Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, a documentary directed by Jay Delaney, is, true to the title, not about Bigfoot (a.k.a. Sasquatch, a.k.a. Yeti), the mythical apelike giant that first chronicled in the 1920s in the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and, more recently, the American Midwest. Bigfoot has appeared in stories, novels, horror films, and on television in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. More than eighty years after the first sightings and despite the efforts of researchers, Bigfoot’s existence remains uncorroborated, a mystery to some, a myth to others, and the life work for others. Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie follows Wayne Burton and Dallas Gilbert, middle-aged friends, [...]

Just three years old, high school-noir got its start with Rian Johnson’s Brick (released in 2006 after being picked up at the Sundance Film Festival a year earlier). Set in a Northern California high school and centered on the investigation of missing student by her former boyfriend, a detective of sorts, and featuring hyper-stylized dialogue and impressive visual design and cinematography, Brick was a noir fan’s dream (other film fans were probably not as impressed). The Assassination of a High School President takes a similar premise (minus the hyper-stylized dialogue), borrows classic noir elements (e.g., the detective, the femme fatale, moral ambiguity, corruption, double- and triple crosses), and combines them [...]

Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a twenty-six-years-in-the-making bio-doc on the life, times, rants, and raves of science fiction writer/raconteur Harlan Ellison directed by Erik Nelson, is a perfect primer for anyone unfamiliar with Ellison’s contributions to the written word, television, and film. Be forewarned, though, Nelson gives Ellison free reign to express his dissatisfaction about anything and everything, from television as opiate (an old argument, that) to creator rights in a tangled, media-saturated world. As fascinating as Dreams with Sharp Teeth is, it’s also frustrating for the questions Nelson doesn’t ask (probably to avoid a patented Ellison rant or rave about whatever subject crosses his path).

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking documentary edited and directed by Kurt Kuenne explores, in often excruciating detail, the death of his best friend, Andrew Bagby, a twenty-eight year old doctor completing his residency in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. On the morning of November 5, 2001, Bagby’s bullet-riddled body was found in a public park. Suspicion almost immediately turned to Bagby’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Shirley Turner, a Canadian woman who studied with Bagby at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She moved to the United States to be closer to Bagby. As Turner’s arrest seemed imminent, she fled back to St. John’s, a small city in Newfoundland, Canada.
Kuenne [...]

Written and directed by Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough, The Upsetter promises, with more than a bit of hyperbole, to document Jamaican music pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s life and times (definitively at that). Perry, a songwriter, singer, and producer, helped to define reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s, working with Bob Marley and the Wailers, and later dub, the predecessor to electronic music. In one, five-year period during the 1970s, Perry produced an average of 20 songs a week for artists in Jamaica and Britain. The later 70s’ saw Perry collaborating with The Clash. One of their early hits, “Police and Thieves,” was actually a cover of [...]

Directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, The Last Good Breath), Stop Loss dramatizes the U.S. military’s “stop-loss” policy that allows the military to postpone the honorable discharge of U.S. soldiers and send them back to Iraq and Afghanistan for another tour of duty (usually a year to eighteen months). Alas, Stop Loss proves the adage that “good politics don’t make good art.” Stop Loss suffers from a serious case of implausibility and contrivance that fatally undermines whatever insight Peirce hopes to shed on the stop-loss policy and its unfairness toward the soldiers who serve in the U.S. military in foreign countries.
Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), leads his [...]

A documentary directed by Rene Pinnell and Claire Huie about Pinnell’s uncle, Texas filmmaker Eagle Pennell (Last Night at the Alamo, The Whole Shootin’ Match), The King of Texas, is both an affectionate tribute to Pennell and his brand of regional-based, DIY filmmaking and a cautionary tale about substance and alcohol abuse and the premature end of a once promising filmmaking career. Over less than three decades, Pennell made four feature films, one short, and contributed to a documentary (Good Life). Pennel was forced to work with meager resources and no distribution outside of local film festivals.

After watching Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s (Survivor, Fight Club) novel directed by Clark Gregg, the words vulgar, crude, profane, blasphemous, obscene, and, best of all, hilarious, all come to mind. A sharp critique aimed at our self-centered, self-absorbed culture, with a few digs at group therapy, psychiatry, and dysfunctional parenting, Choke is the kind of film that can be only made outside the Hollywood system, then gets picked up by a Hollywood-based distributor after it becomes a hit with festival audiences and critics, as Choke did at the Sundance Film Festival two months ago. Choke was picked up by Fox Searchlight, with a released planned for late August, [...]

Some documentaries enlighten. The best documentaries do both. Case Directed by Ellen Spiro, a professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, and Phil Donahue, the former television host whose last television program was cancelled by MSNBC (ostensibly for low ratings, but probably for his liberal-progressive views), Body of War, a deeply moving, ultimately heart-wrenching documentary, follows Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran injured in 2005 during an assault on convoy, his arduous rehab, physical setbacks, his marriage, and his political activism as a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Bright, articulate, and passionate, Young found purpose and meaning by becoming a [...]

A rock opera/musical that’s part Tommy and part Cabaret, Rainbow Around the Sun is a perfect example of what a talented group of artists and musicians can do when they have a modest budget and modern technology (e.g., HD cameras, Final Cut Pro) to work from. Filmed in and around Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by directors Kevin Ely and Beau Leland (who also edited) and based on a concept album (remember those?) by singer/songwriter Matthew Alvin Brown, Rainbow Around the Sun is, at times, startlingly original in its ability to take the best of two mediums, music and film, and combine them into a powerful, moving, moviegoing experience, one that deserves [...]

Bananaz, Ceri Levy’s behind-the-scenes/tour documentary centered on Gorillaz, the virtual band created by Damon Albarn, lead singer and songwriter for the Brit-pop band, Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, the co-creator of Tank Girl, is, alas, the kind of insular, for-fans-only documentary that means a limited theatrical run, if any, and a somewhat appreciative audience on DVD for completists of Gorillaz-centered merchandise or material. Even Gorillaz fans, though, might find themselves bored or otherwise disengaged from Levy’s loose, unstructured, and ultimately self-indulgent approach to the Gorillaz phenomenon.
Bananaz follows Albarn and Hewlett as they formulate the concept behind the Gorillaz and the four amine-influenced band members, 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel, that exist [...]

If, like the vast majority of music listeners, you’re unfamiliar with the term “nerdcore,” then you’re in luck. Nerdcore Rising, an engrossing documentary directed by Negin Farsad, will answer any and all questions you may have about nerdcore, a relatively new hip-hop genre made by and for nerds (e.g., computer nerds, gaming nerds, and pop culture nerds). Farsad tackles nerdcore from various vantage points, interviewing hip-hop names like Prince Paul and J. Live, outside-the-hip-hop-box names like comedian Brian Posehn, singer/comedian ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and Jello Biafra, the former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, a post-punk rock band that had its heyday in the late 1970s through the mid 1980s, [...]

Every year, 25,000 students apply to New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Out of those 25,000 students, only 750 get in. A meritocracy in the best sense of the word, Stuyvesant pulls in the best and the brightest, regardless of wealth, class, race, or gender. Most of the students are the children of first- or second-generation immigrants, with close to fifty percent identified as Asian. The top percentile of each graduating class goes on to Ivy League or other well-respected universities and colleges. Not surprisingly, the yearly elections for president of the student body are famed for their hyper-competitiveness. If that sounds like a subject that’d make [...]

Possibly the unfunniest comedy ever made, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is…. Wait, let’s back up. That’s completely backward. Written by actor Jason Segal (Knocked Up Undeclared, Freaks and Geeks), Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the kind of romantic comedy straight men can get behind and not just because Segel unveils his manliness more times than you can count (actually four full-on frontal nudity shots, but who’s keeping count?). Forgetting Sarah Marshall belongs to the sub-genre of romantic comedies that turn on losing then finding love with the “right” person (as opposed to the “right-now” person). It also fits into what one critic or reviewer has called, semi-pretentiously, the “cinema of discomfort” (actually, [...]

If you’re in the mood for survival horror (and really, who isn’t?), then Dance of the Dead, directed by Gregg Bishop (The Other Side) and written by Joe Ballarini, will satiate your appetite and then some. Made on a modest budget (not a micro-budget, thankfully) and featuring a cast of unknowns (as is usually the case with independent horror flicks) and dozens of zombies, Dance of the Dead plays out like a contemporary remix of Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, with fast-moving, brain-munching, intestine-gnawing zombies on the prowl for, among others, teenagers trying to enjoy the senior prom) Gory, ridiculous fun from start to finish, Dance of the [...]