My wife is going to get pissed...

My wife is going to get pissed, because I just found a new film production/distribution company to obsess over.

Thanks to Criterion, I read an article the other day about a film company that Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys, founded in Tribeca called Oscilloscope Laboratories. Yauch's new project produces and distributes independent films. They have done some music, but mostly its  films that -- from what I've seen -- are think-pieces. I could be completely wrong; there are some dramas in the collection, of which "Howl" is one. But I would classify the common bond of these films as something the audience will learn from.

Yeah, he jokes about how he might be Criterion's competition while delivering his Top 10 favorite films in the Criterion Collection -- yet, says seriously, that he's not their competition.

And realistically he's not.

These films aren't as polished as Criterion; they're not getting the restoration treatments and they're not getting fancy packaging. I can't speculate on all the films -- as I've only seen three so far -- but I'd say the common tie(s) that bind are 1.) these films are educational or informative and 2.) independent in their production.

What sparked this new obsession, though, was picking up "A Film Unfinished" from the library the other day.

I'd been wanting to see the film after reading about it being named as one of the best films of 2010 on one of the year-end best-of lists. The synopsis seemed rather intriguing -- and the film really was.

The basis of the film is that crews of Nazi filmmakers were sent to the Ghetto in Warsaw to film the conditions of Jews there. Some of the conditions were staged as propaganda to show that some Jews lived an extreme life of comfort and that conditions in the Ghetto weren't bad. Other portions of the filming revealed otherwise: starvation, overcrowding, disease, sickness and extreme poverty. It wasn't a very uplifting documentary -- to say the least. However, what was strange about it -- and this is the $1 million question -- is that while the Nazis had a paper trail surrounding a lot of things (including filmmaking), there is no paper trail about why people were sent to Warsaw to film the conditions in the Ghetto or why this film exists.

Nine years after the war, someone found a storage facility in the middle of nowhere filled with stock film and stuff that was never meant to see the light of day when they found four cannisters of film with the title "Das Ghetto" on them and found these rolls of film that are shown in this documentary. There's no soundtrack to the film, no script, just recorded observations of day-to-day life for a short period of time in this neighborhood -- before the deportations to concentration camps started.

Well, upon watching this film, I'd seen the buzzing logo of Oscilloscope before the film started (which I recognized, but couldn't place from where ... thanks to the vast volume of weird movies I view) and while checking out the extra features, I browsed the other available titles. I didn't see much.

So I went to their website ... and jackpot!

I've also seen "Howl," which featured James Franco portraying Allen Ginsberg, in a beautifully crafted film about Ginsberg's time during the obscenity trials surrounding his epic poem juxtaposed with images of him writing the poem, talking about the poem, reading the poem and the stuff going on in his life during the period he wrote the poem -- as well as some trippy animations mixed in of the subject matter of the poem.

Franco delivered a great performance that not many of you will ever see, but the real lasting legacy of this film is really about freedom of speech in the country and who has the authority to label something obscene. Granted, I'm probably not a good judge on that as my judgment on obscene is a little bit more loose than that of others, but...

Finally, and one of the more memorable films I'm sure my wife has actually taken the time to watch with me, is "Dear Zachary ..." Good, god. This film was amazing. It's basically a documentary about this guy who breaks up with his girlfriend and she goes off the fucking deep end and drives from Iowa to Pennsylvania where he's living and -- as all evidence points to her -- kills him.

He's found the next day, face down in his car with five bullet wounds.

She flees to Canada, because she has dual Canadian-American citizenship and upon her arrest, reveals that she is pregnant with this guy's child. After a lengthy child custody battle between this woman and her victim ex-boyfriend's parents, she eventually is tentatively released from police custody, regains custody of her son and eventually jumps into the Atlantic Ocean from a fisherman's wharf holding onto the now 13-month-old child. Both die. And everyone involved is pissed because Canadian law is so convoluted that basically one justice's opinion that this woman poses no threat to herself or others -- despite the fact that a Canadian judge has ruled that there is enough evidence against this woman that she could stand trial for murder in both Canada and the U.S. -- is allowed to be released to commit an even more heinous act.

The laws have since been changed in Canada -- thanks to the outcry of some lawmakers who saw this film and were appalled at what they say.

All three were really good movies and while I'm looking forward to seeing more, there was one film that really caught my eye and was the impetus for making you wade through all this aforementioned bullshit to get to my point ...

If you've ever seen a film with John Cazale in it, chances are you've seen one of the greatest films in American cinema history. And that's no lie. John Cazale's film career spans about six years and five films -- from "The Godfather" in 1972 to "The Deer Hunter," which he was filming when he died of bone cancer in 1978. All five of his films were nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category.

Who has he played? Well, his most famous role -- and one that you've probably seen him in -- is as Fredo Corleone in both Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and "The Godfather, Part II." He was Stan in Coppola's "The Conversation," an amazing film in its own right that has been largely overshadowed by the success of "The Godfather(s)" and Coppola's later work with "Apocalypse Now." He played Sal, opposed his good friend Al Pacino, in Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon." And he was opposite Robert DeNiro (again ... sort of) in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" as another character named Stan at the time of his death.

Five great films of the 1970s and he had a pretty big part in them all. Yet, he might be one of the most under-rated actors of that decade -- starring with the likes of Pacino, James Caan, Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken and his fiance at the time of his death, Meryl Streep.

What interests me the most about seeing this film is the interviews offered by his contemporaries remembering him in this biography for what he did in a span of about six years -- even shooting his scenes in "The Deer Hunter" while he was dying. And, I think that interviews with today's under-rated stars Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will lend an interesting perspective to this biographic documentary.

Of course, I have yet to see this movie and my opinions are loosely based off of what I read on the site, but made stronger by what I already know about Cazale -- that his agent did a really fucking good job selected five amazing roles for him in his unfortunately short career -- and the fact that one guy I work with, Rich, who barely watches any movies and hates most of the stuff I would fawn over anyway happened to catch this on HBO and was thoroughly impressed and said it was really good (if that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is) -- as we were talking about it at work tonight.

So needless to say, after I've moved this to the top of my Netflix queue and finally watch it in the very near future, I think my wife is going to have another film company obsession to deal with other than my affinity for Criterion.

And my wife is going to get pissed.