By Vadim Rizov

If you’ve never been to The ImaginAsian on 59th St., that could well be because few people seem to be aware that there’s a big theater in Manhattan occasionally giving exposure to Asian movies that got lost in the festival/commercial shuffle. Case in point: through Thursday, the theater is screening 2004’s The Taste of Tea and 2005’s Funky Forest: The First Contact — both films by Katsuhito Ishii, the latter co-directed with Shin’ichiro Miki and Aniki, on which more in a second.

For a quick reference point, Ishii was the man responsible for the anime sequence in Kill Bill, but that knowledge won’t help you much with these movies. The Taste Of Tea is kind of a minor classic I wrote about the last time it played at ImaginAsian: it’s been given less screenings, but it’s worth going out of your way for. It’s a less rigorous Yi Yi, which is to say that — like the title, a simpler version of Ozu’s The Flavor Of Green Tea Over Rice — it’s a contemplative mini-epic about a family, only spiced with the kind of WTF moments that make for handy YouTube clips. It’s cohesive, lovely and deeply pleasurable, if a bit too long for what it’s trying to do. If that sounds good to you, dig in.

Funky Forest isn’t nearly as good, but it should be easier to get people to watch with you, at the very least. At 150 minutes, it’s a plotless compendium of bizarro sketches, the co-responsibility of the three directors. (It’s impossible to tell whose segment is whose, at least without reading Japanese.) It’s hard to summarize: it opens with a comedy act by the Mole Brothers, before revealing that said Brothers are being watched by some kind of astronaut hanging out in a white, amoeba-like cell that takes off, propelled by little flippers in a white sea of similar blobs. Soon after, we’re introduced to The Unpopular With Women Brothers - e.g., three guys who obviously aren’t related, including a fat white kid whose only apparent function the whole movie is to give people Snickers bars on demand. The first half is surreal, culminating in a most excellent dance-off dream sequence; after an on-screen intermission (Muzak-y stuff plays while a counter gives you three minutes), things get actively Cronenbergian, with all manner of vaginas and penises proliferating in various ways. Here, all the orifices seem friendly rather than menacing, which is the key difference, I guess: for all the spurting fluids (skip to the 1:55 mark), occasional threats of violence and animated Satanic visitors, these are a consistently bizarre 2 1/2 hours. They’re all chopped up on YouTube, hence the linkage above — here’s another of my personal favorite bits — and maybe that’s where the movie belongs; it’s a zippy epic, but it’s still non sequitur. But — although you can watch bits of Taste Of Tea online too, that would be wrong; it’s the rare cult movie greater than the sum of its weird parts.