Amateurs Films for Connoisseurs
Wednesday, 7/9/2008 By John DeFore
The recent Jack Black/Mos Def comedy Be Kind Rewind just hit video stores, overflowing with love for movies that are handmade, technically challenged or just plain weird.
The Internet is kind to movies like that, supplying enthusiasts with corners devoted to every kind of oddball cinema. Take Onar Films, for instance, which specializes in Turkish films. There, a subspecies of cult movie takes (ahem) liberties with American icons, as in a Turkish Superman that’s so shoddy the planet Krypton is obviously represented by a Christmas ornament. On these shores, tiny video companies develop specialties of their own. Synapse has a line of the Japanese sex-and-swordplay Pinky Violence films that influenced Kill Bill; Mondo Macabro digs up Indonesian oddities like Mystics in Bali, where a disembodied head goes flying around in search of victims; and Dark Sky releases tons of “drive-in” fare like this Del Tenney collection that contains the screen debut of the late Roy Scheider. (Beware: Fig around these sites and you’ll find all sorts of lurid, gory, potentially offensive movies — which is what you’re looking for, right?) Inching into the mainstream movie biz are indie black-comedies like the John Waters TV series ‘Til Death Do Us Part and the undead mockumentary American Zombie. Most in keeping with Be Kind’s happy do-it-yourself theme, though, is the delightful anthology The Animation Show (pictured), in which Mike Judge (King of the Hill) and Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected) pick their favorite cartoons of the year, from scribbly yarns about overprotective guard dogs to meticulously morphing geometric compositions and video-game-appropriating samurai films.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment