The Screengrab

To be honest, Urusei Yatsura 2:  Beautiful Dreamer probably isn’t one of the greatest animated features of all time.  It probably isn’t even one of the best Japanese animations of all time.  What it is, though, is a surprisingly good and unexpectedly deep installment of a beloved anime series that came out of left field, surprising – and, to be honest, disappointing – many dedicated fans (and the show’s creator), but finding an audience beyond the normal ‘Japanimation’ devotees who appreciated its daring, its ambition, and its beautiful eeriness. 

Directed by Mamoru Oshii (who would later become famous for Ghost in the Shell and his “Kerberos” saga), Beautiful Dreamer, released in Japan in 1984, was the second big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular Urusei Yatsura anime series.  Like much of creator Rumiko Takahashi’s work, Urusei Yatsura was gentle, good-humored, slightly subversive situation comedy – in this case, it focused on the flighty, jealous Lum, an alien who begins attending a Japanese high school and constantly disrupts classes with her protective attitude towards her dimwitted boyfriend, Ataru.  However, this sort of story – along with the attendant physical comedy that marked the show – no longer interested Oshii, and he decided to take things in a decidedly different – and much darker and deeper – direction.

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Despite having only directed thirteen features in a career that spanned nearly half a century, Robert Bresson is one of the most important and acclaimed filmmakers in cinema history. For example, consider that eight of his thirteen films are listed among the top 1,000 films of all time, as listed by the Web site They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since Bresson’s death in 1999, various companies like The Criterion Collection have helped to make most of his work accessible on DVD. However, there are a number of films that are still unavailable in the U.S. Most notably, his 1971 film Four Nights of a Dreamer is tied up in rights issues and is officially unavailable in any format. 1962’s The Trial of Joan of Arc has shown a few times on cable, but it too isn’t available on Region 1 DVD.

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Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.

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Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

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Most low-budget, independently produced horror movies are cheesy gross-outs designed for the straight-to-video market, and that can make it even harder for a real movie maker who's decided to dip a toe into the scare genre; his work may end up tainted by association. When the writer-director Michael Almeda decided to make Nadja (1994), his oddly poetic comedy about a vampire princess in Brooklyn, he had an additional problem in that the children of the night were becoming so goddamn overexposed; Almeda, who has since become best known for his amazing 2000 Hamlet and his documentaries about the creative process (This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World), was competing for attention with Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, with Jess Weldon and lesser pretenders coming up fast. Seen today, Nadja is a flawed but strikingly inventive, great-looking, and sometimes very funny riff on the mythology of the undead. It's also very evocative of a specific time and place, and I don't mean Transylvania. Almeda cast it with what you might call the Mid-Nineties Indie Film All-Stars: The stunning Elina Löwensohn in the title role, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary and, on the comeback trail, Peter Fonda as the vampire killer Van Helsing. (Fonda, who's just arrived in town after finally dispatching Dracula, is especially funny explaining that staking the old Count was no great challenge: "He was like Elvis at the end. . . The magic was gone, and he knew it.") There's also a cameo by David Lynch, who was one of the movie's producers, as a security guard at the morgue. One line in particular also time-stamps the picture, when Jared Harris, as Nadja's brother, describes an ESP message from his sister as "a psychic fax." If the picture had been made twenty minutes later, he would have said "e-mail."

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