Tag Archives: Documentary

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CAPSULE: STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Linus O’Brien

FEATURING: Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, ,  , Peter Hinwood, ,

PLOT: Most of the cast and crew of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gather to re-tell their experiences making the landmark cult classic that became the ultimate midnight movie.

Still from "strange journey: the story of rocky horror"

COMMENTS: It isn’t enough just to call The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) a “cult movie,” because it is the first movie to attract a cult at all. As fan after fan raves, it’s not just a movie, it’s an event, a lifestyle, an anthem uniting all us rainbow freaks into the collection of beautiful cosmic blueberries we are. For the 50th anniversary of this phenomenon, Strange Journey (2025) reunites most of the major cast and production team to tell how this movie came to be.

The documentary is everything you’d expect. The producers spared no effort in tracking down everybody for a chat. Although sadly missing rock legend Meatloaf (RIP 2022), we still get sit-down interviews with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Bary Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, and even the rarely-appearing Peter Hinwood. Most prominently, we get Rocky creator and Riff-Raff himself, Richard O’Brien, giving us the complete story of how the story came to be: from its inception as a stage play to creation of the film, its initial flop release, and its subsequent discovery as a cult hit. We even get O’Brien on acoustic guitar singing the hits from the show as he originally composed them.

The documentary is well-produced, with a nice flow alternating interviews and voice-overs with montages of photos and theater review clippings. The fandom gets its say as well, including veteran “shadow cast” performers speaking about how the cult around Rocky allowed them to live out their dreams as their out-of-the-closet selves. Jack Black provides cultural commentary. I don’t even question Jack Black appearing in anything anymore; he’s a free-range media personality who’s attracted to the smell of any camera.

Your humble author was a tad young to catch The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it first came out, but I still heard about it. Over the years, a steady trickle of friends and acquaintances turned up saying they’d caught the show at some midnight campus event. I ended up with a cassette tape of the soundtrack before I ever saw the movie. As soon as I saw it, I got it immediately. The 1970s were a decade of hard-fought social issues, and a time when Americans were maddeningly obsessed with everybody else’s peepees and what they were doing with them. Rocky hit at the exact crest of a wave of social change, throwing off the persecution of alternate lifestyles and expression and wrapping sexual rebellion up in a tribute to rock ‘n’ roll and vintage horror. It was destined to be a hit, because this movie urgently needed to be made at that time.

Naturally, any Rocky fan worth their feather boa needs to run right out and see this doc. So should cultural historians, and for that matter, rock music fans, because Rocky is the singularity around which all things cool revolve.

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror can now be rented on Plex, Apple TV, or Google Play, and a Blu-ray release drops on July 7, 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I reminisced, I learned a few new things, and I walked away with an even greater appreciation for this wonderfully weird phenomenon.”–Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots

 

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CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson

FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower

PLOT: The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.

Still from The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

COMMENTS: The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into ‘s uniquely nihilistic world.

Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.

His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.

Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.

The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand Continue reading CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025) →

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CAPSULE: ENDLESS COOKIE (2025)

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Endless Cookie is available to purchase on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

FEATURING: Voices of Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

PLOT: A Canadian cartoonist interviews his half-Cree brother and his numerous nephews and nieces to make an animated documentary about their shared family history.

Still from Endless Cookie (2025)

COMMENTS: Animator Seth Scriver sets himself a difficult task. He thinks his half-brother, Pete (born to Seth’s father and an indigenous woman of the Cree tribe) is the greatest storyteller he’s ever known, and wants to document those tales. But Pete lives on the Shamattawa reservation in northern Manitoba, a location so remote that there are no roads and visitors must fly in. Pete’s large family has no experience with filmmaking, and the sound quality is so bad Steh frequently has to scrap recordings and start over. He’s excited to get a grant from Telefilm Canada, but his financial backers grow increasingly skeptical with the work-in-progress (“Is this what you’re doing with the money we gave you?” “Tell me, Seth, why is this pizza scene going on so long?”). A project that was supposed to take 7 months to complete stretches out to 9 years. But he crosses the finish line, and he and Pete finally deliver a heartfelt but oddball saga that sometimes approaches outsider art.

Seth’s lack of direction for the project becomes both a thesis and a running joke. His vague but lofty aspiration is to create a documentary that’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” Easygoing Pete is fine with the plan: “oh, okay.” The original idea is for Pete to tell seven stories, but his first attempt, a tale about the time he got his hand caught in a Conibear trap, is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet in the background. (Pete won’t finish this story until the end of the film.) Seth’s briefly-glimpsed flow chart for the movie is composed of irregular scribbled blobs representing scenes and looks like a bulbous, winding intestine instead of a straight arrow. The seven story structure is scrapped in favor of a laid-back method of just recording daily life and squeezing in stories as the come, an approach that better fits the documentarians’ personalities. While sitting around the table at Pete’s house—interrupted by Pete’s daughter Cookie offering to make sound effects for the film—Pete talks to his father on the phone, and Seth’s mother tells a story about a dream Pete told her, which leads the father to reminisce about a fishing trip where he encountered a strange glowing globe in the sky. And so it goes. As they slowly progress through each episode, with digressions aplenty and flashbacks nestled inside of flashbacks, a portrait emerges of Pete’s family and the way First Nations people live today: clinging to some traditions while jettisoning most for modern conveniences. This unforced, as-it-happens methodology allows the movie to touch on social topics like indigenous incarnation rates, lack of access to clean water and hunting lands, and historical injustices without seeming pedantic. Somehow, the movie ends after the apocalypse—although it eventually circles back to the present, because the past is an endless cookie.

The meandering style fits Scriver’s ADD animation style, which can best be described as “cute grotesque.” The brothers are drawn as clowns assembled from Mr. Potato Head parts, with plastic hats perched atop their rotund heads and big floppy noses; they wouldn’t look out of place in Yellow Submarine. Other characters become anthropomorphic trophies, slices of toast, right-angle rulers, or baby onions—not to mention the eponymous Cookie, who’s an actual talking chocolate chip cookie. Scriver puts enormous detail into every deceptively crude Flash animation frame, and indulges in surreal flights of fancy at every opportunity: coffee cups add commentary, real characters intrude on the stories (and vice versa), and a suicidal family member drives an eyeball motorcycle into a desert eternity. Endless Cookie is never visually dull, to say the least, and although some people can’t connect with the meandering storytelling, it resolves into a conversational format: one idea sparks another as stories wind their way through the tapestry of life, indifferent to temporal and physical laws. In the end, Scriver checks off his list of “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true”; he just forgot to add “and kind of weird.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the film… boasts so much mirth and good will that the strangeness becomes grounded in universal feelings of warmth and togetherness. The surreal becomes identifiable and relatable… It’s a weird kind of hang out movie where the door is always open, either to engage directly or to just let all the strangeness wash over the viewer.”–Andrew Parker, The Gate (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Sean Ramsdell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: François Girard

FEATURING: Colm Feore

PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.

Still from thirty two short films about glenn gould (1993)

COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming,  breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.

The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.

I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…because of the deadening uniformity of the genre, Girard’s film appears all the more miraculous in retrospect. From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

[(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]
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