Monthly Archives: March 2010

Movies About Gypsies

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Our movies about gypsies page is special to me for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that I really didn’t know anything about gypsies until I read the page and checked out some of the movies. (By the way, if you only see one of the gypsy movies recommended on our site, see Traveller. It’s great.)

Here are some things I’ve learned about gypsies now that I own a site with a “movies about gypsies” page:

  • Gypsies lead a wandering, or nomadic, life.
  • “New Age Travellers” are considered gypsies, and so are “Scottish Travellers” and “Irish Travellers.”
  • The classic, stereotypical gypsies in movies are usually Romanian gypsies.
  • Several groups of gypsies live in the USA today. They have names for themselves in their own language, but they all translate their name to “gypsies” when translating the word into American English.
  • Some of these USA gypsy tribes include: Hungarian gypsies, English gypsies, Romanian gypsies, and Russian gypsies.
  • 250,000 gypsies were killed in the Holocaust.
  • Some famous gypsies include John Bunyan, Django Reinhart, Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, Yul Brynner, Michael Caine, and Bob Hoskins.

If you want to learn more about gypsies, there are some great movies available via Amazon. I recommend these:

  • Gypsy Caravan: When the Road Bends - This is the movie to see if you want to learn about the music of the Roma people.
  • King of the Gypsies - This is a piece of fiction from 1978, but it’s still a pretty interesting movie. It stars Eric Roberts, who is possibly better known for playing the jealous boyfriend/husband in Star 80. He’s also Julia Roberts’ brother.

And if you’re looking for some websites where you can learn more about gypsies, consider visiting these:

Coming soon–an article about movies from Spain.

Crazy Love Movie Review

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My Crazy Love movie review includes minimal spoilers. I had trouble sleeping tonight, so I got up and looked for something to watch on Netflix. The first recommendation on the page was for a documentary called Crazy Love. I didn’t know when I started watching it that it would qualify as a “weird movie,” but I suspected that it might be, because it was listed as a “mind-bending” documentary. (I don’t know exactly what Netflix means when it calls a movie mind-bending, but a lot of the movies that come up for that also appear on a lot of weird movies lists.) Since I knew nothing at all about the subject of the movie, it had a few surprises for me.

The only plot information I’m going to reveal about the movie Crazy Love is that it’s a documentary about an obsessive relationship between and older man and a younger woman. That’s all I knew going in to the film, and to maximize your enjoyment of the movie, I’d recommend not spoiling it any further than that.

The first 30 minutes of Crazy Love left me thinking, how dull–what’s so mind-bending about this?

Of course, figuring out the answers to what’s so mind-bending about the movie didn’t take long, although the movie has at least two surprises. (Don’t try to hard to figure them out.)

If you’re from New York City, then you probably already know the true story behind this movie. And if you watch some daytime television, you might have seen the subjects of the film on television a few years ago. At any rate, the movie is questionable in terms of how it presents the people and their actions in the film. Many think that the documentary Crazy Love is far too sympathetic with at least one of the main characters. I’m not going to judge the movie based on that. As an aesthetic experience though, the movie was well-made indeed, and it’s well worth watching.

Bizarre Movies

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So I recently bought this site, about odd films and weird movies, and I’ve decided to add a blog here. My plan is to update the blog at least four times a week with whatever I can think of to write about as it relates to bizarre movies. For today’s post, I thought I’d start by listing some of the most memorable and bizarre films that I’ve seen personally–the ones that made the biggest impression on me as being “weird.” Since this is a personal list, it shouldn’t be construed as a list of good weird movies or as a list of the weirdest films ever. It’s just a list of the strangest movies I can remember seeing.

1. Deconstructing Harry – I’m a Woody Allen fan, and I have been a Woody Allen fan ever since I saw The Purple Rose of Cairo in my college film class. But I don’t usually think of him as a make of bizarre movies. But Deconstructing Harry is nothing if not bizarre. The movie is about a writer, played by Woody Allen, who drives to a university to receive an honorary degree. (The writer had been thrown out of the university before he was successful.) He kidnaps his son to take with him on the trip, and he also brings along a prostitute. Along the way he interacts with characters from his own fiction. Billy Crystal was particularly funny in his role as Satan.

2. The Machine Girl – My background as a small-town country boy from Texas leads me to think that most foreign films are weird in one way or another, but I think most people, regardless of where they’re from, would agree that The Machine Girl is pretty wild. It’s a Japanese action movie about a young woman with a machine gun prosthetic instead of a hand, and she puts it to use getting revenge for the death of her brother. The Machine Girl was pretty over-the-top with the action, but it’s not over-the-top in terms of creepiness or surrealism. You may not find it at your local video store, but services like LOVEFiLM and Netflix should carry it among their piles and piles of DVD releases.

3. Memento – This one is listed on our amnesia films page, but it’s a great movie. If you enjoy the non-linear storytelling that Tarantino made famous in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, then you’ll probably enjoy the storytelling techniques used in this movie. The plot revolves around a character who suffers from a type of amnesia where he’s unable to create any kind of short-term memories. So if you’re having a conversation with him, he might forget who you are by the time the conversation ends. He compensates for this by leaving himself multiple notes, some of which are important enough to tattoo to his own body. The plot revolves around how a man with no memory can try to play detective.

4. Right at Your Door – This 2006 scifi thriller won the cinematography award at Sundance. But don’t let the fact that it’s an award-winning film keep you away. This one’s a well-written and realistically-told story about terrorist attacks in Los Angeles. Like Cloverfield, the action is revealed via the perspectives of two of the ordinary people experiencing the events. Mary McCormack’s performance was particularly strong. My wife and I watched this together, and this isn’t the kind of movie she normally likes. But she loved it anyway. I was able to purchase a DVD of this one for next-to-nothing at my local Blockbuster.

5. Synecdoche, New York – Any movie that’s really great but almost impossible for me to actually understand is going to get a mention in my lists of bizarre movies. This one features Philip Seymour Hoffman as a playwright who works on a huge play that eventually becomes bigger than any play you could ever imagine. The screenplay is terrific, and so are all of the performances. There’s a tendency for a lot of middlebrow filmgoers to get upset when a movie doesn’t make complete sense to them, but I promise that there are rewards to be found in Synecdoche, New York if you can relax and just go with it, even though it makes little sense.

So this isn’t a complete list of bizarre movies that I’ve seen, but it’s definitely a list of good bizarre movies. I can recommend seeing all of these.

Also, I’d like to mention a couple of good blog posts I’ve read elsewhere this week. Be sure to check these out:

  • Good Chinese Movies – A blog post from my very good friend Shane Rivers, the editor and writer for Only Good Movies.
  • Between Men Review – This blog post made the movie sound so interesting that I ran over to Amazon to watch it. (It’s available to download there.) The guys at 366 Weird Movies post great bizarre movie related content all the time, so be sure to bookmark their site.
  • Anthropophagus Review – Warning–this link includes some gruesome pictures. This one’s from Goregirl’s site about gory horror movies. Her site is another great resource for people who want to find entertaining and less well known bizarre horror movies to watch. (And I love it when people write about Tisa Farrow movies. Tisa Farrow is Mia Farrow’s sister.)
  • Avatarize Yourself on the Web – This made me laugh. I’ve been a fan of Michael Martinez for years now, so seeing his image “Avatarized” was a real treat. And if you’re looking for a good place to find science fiction movie news, then you could do a lot worse than this blog.

I’ll be back tomorrow, with more bizarre movie recommendations and web resources.