I don't know if you're like me and have become sick and tired of independent films with their cute casts of eccentrics and the even cuter child that leads them all to enlightenment. For something supposedly independent, these movies are all beginning to look and sound alike. To be fair, this judgment is based on those movies which make it out of the festival circuit with some sort of distribution deal, and distributors are only going to be interested in those flicks they think are going to be able to make them some bucks at the box office.

There's the rub, isn't it? If filmmakers know that they need to make a certain type of film if they want to have a hope in hell of making their money back, don't you think that they are going to make a movie that a distributor wants? How is that any different from what would have happened if they had a studio putting up the money for the flick instead of raising it on their own? Sure they don't have some executive producer foisted on them by Universal or whoever telling them what to do, but they are still making a movie based on the dictates of what someone else thinks people want to see.

Aside from a few directors, like Kevin Smith, who have had the balls, luck, and talent to carve out a career for themselves to make the movies they want to make, the majority of real independent movies will probably never make out of the festival circuit and show up in your local multiplex. They might get occasional screenings at art house theatres or second run cinemas, but aside from that, the only place you'll probably see most of them is in the privacy of your own home on DVD.

One that you might want to keep you eyes open for that's being released on DVD at the end of April, 2008 is The Guatemalan Handshake directed by Todd Rohal and distributed by Benten Films. Not only does it give new meaning to the word quirky, it also does a fine job of ripping a strip off the eccentric/cute child formula so beloved of reviewers and distributors alike. This movie will never be dammed with the faint praise of "heart warming movie of the year". (Just how many of those can there be in one year anyway?)

Local misfit and human doormat Donald Turnupseed vanishes in the confusion following a massive power outage in a small town somewhere in middle America. The last we see of him, aside from a few flashbacks and daydreams by other actors, is him walking away from his father's small electric car at the beginning of the movie. In his wake he's left behind a pregnant girlfriend, a widowed father, two half-brothers, and his best friend — an eleven-year-old girl named Turkeylegs.