Here's a look at two of the latest films that will not be coming to a theater near you.
Winged Creatures
Winged Creatures is perhaps the more commercially viable of the two films. Featuring one of those sprawling, interwoven storylines that revolve around one particular event (in this case a shooting in a local diner).
After its premier at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival, it languished for some time and will make its debut on DVD next month.
It is easy to see how this rather protracted piece that ruminates on fate, chance, God, etc., would not duplicate the success of it's similarly plotted cinematic cousin Crash, but it's polished enough, with flashes of good performances (most notably Pearce, Tripplehorn and Haley) to at least guarantee a few weeks of modest seat-filling.
Winged is guilty of reaching far beyond it's meager means, and perhaps following any one of the character's plotlines may have made for an interesting diversion (Pearce's desperate attempts to be a savior is the most bizarrely entertaining). But too often the film stretches until it's almost threadbare, with characters speaking straight from a writer's keyboard rather than as actual fleshed-out humans (Fanning's change into a Jesus freak has her delivering lines that would cause the most well-versed preacher to go back to the source and check his notes).
With a cast this expansive (and talented) it's hard for the film to not hit some of the right chords in dealing with grief and trauma, and it has moments of honest intensity scattered throughout.
But, as a whole, Winged Creatures remains in a cage gilded with melodrama.
Killshot
Killshot is a little more tricky. Completed before Rourke's triumphant performance in The Wrestler, the film was made at the tail end of his cash-grab days, which included Shades, Out in Fifty and Get Carter.
Based on an Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, he plays a Native American (from the sound of his voice, he once belonged to the little-known Brooklyn Tribe), who serves as a "cleaner."
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