Thank you for reminding me of My Cousin Vinny. Just watched it on netflix. That movie is great.

I guess I should add a few more that haven't yet been mentioned yet. Trying to keep thinking of overlooked flicks, but it's hard to come up with good ones.

Ed Wood. Overlooked film from the mid 90's by Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp. It's not really a biopic since it's heavily fictionalized, but it definitely gives you a good idea of how totally surreal Ed Wood's reality was. It's also a flick about film making, which may or may not make it more relevant to this forum.

And speaking of comedies about film making, Living In Oblivion is another that isn't widely known about. Steve Buscemi wrote, directed and starred in it. It's about a director trying to finish a film while the entire cast and crew seem hell-bent on making his life a living hell. Pretty much equal parts goofy antics and "it's funny cause it's true" type comedy.

(sorry if there's an ad before that...)

And now for one that's so obscure that you're probably lucky if you can find a copy of it in any way shape or form on the planet because as far as I know this film toured a few festivals and art house theaters and then failed to get wide distribution in any way shape or form. I speak of Colin Fitz Lives!. The story goes like this: in the mid 90's, this guy named Robert Bella decided he was gonna make a movie. I dunno if he was inspired by Kevin Smith or not, but the guy made the film by maxing out his credit cards to the tune of $150K. He made the film, it toured in festivals, won awards, became a hit at Sundance and the guy went from nobody to promising comedy director overnight. Unfortunately, the offers he was getting for distribution wouldn't give him enough money to cover his expenses for making the film, so he ended up not taking any of the offers, going flat broke and sleeping at night in a rented mini-storage unit curled up around the canisters containing his awesome film.

I saw this flick WAY back in the late 90's when it was still doing the festival / arthouse circuit, and I remember liking it a lot. The trailer I have below this sorta makes it out to be a wacky, goofy, sophmoric sort of dumb comedy, but the film I remember was pretty dark and was more dry comedy than zany antics. Anyway, for the last decade or so I've been waiting for this damn movie to come out on DVD or something so I could have a copy. Turns out that this Robert Bella fellow finally managed to pay off his personal debt and has struck a deal with IFC to release his film in a Video On Demand format. It's $20. I'm currently downloading it. I can only hope that it lives up to the memory I have of it. Anyway, here's a trailer, but I do believe it's trying to sell the film as something that it's not. Once I download it, assuming there's not some ridiculous DRM involved, I'll watch it and attempt to cut a trailer that better resembles the darker comedy tone I remember the film having.

EDIT: Colin Fitz Lives is ok. You can tell the guy was going for a Kevin Smith type of dialogue through most of the movie, but the actors weren't up to the task. Not bad, tho. It's not gonna make you laugh out loud or anything, but it's got some decent scenes.

Don't buy shit from IFC's little webstore, tho. It's got DRM that prevents you from using any player but their own, and their player is fairly crap. Play, pause, stop and not much else. No option settings that I can find. Kinda crap way to sell your movies. They should strike a deal with Netflix for rentals and just sell DVDs.

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-06-25 09:27:08)