Carol Altschuler, of Elkins Park, left a voicemail earlier this week: Based on a two sentence description she’d read in the Inquirer, she ventured into town over the weekend to catch Bird’s Eye View at the Roxy Theater.

This is part of her review, the message she left on the phone: “Unbelievable … The movie was a riot… The whole animal thing, the alien thing… I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a real find!”

Ah yes, the animal thing, the alien thing. Cybela Clare, the Rittenhouse Square writer/director/producer and star of Bird’s Eye View, communes with cockatoos. She has an ardent animal rights agenda that makes Brigitte Bardot look like Mademoiselle Milquetoast. And then there’s the alien stuff: a flashback to Clare’s character’s childhood, a little girl gone missing in a blast of light. There’s are testimonials from women who were abducted and impregnated by aliens. There’s even stuff about missing bovine body parts – cow organs taken into space on flying saucers.

A true indie, a piece of cinematic outsider art, Clare’s faux-doc thriller combines Dan Brown huggermugger with paranormal X-Files intrigue with dialogue that’ll make you laugh. But behind it all is a sentiment, and a sense of spiritual adventure, that defies ridicule. Bird’s Eye View is an odd and goofy enterprise, shot with the aesthetics of an infomercial, and boasting a plot that’s literally all over the map (the Mediterranean, South America, Central Park).

Altschuler says she’s urging her friends and family to check out Bird’s Eye View. I second that emotion. Really. It’s weird, wacky, kitschy, campy, and ultimately kind of sweet, too.

Playing at the Roxy Theater, 2023 Sansom Street, 215-923-6699. Click on the Bird’s Eye View website here.

Let’s see -- 271 movies in ten days, that’s 27.1 movies a day. Which means that most Toronto Film Festival-goers are going to have wildly divergent takes (and tickets) as they queue up with their circled and underlined schedules, waiting for whatever the next show is at the Varsity or the AMC plexes, the Elgin or the Cumberland, or the other venues spread around town. (A town celebrating its 175th year.)

And so far, my festival has been a grim one – thematically, that is. With the exception of the happily loopy, sort-of-true The Men Who Stare at Goats and its tale of secret paranormal military ops and New Age army dudes (including a Dude-like Jeff Bridges), I’ve seen nothing but doom, death and depression.

Sure, the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man – drawn from Joel and Ethan’s experiences growing up in 1960s suburban Minnesota -- is laced with typical Coensian irony and close-up absurdity. But the film’s protagonist, a physics professor played by Michael Stuhlbarg, has the luck of Job: his wife wants a divorce, his brother, a jobless social misfit, has moved into the family house, the tenure committee has been receiving unfavorable, anonymous letters, and a foreign student is threatening to sue. On top of that, the X-rays from this ill-fated father and husband’s most recent doctor’s visit seem ominous. Laff riot.

Maybe one of the reasons Quentin Tarantino insists on spelling Inglourious Basterds the way he does (the director’s not saying) is that there’s already a Spell-Checked Inglorious Bastards out there in the universe.

Released in 1978, Enzo Castellari’s World War II action pic remains a cult fave, revered in certain cinema circles – Tarantino’s circle being one of the more notable. (Tag line on the original poster: "Whatever the Dirty Dozen did, they do it dirtier!") To capitalize on the new Weinstein Brothers' release, the first Inglorious has just been sent out on DVD and Blu-Ray via Severin Films. Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson star as members of a gang of criminals who escape an Allied prison convoy with a plan to hop over the Swiss border, but end up ‘volunteering’ for a suicide mission deep inside Nazi-occupied France instead.