Fantomas This suite of pages devoted to the elusive French super-meanie Fantomas is one of the handsomest WWW fan installations I've ever come across. It's also very thorough, offering plot descriptions, cover art from most of the original turn-of-the-century Fantomas pulp novels, extensive info on the great silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade, and a cool page on the Mexican "Fantomas" comic book.
The Harry Stephen Keeler Society Memorialized in Gun in Cheek as one of the worst mystery writers of all time. He's that and more.
Eric Kraft's Peter Leroy Page The work of novelist Eric Kraft is perfectly suited to the hyper-link treatment offered here, in a complex interactive site designed by the author himself. Kraft was an early Mac adopter, and put together a celebrated CD-ROM version of his novels for the Voyager Company.
Alan Moore Comic book auteur of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and, most recently, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
MOVIES
Hayao Miyazaki Perhaps not quite as elegent as the Fantomas site listed above, but close, and even more extensive. Inspired, perhaps, by the genius of their subject.
The Illuminated Lantern Easily the best Hong Kong cinema fan site I've ever come across, with informative and well-written background articles, a huge links page, and an ideosyncratic range of favorites. Web-sifu Peter Nepstad explains the role of the magical Taoist priest in HK horror movies in a way that even I can understand.
Chang Cheh: The Godfather of the Kung Fu Film An impressive collection of articles and interviews celebrating the life and work of late great master of the "hard" school of martial arts cinema.
Films42.com One of the few Internet film sites with a distinctive and potentially useful premise, offering movie information for overworked couples to enjoy a deux. Smart, funny reviews that were not written by 23-year-olds with goatees.
Senses of Cinema An on-line film journal from Australia with a stronger line-up of contributors than most ink-and-paper publications. Which sounds like faint praise but isn't meant to be.
BOLLYWOOD
Upperstall.com - A Better View of Indian Cinema Well-wriiten and beautifully designed, this is a labor of love site packed with information about every aspect of Bollywood cinema, from the Golden Age to the present.
BollyWHAT.com Useful Hindi cinema resources for the beginner: reviews, song lyric translations, cultural notes, vocabulary lists, and a sense of humor.
IndiaPlaza.com Solid on-line retail source for Sub-continental DVDs, books, food, and cricket equipment.
India Weekly A retail video source favored by many fans.
Ayngaran International A British DVD company that specilizes in high-quality, subtitled, no-region DVDs of Tamil films. The new Mani Rathnam picture will be available here first.
Zulm.net Cranky, well-informed videophile reviews of Indian DVD releases, illustrated with frame grabs.
Planet Bollybob Web maestro Muffy St. Bernard is a Canadian drag queen, radio disc jockey, and long-time Bollywood addict who writes dead-on sarcastic/affectionate tributes to his/her Hindi favorites.
Filmi Sangeet - The Indian Film Song Lots of good basic information, both historical and musicological, on the classic Indian film song. With useful links to book and CD sources.
Dishant.com A good site for Bollywood film music, now that All India Radio seems to be on permanent hiatus.
Javed Akhtar Personal site of the genre-defining screenwriter of Zanjeer and Sholay, now one of Bollywood's best lyricists and a consistantly level-headed observer of Indian popular film culture. See also Nasreen Munni Kabir's book length interview Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar.
Shammi Kapoor This appears to be (or presents itself as) the very personal, family-oriented web page of one of my favorite Bollywood performers, the high-stepping "Indian Elvis" of the 1960s.
Horror Movies of India and Pakistan The Hot Spot is a Pakistani video and ice cream franchise with branches in Lahore and Islamabad. Their web site is a treasure trove of information about the strata of South Asian cinema that we in the West rarely hear about.
MUSIC
Puffy "Temple of Puffy, fascinating girl-Beatles of Japan."
Dangdut Proof positive that AltaVista is still the search engine of choice for the globally-minded individual: Google didn't lay a glove on this massive Indonesian mail-order music site. Dangdut, a demotic, mostly Muslim pop form, was essentially invented by one man, the great Rhoma Irama, whose Soneta Group has a site of its own.
Rembetika This stuff really gets under your skin: the exact Greek equivilent of rust-bucket Delta blues. There are several volumes of import re-issue CDs in The Greek Archives series from FM Records of Athens, at least two books in English (one, two) and several informative web sites.
Chutney Soca! An utterly infectious mix of calypso and the Hindi filmi (film song) genre. Sniffed at by the snob purveyors of "world music," but beloved by actual people, specifically West Indians of East Indian descent.
Dismuke's Virtual Talking Machine Pure pleasure: A 24 hour online radio station devoted to vintage pop and jazz recordings from the decade 1925 - 1935, otherwise known as the Pennies From Heaven era.
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