Back in graduate school all the cool kids were into indie filmmaker Hal Hartley, and I started watching his movies too. The Hartley film that stuck with me was Henry Fool. How could a movie about a garbageman poet not stick with someone getting a PhD in English and teaching composition, especially with teachable scenes like this:
Fay Grim is Henry Fool's sequel, released nine years later. It features the same actors, even the kid who plays their son whom HF takes drinking and smoking when he was 5. And of course there's the striking and subtle Parker Posey, who gets some choice lines in HF, like when she (as Fay) claims that her brother's poetry brought on her period a week and a half early. As you might be able to tell from the title and the movie poster, Fay is front and center in the sequel, which is rather unexpectedly wound around an espionage scheme. And if you haven't seen Henry Fool, then by all means, rent or netflix them both.
