Napoleon Dynamite(is that an independent film?)Anyway to make it short-I love movies.Oh,wait the most absurdly entertaining one ever-The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

Answer 4

Indie movies for sure.

Answer 5

indies. but somewhat mainstream indies.

junebug.
my date with drew.
how to draw a bunny.
supersize me.