You saw this movie once, but you don't know what it was called.
I don't know the actor, but he looked a bit like that famous guy, you know?
Or maybe you were watching this movie on late night TV, and you were so tired, you just HAD to go to bed, and you don't know how it ended. You would look it up on The Internet Movie Database but you have no idea what it was called and you can't figure out how to find it.
This audience is a great one to help you with your problem. I am going to pose a couple of frustrations of my own (and boy, do I hope you can help me with the first one particularly -- I have been looking for that movie for more than 30 years!), and open up the floor for suggestions and more questions/problems. I will try to help you, and maybe (she says hopefully) you can help me.
My big problem, one that has haunted me for three decades, is a movie that I saw in the town I grew up in.
(By the way, this memory may be partially made up -- I cannot vouch for any particular part of it to be accurate -- I was less than ten, and I am in my mid forties now, so it has been a long time for memories to get screwed up in my pea-sized brain)
They had afternoon free movies, where your Mom could drop you for a couple of hours while she went shopping or to lunch with friends. I think they were free -- I don't remember paying, anyway, and I knew how much movies cost -- 75 cents and 25 cents for popcorn is my clearest memory. I saw Yours, Mine and Ours (Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball) that way. But one I saw, the one I want to ask your help on, was I think a British one.
It started with a group of maybe four boys in school uniforms, with jackets and beanies and all, who had just gotten out of school (I think for the day) -- I have a vague memory that two were brothers and the other (one or) two were just friends. On the way home, they went on an amusement park ride, a tunnel of love thing. They went into this cave thing, and I don't know quite how it happened, but they didn't come out in the normal place they expected.
They went back in time, but not human time -- geological time. I don't remember if there was a mammoth/sabre tooth thing, and I am quite sure there was a dinosaur thing -- I vaguely remember them having to run from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it might be that I was grafting another movie onto this one. What I do remember very specifically is the big BIG bugs and the jungle, and at the very end the boys getting into the boat (I think it was the same one, but maybe they built a raft), and pushing off from the primeval swamp (they went back and back, each stop an earlier phase of geological time), to cross an ocean where in the distance ther were volcanoes and lava. I don't think they ever thought it was a trip through the center of the earth -- they really were experiencing the eras of the earth. There was no nice resolve at the end, either -- the boys were pretty sure they were not going to get home, but were off to explore the origins of the earth, pushing off from the swamp -- it is in my memory a not as happy voyage as Reepicheep's trip to heaven at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But it was haunting.
I loved this movie. I guess like everyone I had been interested in dinosaurs when I was little (we had a Sinclair gas station in town -- who doesn't love a dinosaur on the sign -- and a set of plastic extruded dinosaurs in dull red and blue that we probably got when Dad filled up his tank at a Sinclair station), but this movie made me take a science encyclopedia off the shelf, and I memorized the geological eras. I fantasized about being the girl who had been in the boat with the guys (I am sure they were cute, and I remember them being English, so they would have had cute accents).
My brother doesn't seem to remember this movie (I don't know if he went with me), and my Mom certainly doesn't. I have no idea how to look it up on the databases. It would have probably been mid 1960s (certainly before 1971's Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which had a tunnel-of-love kind of thing), English made, and I would dearly love to know what it was, so I could try to track it down and watch it again. Can you help me?
The other one (I am embarrassed to admit this) is a made-for-tv movie called Friendships, Secrets, and Lies. I saw this late one night, in an airport hotel (where the airline put me up because they didn't get me across the Atlantic in time to make connections), but I was soooooo exhausted and so jetlagged that I simply couldn't stay up to watch it. I have been through the IMDB comments and they don't tell me how it ended (and there is no complete summary). It was a movie about six women who had been at a sorority house, and there was a baby's skeleton found there and so there was a reunion? a confrontation? A reporter investigating the story, I think, was a catalyst. I was curious who had the baby and why it was abandoned (was it murdered? was it an abortion -- is that what they are saying in the film?). It was a 1979 movie, and so I was seeing it some 15-16 years later. In looking at the IMDB discussion, I realize I missed completely that there were no men in this movie at all. Interesting.
Can you tell me how it ends? As it is almost 30 years old, I don't think we really need spoiler space...