Really? Well, for those who compete in the Monopoly World Championship every four to five years, it is. After a predictable opening sequence of The Drifters’ song playing over Atlantic City tourist footage, freshman feature director Kevin Tostado introduces us to them and, unfortunately, stays focused on them. Sad to say, the “Story” promised by […]
documentary
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Talking Heads: Chronology
While official Warner Bros. compilations of the Heads’ mind-bending, envelope-pushing videos allow for a glimpse of the art-rock band at its most creative, this 18-track disc is the next best thing to catching them live — outside of Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense,” of course. “Chronology” kicks off with a 1976 mic test that captures […]
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The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Being Swedish, director Göran Olsson inherently carries an advantage over most American historians when it comes to documenting domestic cultural phenomena, such as the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Because who’s more objective than a foreign visitor? Olsson makes this point early on in “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” when Swedish […]
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Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
Starting in 1994 on the East Coast, Justin Duerr did; he wondered what it meant. The more he encountered them, the more his interest was piqued. Curiosity beget obsession when an in-its-infancy Internet search yielded no results, and the documentary “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” follows Duerr in his roughly 15-year search […]
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‘Slow’ your roll
With decidedly repulsive band names like Alabama Thunderpussy, Eyehategod and Goatwhore, it’s no wonder that underground Southern metal remained a subgenre largely unexamined — until the documentary “Slow Southern Steel,” that is. “This was something we felt passionate enough to put out there, because there is no comprehensive documentary about this scene, and we felt […]
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Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
But this is no peep show. Director/producer Taggart Siegel (“The Real Dirt on Farmer John”) has loftier goals in mind with this documentary on colony collapse disorder. That’s a fancy-sounding scientific phrase for the disappearance ’round the globe of worker bees. While the insectophobic among us may think that’s not that big a deal, “Queen […]
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Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
See, Johnny Lee Sausage and Mitch Deprey had trouble sleeping because of the drunken arguments pouring through the paper-thin walls of the oil-and-water old men Ray and Pete, one of whom was gay, both of whom drank constantly, and neither of whom worked. Ray and Pete’s nightly exchanges included slurred shouts of “cocksucker” and “fuckin’ […]
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The Staircase
It’s that gripping — a miracle, considering the film is so long (six hours), it has to span two discs. On Dec. 9, 2001, Nortel executive Kathleen Peterson died at the bottom of a narrow stairwell in her North Carolina home, presumably from a fall. She was found by her novelist husband, Michael, who called […]
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The Man Nobody Knew
It’s a life explored, as much as one can explore a life mired in obfuscation, by Colby’s son, Carl Colby, in “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.” The documentary screens Thursday night at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Despite the familial connection between documentarian and subject matter, […]
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Bobby Fischer Against the World
The man was Bobby Fischer, a notoriously private guy who nonetheless became a global superstar in 1972 for unseating Russia’s Boris Spassky for the world championship in chess, so perhaps it’s not so inappropriate that a documentary about his life begin unfolding to the famous funk groove of Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft.” For a brief time, […]