So this past week I've watched some excellent older films that I'm reasonably assured most users here probably haven't seen but might enjoy, especially if you're sick of recent media. Anyway here you go.
Watership Down (1974 version)
Based on the excellent Richard Adams book (which I also highly recommend) about a small band of rabbits fleeing the destruction of their warren and setting out to find a new homeland. The animation is rather poor but its buoyed by strong voice acting and a compelling story. Pay close attention and you'll see some interesting stuff on the power of myth, folklore, leadership, Nature, and the will to power. Way more than just a cartoon about cute bunnies. Not for young children, by the way.
Zardoz
This might be the most ridiculously based movie I've ever seen. Unfortunately more people seem to know Zardoz from the infamous promotional picture of Sean Connery in a tight red speedo and riding boots with bandoliers than from actually watching the film. From the same director that made Excalibur and Deliverance, it stars Connery as the leader of a post-apocalyptic band of horse-riding barbarians who are manipulated by a powerful, hidden but debauched elite into keeping the hordes of unwashed peasants at a manageable level. The unusual aesthetics and sometimes iffy special effects might turn people away, but if you look past that you'll experience one of the most virile, masculine, Nietzschean, anti-feminist, anti-modern movies ever made.
The Naked Prey
Firmly in the category of "Things That Would Never Be Made Today", Naked Prey is about a white hunter in colonial-era Southern Africa who is captured, stripped naked, and forced to flee as he is hunted by spear-toting tribesmen. Read what you will into that plot in Current Year lol. If you like "man is the greatest prey" type stories, you'll love this. There is almost no dialogue, just a savage, kill-or-be-killed race for survival.
A bar I go to plays a lot of WWII era war movies. I don't have any specific recommendations on them except to say as a general statement if you watch enough of them you can clearly see where Hollywood was trying to coalesce an American national identity from that shared war experience.
And with the benefit of hindsight you can also see that they ultimately ended up pulling it out of the oven a bit before that national identity had fully cooked.
...do you by any chance remember a movie from the 60s/70s about a submarine called the "sea tiger"? I have hazy memories of a movie that I think might have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek (though it went over my head at the time).
At one point, they had to paint the ship pink, because they didn't have enough paint to repaint it, so they combined all the paint they had, and it came out that way. As I recall, this became a major plot point.
Doesn't ring a bell, but I can ask.
it's okay, I ended not being lazy and looking it up. it was "operation petticoat", lol