Hell is for Faustus

Felt the impulse this week to rent films - in this case, two surreal Czech samples from the city's best video store, Le Video, a.k.a., We Bring You the World in Film Even Via Bootleg Copies If We Have To Stoop To That. Not to get the good folks at Le in trouble - they have plenty of commercial releases too, and will gladly stock the shelves with "official" versions as fast as they become available. It's a fantastic store. I have an anecdote from one of my old coworkers, about how he had to escort a fairly famous Italian horror director around for a San Jose film fest which (embarrassingly enough) turned out to be playing an edited version of his movie, and took him to Le Video, which had all of his films in stock, and uncut. In these days of bittorrent, TV series can swap hemispheres fairly quickly, but world film can still be hard to obtain - thank heaven there are still places like these that push the envelope. ( Adventures in World Cinema )