I realize that Quentin Dupieux‘s Rubber (on demand 2.25, theatrical 4.1) has played at other festivals including Cannes 2010, but wouldn’t it be great if it could show at Sundance or Slamdance? You can tell right away from this recently-posted trailer that Dupieux knows exactly what he’s doing. And a journalist-roommate who caught it at last November’s Stockholm Film Festival says it’s “really good.”

Right now the ratio of Green Hornet-type movies (corporate crap, death of the spirit, serious wounding of Seth Rogen) vs. Rubber-type movies (cleverness, originality, coolness) is about 20 to 1. That needs to change. Rubber and Hobo With A Shotgun are both about a strange outsider who kills with impugnity. At best I’m approaching Hobo with extreme caution (especially given emphatic claims that there’s no way I’ll be able to extract a kill-the-Wall-Street-guys metaphor), but I’m already in the tank for Rubber.

I should have seen it at last May’s Cannes Critics Week. I wrote about it as the festival began but I dropped the ball for some reason.

Rubber “is the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been abandoned in the desert, and suddenly and inexplicably comes to life,” the site says. “As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to destroy anything he wishes without having to move.”

The cast includes Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Roxane Mesquida, Ethan Cohn (I presume this isn’t a typo and that it’s not Ethan Coen),

Charley Koontz and Daniel Quinn.

This YouTube trailer is okay, but it isn’t nearly as grabby and well-cut as the more recent one that went up a day or two ago.