tallandthin

Unfortunately this excellent documentary aired less than a month after the tragedy of 9/11 and was completely overlooked, and I don't recall VH1 making any effort to promote it. If you have a chance to watch the DVD or buy the box set soundtrack, it is well worth your time. It is an enormously entertaining documentary with great music and incredible interviews. It even deepened my respect for Snoop Dogg. The comprehensiveness of the documentary is what makes this worth the investment in time (I believe it's five hours): watch this and you feel like you've earned a PhD in music history. The producers and directors (including Quincy Jones) obviously approached this as a labor of love. Is there an Emmy category for documentaries??? This should have won a couple. Rare to find something so intelligent and yet so enjoyable at the same time.

One of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. I haven't seen a funnier first 10 minutes of a movie since SOUTH PARK -- the gags are puerile and stupid, yes, but they are also refreshingly original. No fair comparing this to POLICE ACADEMY -- the characters in that dreadful series of movies were all alien morons and hardly recognizable as human beings. These characters are smart and fully fleshed out -- these are the kind of guys who remind you of your friends. This movie should be an inspiration to both aspiring film-makers and to the big studios -- you don't need a $20 million actor and twenty-five different writers and a ridiculously contrived concept to make a successful comedy. If I were running a big studio, I'd sign Broken Lizard up to do 10 more movies at the $5-$10 million range, let them hit their stride and develop a following, and cash in on the DVD sales. And let's face it -- none of these guys are leading men, none of them would ever have had a career in Hollywood on their own, but together, they're funnier than those lames on SNL.

Movie has mesmerizing performances, and a great example of what film-makers today can do on indie budgets. However, I'm surprised at how many posts are using the film as some sort of insight into today's youth culture. It's a shocking film about a specific (and shocking) crime, but to use it to generalize an entire generation of kids is naive. First of all, their behavior (aside from the murder) is no more or less shocking than the behavior exhibited by my classmates at a Catholic school in Missouri in the early 80s. We didn't listen to gansta rap - no, we only listened to death metal and wore Satanic symbols. Half my graduating class smoked pot and snorted meth and dropped acid. I had classmates who were bullies, who were lazy, who hated their parents, who picked fights and got into brawls, who were rebellious and shiftless and shallow. We had video games and television and date rape and bad parents. Indeed, the murder rate among teens was much higher in the 1980s than it is today. This is a fascinating film, and surely nobody would be as interested in a film about the many teen-agers whom I work with who are bright, articulate, and motivated. Our school systems have definitely declined, and working parents work more now than ever, so don't get me wrong - teenagers today have many more social pressures than ever to contend with. But don't let this film influence you into thinking that Marty and Ali and Bobby are typical teenagers. My theory is that Larry Clark is actually a secret Republican operative, out there making movies designed purely to scare the living heck out of parents...