With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

This will no doubt be an illegal movie forever. After seeing it at the UC Theater in the summer of '82, I recently found a copy on a bootleg VHS for $1 at a Friends of the Library sale, still burned with the Sundance Channel bug. In today's cinema, much is made of the nostalgia value of the 1980s soundtrack: a famous example being Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" during Donnie Darko's opening. You can have your MTV, though, since URGH! A Music War was the soundtrack to my 1980s. Hey, what a surprise, no Duran Duran, no INXS, no Soft Cell covering a Gloria Jones soul classic and convincing a history-impaired generation that they wrote it. And yet it's clear why this film failed.

As a business scheme URGH seems, in 2008 hindsight, a uniquely quick way to burn a fortune. The film documents second-wave punk and New Wave bands playing from LA to London, editing them together without any particular zeitgeisty event like a music festival. So: play it a little under a real kiss-of-death title, and then wait to be deafened by the wails of bands, managers and lawyers zooming in to fight over the non-existant money. The Police were the headliners, opening and closing the film. They wrap up the film, too; you can see drummer Miles Copeland wearing an URGH! T-shirt. Is this perhaps all he was paid for this film? There are mostly cinematic performances here, and we see how much was lost by the fact that the Industry couldn't figure out a way to use their talents in the movies. Here's a key to the best of the show, omitting slurs of forgotten bands who perished long years ago.

Do you like a little dark twist with your holiday movies? Maybe you're tired of always seeing Santa as the good guy, or watching some grouchy old holiday hater redeemed at the end of the movie. Perhaps you're a fan of cult movies with early appearances by unusual acting talent, bizarre and inappropriate music, or acting so amateurish you either have to laugh or run screaming from the room. In other words, you need cult films to get you through the holidays, not that contemporary Hollywood blockbuster stuff.

Originally this post was entitled "Cult Christmas Movies," but I got lucky and remembered a certain Hanukkah-related cult favorite from a few years ago. Once I started, there were so many movies to choose from. I had to decide whether Kiss Kiss Bang Bang counted as a holiday cult film (not yet), whether it was worth including Santa Claus: The Movie just because the title character is played by the actor who played the elder Jeffrey Lebowski in The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), and whether I should include The Poseidon Adventure (or its remake) simply because I didn't have a New Year's Eve movie on the list.

Feel free to share any favorite holiday-themed cult movies that aren't on this list. 'Tis the season for some of us to enjoy some really good bad movies.

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is not technically Tim Burton's. He produced the film and conceived it, but it was, in fact, written by Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) and directed by Henry Selick (who later helmed the bizarre but unjustly hated Monkeybone). Still, you feel Burton in every single frame. As audiences eagerly await Burton's Sweeney Todd, I thought this would be an ideal time to look back at his previous stab at the musical genre.

The story of Nightmare is a simple one. Jack Skellington (voiced by Prince Humperdinck himself -- Chris Sarandon, with composer Danny Elfman handling singing duties) is the "Pumpkin King" of Halloweentown, but he has become bored in the role. He literally stumbles into a place called Christmas Town, loves what he sees, and decides to hijack the holiday. Skellington even (in the film's funniest segment) takes over the gift delivery duties for Santa Claus ("Sandy Claws"). And of course, there's a not entirely necessary love interest -- Sally, voiced by an unrecognizable Catherine O'Hara.

Speaking of Elfman, the scores he has written for Tim Burton's films are some of the most memorable in modern film. Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman/Batman Returns, and Edward Scissorhands wouldn't have been nearly as wonderful without Elfman's glorious music. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the music of Elfman is front and center, and his songs -- whose staccato rhythms and mixture of singing and speaking certainly owe a debt to Sweeney Todd composer Stephen Sondheim -- suit the film perfectly. The catchiest of Elfman's tunes is "What's This?" It's the kind of song you'll find yourself singing days later, during the most mundane of activities. Just this morning, I walked into the bathroom singing "What's this, what's this? My toothbrush on the sink! What's this, what's this? I'll brush my teeth I think!" Thank God I live alone.

You might question my picking of Back to School as a guilty pleasure. The Rodney Dangerfield movie, about a rude, millionaire businessman who enrolls in the college his son attends, was pretty well received by critics and it did really well at the box office (almost taking in $100 million in 1986). But I never enjoyed it for being a good movie. Dangerfield, while compared to Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields by Roger Ebert, always seemed to me an acquired taste. A taste I never acquired enough to enjoy any of his other pictures. When it came out, I was just a kid and I loved it in the same way I loved other dumb comedies of the '80s. When it was funny, it made me laugh and when it was slow -- take any scene with Sally Kellerman, for instance -- it made me bored. Later in life, I figured my enjoyment was based on nostalgia, though I had new appreciations in that I was then a fan of Oingo Boingo (and front man Danny Elfman) and Kurt Vonnegut, who appear in cameos as themselves.

Today, I appreciate it on another personal, rather than critical, level. As I begin college today after a ten-year hiatus, I feel somewhat related to Dangerfield's character of Thornton Melon. Sure, he was going for the first time and I'm returning after having dropped out, and he was much, much older than I am now, but nonetheless, I am an older-than-usual college student. Unfortunately I'm not rich enough to have a hot tub in my dorm (actually I won't be living in a dorm) or hire Vonnegut to write my papers on his own work. I also don't plan on wooing any professors, going out for the diving team, or doing much of what Melon does in the movie -- I would like to see if Burt Young wants the job of my bodyguard, though.

Today (March 6) is Richard Elfman's birthday. If your immediate response is "Is he related to Danny?" then obviously you have never experienced one of the weirdest movies ever: Forbidden Zone. Richard Elfman directed this 1980 black-and-white festival of grunge, which has picked up quite the cult following over the years. I first saw this ultra-low-budget movie on video at LSU in my undergrad days with a bunch of friends, and we were so proud to have discovered an unusual, obscure film that didn't look like any other movie we knew. (When I took my boyfriend to a screening at Alamo Drafthouse last year, he pointed out that the overall look of the movie must have been inspired by underground comics of the time.)

Several members of the Elfman family appear in Forbidden Zone, including Richard and his then-wife Marie-Pascale Elfman. I couldn't find a good still of Richard from the film, but I found one of his little brother, who plays Satan: yep, that's Danny Elfman above. Danny appears in only one scene but he's fabulous.

The cast also includes Herve Villechaize, Susan Tyrrell, and Viva. The soundtrack is a lot of fun and includes some bizarre reworkings of old Cab Calloway songs. The plot ... well, it would take me a while to explain and wouldn't make much sense, anyway. You'd have to see for yourself.

Forbidden Zone is truly a unique film, but if you're thinking of renting it, bear in mind that it does include partial nudity, excremental and sexual humor, and possibly offensive manipulation of racial stereotypes.