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It's tempting to suggest that My Big Fat Independent Movie is part of the same bankrupt parody trend that brought us Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans. Its infamous $5,000 box office further supports the notion that it's a waste of celluloid. But that's ignoring two key differences between Philip Zlotorynski's film and the dreck churned out by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg: 1) This film takes its jokes from actual independent movies, rather than whatever happened to be in theaters when the script was written; 2) It's actually sort of funny. By being so relentlessly self-aware, My Big Fat Independent Movie supersedes all criticisms that it's too on-the-nose, because that's precisely the point. Writer Chris Gore didn't want the kind of parody in which genre tropes are merely exaggerated for comic effect -- he wanted his characters to name-check the films they're parodying, discuss the narrative function of their clichéd behavior, and consider which ironic pop songs are best to play while torturing an undercover cop. Sure enough, Quentin Tarantino is one of Gore's primary targets, as he skewers both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. But he also fits in at least one scene and/or character from a dozen other films. Some he has to explain in the dialogue ("Didn't any of you see the movie Pi?"), while others are obvious enough without that (a Memento parody may be the funniest, with the amnesiac tattooing reminders on his arm not to answer the phone -- because of telemarketers). None of this is particularly inspired, but it does have a certain innocuous quality that's absent from the Seltzer-Friedberg model -- namely, Gore and Zlotorynski want something more sublime than to crush annoying pop culture icons with heavy objects. They may fail more than they succeed, but the results are watchable enough.