When you're named after a mythological figure (in some traditions, a co-ruler of Hell), and your mentor is the deeply strange Stan Brakhage, and your most well-known production to date is a nearly silent comedy whose big claim to fame is having been shot on stolen film, you'd have to go pretty far not to be considered the weird one in your family.
Unless, of course, you're Azazel Jacobs.
Jacobs escapes being the strangest fruit hanging from his family tree by virtue of who his father is: the legendary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, director of the brilliant Tom Tom the Piper's Son and the infamous found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death. Given his parentage, it's not surprising that Azazel Jacobs started making movies that are more than a big off-kilter; what's surprising is how resolutely normal they seem in comparison to his dad's work. Nonetheless, his movies have garnered Jacobs the Younger a reputation as a rising star in independent film; his last movie, The GoodTimesKid, was a quirky, unpredictable physical comedy, and his latest, Momma's Man, takes advantage of his father's skills -- not as a director, but as an actor. As the Jacobs explain to the LA Weekly, the film is a gauze-thin metaphor where a young man (not played by Azazel Jacobs) goes to visit his aging parents (played by Azazel Jacobs' parents) and suddenly, inexplicably, finds himself unable to leave. The apartment (played by Azazel Jacobs' parents' apartment) is both comforting and terrifying, a huge, strangely angled place that is filled with eerie emptiness and amusingly odd piles of junk ("What junk?" protests Ken Jacobs; "It's my life.")
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