Cool to Be Uncool

"It is much easier to proclaim dislike for a popular movie than to admit liking an uncool movie."

So confesses The Self-Styled Siren, a most erudite and opinionated blogger, before admitting that she likes, among other certifiably uncool movies, Nicolas Cage in Valley Girl, The Enchanted Cottage (the 1945 Robert Young/Dorothy McGuire schmaltz that inspired a character in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman), the 1940 Pride & Prejudice (with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier) and Leslie Howard. Flickgrrl isn't ashamed to say that she agrees with Siren in these four cases, despite being chastised by hundreds of card-carrying members of the Jane Austen Society of North America for her love of the 1940 P & P, which has Victorian interiors and costumes rather than those of the Regency era. (And despite laughing at Marlene's Dietrich's 1939 journal entry, after seeing the Technicolor Gone With the Wind: "Leslie Howard with orange hair! Now I've seen everything.")

What constitutes cool? Flickgrrl's intuition is that it's a picture or performer that doesn't care whether you like it/him/her. This is why Robert Mitchum is cool and Victor Mature not. Why Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married is cool and Hathaway in Princess Diaries is not. Why Denzel Washington is cool and Eddie Murphy not so much.

There are probably hundreds of movies and actors beloved of Flickgrrl considered uncool. For the sake of time and space, she'll name only one: Sofia Coppola's deliberately anachronistic Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst as the unloved queen who stops embracing frivolity once her husband embraces her.

Your nominations for uncool movies and performers you love?