Few­er than 40 min­utes sur­vive of My Best Friend’s Birth­day, the first film direct­ed by Quentin Taran­ti­no. But its brief screen time runs dense with ref­er­ences to Elvis Pres­ley, the Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, A Count­ess from Hong Kong, Rod Stew­art, Deputy Dawg, and That Darn Cat. In between the rapid-fire gab ses­sions, we also wit­ness a slap­stick kung-fu bat­tle and even hear a bit of repur­posed ear­ly-sev­en­ties pop music. Though a fire claimed the sec­ond half of what was pre­sum­ably the pic­ture’s only print, the first half, which you can watch free on YouTube, leaves no doubt as to the iden­ti­ty of its auteur. In some sense, it bears an even deep­er imprint of Taran­ti­no’s per­son­al­i­ty than his sub­se­quent films, since he stars in it as well. To behold the ear­ly-twen­tysome­thing Taran­ti­no por­tray­ing the good-heart­ed and aggres­sive­ly enthu­si­as­tic but jit­tery and dis­tractible rock­a­bil­ly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Taran­ti­no pub­lic per­sona in an embry­on­ic form, a dis­tilled form — or both.

The plot of My Best Friend’s Birth­day, such as it remains, finds Clarence look­ing to give a birth­day present to his pal Mick­ey, who’s been fresh­ly, and harsh­ly, re-reject­ed by an ex-girl­friend. None of Clarence’s ideas — not the cake, not the call girl — work out quite as intend­ed, though now I sup­pose we’ll nev­er know how wrong things real­ly went, or if they man­aged to right them­selves in the end. Yet the trun­cat­ed ver­sion of the film feels some­how more fas­ci­nat­ing — more sat­is­fy­ing, even — than any com­ple­tion I can imag­ine. Both the movie’s hope­less­ly unre­solved sto­ry and its dreamy visu­al qual­i­ty, cour­tesy of a beat­en-up 16-mil­lime­ter print trans­ferred onto what looks like a VHS tape, turn it into the most exper­i­men­tal art Taran­ti­no has ever cre­at­ed. It casts adrift even the direc­tor’s hardi­est fans in a stark south­ern Cal­i­for­nia real­i­ty: long-run­ning argu­ments about mean­ing­less cul­ture, cease­less ele­va­tion of the dis­pos­able, and a vague, loom­ing, but nev­er­the­less con­stant sense of threat. And amid all this, it can still serve up a line like, “What made you inter­est­ed in tack­ling pros­ti­tu­tion as a career goal?”

My Best Friend’s Birth­day appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Crack­ing Taran­ti­no

Film­mak­ing Advice from Quentin Taran­ti­no and Sam Rai­mi (NSFW)

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives Sneak Peek of Pulp Fic­tion to Jon Stew­art (1994)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

And now for some­thing com­plete­ly deli­cious: a rare gem from the Mon­ty Python vault called Away From it All, fea­tur­ing John Cleese as Nigel Far­quhar-Ben­nett, a voice-over artist bad­ly in need of a hol­i­day.

The 13-minute film is a par­o­dy of the mind-numb­ing trav­el­ogues they used to show in movie the­aters. It was pro­duced in 1979 and screened in British and Aus­tralian the­aters as a warm-up for Mon­ty Python’s Life of Bri­an.

The nar­ra­tion was writ­ten by Cleese, who Michael Palin once said was born with a sil­ver tongue in his mouth. “John loves words,” writes Palin in The Very Best of Mon­ty Python, “espe­cial­ly ‘neb­u­lous’, ‘tren­chant’ and ‘ortho­don­tic’. Though most chil­dren’s first word is ‘mama’, John’s was ‘eli­sion’. ‘Mama’ was third, after ‘hydraulics’.” Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese on the Ori­gin of Cre­ativ­i­ty

The Mon­ty Python Phi­los­o­phy Foot­ball Match Revis­it­ed

Bill Mur­ray, sure­ly both Amer­i­ca’s most and least approach­able movie star, seems for almost every­thing yet unavail­able for almost any­thing. Rarely grant­i­ng inter­views, lim­it­ing him­self (most­ly) to roles he actu­al­ly cares about, and famous­ly work­ing with­out an agent, he tends to pop up in places you would­n’t expect him to. Well, aside from Wes Ander­son films, where he’s remained a con­sis­tent pres­ence since 1998’s Rush­more — but remem­ber how star­tling it felt to see the star of Ground­hog Day turn up in such a rel­a­tive­ly small-scale, low-con­cept, gen­re­less pro­duc­tion in the first place? More recent­ly, his extend­ed cameo in Ruben Fleis­cher’s Zom­bieland has become, in the full­ness of time, that pic­ture’s very rai­son d’être. Not long before that, he appeared in a selec­tion at the 2008 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val: it was­n’t the lat­est fea­ture from a Wes Ander­son or a Sofia Cop­po­la or a Jim Jar­musch, and in fact not a fea­ture at all, but Peter Kari­nen and Bri­an Sac­ca’s short FCU: Fact Check­ers Unit.

Kari­nen and Sac­ca star as two low­ly fact-check­ers at Dic­tum, a pub­li­ca­tion solid­ly in the tra­di­tion the Unit­ed King­dom calls “lads’ mags.” (“SEX WORK OUTS,” insists one cov­er blurb.) Faced with a draft of an arti­cle on celebri­ty sleep­ing tips that rec­om­mends drink­ing a glass of warm milk before bed, “like Bill Mur­ray,” the fel­lows kneel before a shrine to Alex Tre­bek — their per­son­al god of facts — don their Fact Check­ers Unit wind­break­ers, and go look­ing for Mur­ray’s house. Sens­ing their stum­bling pres­ence, Mur­ray finds our heroes hud­dled in the bath­tub almost imme­di­ate­ly after they’ve bro­ken in. True to his rep­u­ta­tion, Mur­ray has not been easy to find, but true to his pub­lic per­sona, he proves placid­ly will­ing and able to hang out when found. After an evening of M*A*S*H, mar­ti­nis, check­ers, and lounge singing, the FCU boys dis­cov­er the truth about Bill Mur­ray and milk. I won’t, er, spoil it.

I can’t help but admire this cast­ing coup; Kari­nen and Sac­ca must have gone through just as much has­sle as the FCU did to find Bill Mur­ray. (That, or they hap­pened to know him through some coin­ci­den­tal con­nec­tion none of us could ever repli­cate.) Even more impres­sive, in its way, is how they seem­ing­ly craft­ed the struc­ture of FCU: Fact Check­ers Unit to accom­mo­date whichev­er hard-to-come-by celebri­ty they could have man­aged to come by. Per­haps a big­ger fan than I knows of some deep, long-estab­lished con­nec­tions between Bill Mur­ray, lad’s mags, M*A*S*H, and warm milk, but noth­ing stops me from imag­in­ing the Kevin Spacey ver­sion. In fact, I’d like to see the Kevin Spacey ver­sion. Insert a new celebri­ty each week while hold­ing all else equal, and the con­cept could become an avant-garde web series.

You can find this film list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.