THE MOVIE:

There is a great documentary to be made on the life of Norman Mailer: legendary writer, famed raconteur, failed politician, occasional filmmaker, notorious womanizer, renowned drinker. That great documentary has yet to be made; Joseph Mantegna's Norman Mailer: The American, put politely, is not it. Shabbily assembled and glancingly shallow, this brief 2010 portrait offers some bracing footage and tantalizing ideas, but either the subject is too immense, or the filmmaker was simply unable to lick him.

After a trailer-style prologue setting up his life and achievements, the film catches up with Mailer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, circa 2006. He's unapologetic and candid ("I'm too old to sell myself"), and from there Mantenga jumps back to the writer's childhood. There is no narration--Mailer provides much of it himself via interviews, and his biographers help ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Dateline 1964: The Beatles' arrive in America. Although we all know about that fateful night on The Ed Sullivan Show and the teen-girl frenzy it led to, it also spawned the ripple effect of rock 'n roll mini-scenes thriving in places as far flung as Portland, New Orleans, Boston and Detroit. For every group of high school boys who picked up guitars and formed a band, there was a local venue to play in, a radio station to pick them up, and a 45 RPM record or two to be pressed and (hopefully) get heard coast-to-coast. With Teen A Go-Go, documentarian Melissa Kirkendall looks at this phenomenon as it happened in Fort Worth, Texas.

Garage rock from the 1960s is a leaner, more attitude-drenched version of the stuff that hit the charts at the same time - what the bands lacked in finesse was made up for in sheer spontaneity and passion (all those teen hormones needed an out...Read the entire review