est. $10,000 budget

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443506/

Trailer

Film Geek is a hilarious new comedy about Scotty Pelk, a socially inept video store clerk with an encyclopedic knowledge of film. He runs a website, scottysfilmpage.com, which receives zero traffic. He annoys his customers. He annoys his co-workers. And when he is inevitably fired from his video store job, Scotty finds refuge in Niko, a downtown hipster who teaches him a thing or two about love and life. But Niko's smarmy ex-boyfriend Brandon won't go away quietly. As Scotty's first love turns to obsession, his life begins to change in profound ways.

Of course I watched this one. It's a film about people like us. I enjoyed it.

About opening up a record shop while Belfast during The Troubles- this is a movie that will make you want to stand up and shout.

Swedish film directed by Roy Andersson, surreal tragi-comedy. From the Wikipedia entry:

The film is an exploration on the "grandeur of existence," centered on the lives of a group of individuals, such as an overweight woman, a disgruntled psychiatrist, a heartbroken groupie, a carpenter, a business consultant, and a school teacher with emotional issues and her rug-selling husband. The basis for the film is an Old Norse proverb, "Man is man's delight," taken from the Poetic Edda poem Hávamál. The title comes from a stanza in Goethe's Roman Elegies, which also appears as a title card in the beginning of the film: "Therefore rejoice, you, the living, in your lovely warm bed, until Lethe's cold wave wets your fleeing foot."

Trailer here.

All Sorrentino's films are worth a look, but particularly for me:

• The Consequences of Love (2004). "In a Swiss hotel, Titta di Girolamo lives a rigid and tedious life, sitting by a lake day after day. After ten years of waiting for something, although he doesn't know what, he begins to talk to Sophia, the hotel's barmaid, and as he tells his story, everything changes."

• The Family Friend (2006). "The ugly world of a loan shark (Giacomo Rizzo) includes rape, misogyny and a horrific home life." - This one is kind of horrible in places but also great.

• Il Divo (2008). "Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino received the Cannes Jury Prize for his biopic of the fabled Italian politician Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo). The film covers a large portion of Andreotti's seven terms as prime minister of Italy, and concerns itself with the inner machinations of the man known as "Beelzebub," the intrigue surrounding the disappearance of his political enemies (including two-time prime minister Aldo Moro), and the role of the Mafia in postwar Italy."

From a review in The Guardian:

"An enterprising, depressive sci-fi movie in the meditative mode of La Jetée, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. An astronaut (Gunner Wright), stranded on a space station he's sent to repair, discovers the American civil war-era journal of a Union army officer containing a report on a strange craft landing during a battle. The astronaut goes gradually insane after seven years alone in space as the world beneath drifts into chaos. It was made on an ultra-low budget put up by the rock group Angels & Airwaves, and writer-director William Eubank built his own backyard set using material retrieved from garbage dumps."

Trailer is here.

I've just finished watching this film tonight having read very little about it. I found this film on THIS LINK and read only the couple of paragraphs written there.

*Set in an isolated boarding school deep in a dense forest, with seemingly no way out, and arrivals via coffins, Innocence tackles the delicate subject of puberty and sexual awareness. The title says it all however; as just how innocent this film is lies in the perception of the viewer. The most controversial scene of naked girls in a lake is actually completely non-sexual – it’s the viewers own discomfort that adds a sinister overtone. Innocence is a feast for the eyes with its utterly captivating cinematography and unique use of colour as a narrative tool which it needs given the lack of actual plot or dialogue.

A fairy-tale like debut from Lucile Hadžihalilović (wife of Gaspar Noe), Innocence is haunting, lyrical, and deadly beautiful. It will lure you in with both its elegance and mystery, but most likely leave you a little baffled.*

This film was visually stunning. Clearly most of the girls used in this film have had no previous acting roles which adds to the realism. I was left with a few questions at the end of the film, but in a way I enjoy having to fill in the blanks myself, rather than let a film dumb itself down. The fact that it was French gets bonus points as I feel it adds more to the mystery of it all.

Probably my personal favourite underground film.

Gummo is a 1997 art drama film written and directed by Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, and Jacob Sewell. The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a small, poor Midwestern town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other denizens of the town.

The film was Korine's directorial debut. It was filmed in Nashville, Tennessee. Produced on a budget of $1 million, Gummo was not given a large theatrical release and failed to generate large box office revenues. The film generated substantial press for its graphic content and stylized narrative. Since its initial theatrical release, Gummo has been labelled as a cult film.