Bedhead (1991)

You can tell that Robert Rodriguez labored over every moment of this witty black-and-white short film that won him all sorts of prizes back when he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s about a girl who hits her head one day in a fight with her brother, who has an Eraserhead-worthy case of bedhead, and then gains strange new powers from the blow. As in Rodriguez’s debut feature, El Mariachi, made the following year, his camera here is a whirling .dervish that will spin around anywhere It’ll dash up stairs at light speed. It’ll rush up close to someone’s face like a cartoon detective wielding a magnifying glass. Sometimes it might rest like a fly in an odd corner of the room and observe the action from there. It all adds up to a funny little short story, smart, eccentric, and finely observed.