Searching For Sugar Man
Unearthing Forgotten Buried Treasure
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 86 min

‘Sugar Man’ is Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, a working class Detroiter who made 2 Dylanesqueseish albums in the early 70s that never gained any traction in the US, so he gave up on his musical aspirations and killed himself on stage.  Or did he?????????????????

Well, apparently the US’s loss was South Africa’s gain.  Rodriguez somehow had a following there, a BIIIIG one (his rebellious music spoke to white folk who hated apartheid), but Rodriguez had zero idea about it, and his South African fans knew so little about him, cause this was during a pre-internet time, which is hard to fathom, cause who would want to live in a time without the interwebs????  [we also can’t fathom a time where men had to wear suits ALL THE TIME, like in 100000 degree heat]

There were two South African men who refused to let the Rodriguez mystery remain a mystery – a record store owner & a journalist.  Together they unraveled the mystery, wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a burrito wrapped in saran wrap at a wrap party sponsored by Rap Snacks, by finding what they were searching for, and in turn created an incredible fairy tale ending that was only just the beginning of more amazingnessnesssss to come!!

This documentary is not about who Rodriguez is, but the search for him.  This journey and its destination create quite an emotional roller coaster, which had us fighting back tears and welcoming smiles at each and every turn in the road.  It doesn’t hurt neither that Rodriguez’ music is simply INCREDIBLE, which basically makes Malik Bendjelloul‘s doc is the greatest untold music story about (maybe) the greatest unknown musician, away and far and far and away, hands AND thighs down.  That’s quite a claim, WE KNOW, considering there are probably zillions of untold tales about zillions of unknown musicians that are still, well, untold, but we stick by this claim cause we are actually the final authority on everything, and we know what’s good, for you and for we, and for us all

Soundtrack of Our His Lives: a man who released only 2 albums in his prime that most people never even heard of to begin with, doesn’t exactly need a greatest hits album, but that’s pretty much the void that the fantastic soundtrack serves.  so, see the doc, then discover the music OR ELSE!!!

Verdictgo: Breast Breast Breast Breast In Show

Sugar Man is found NY/LA today, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Don’t Smash His Camera
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 91 min

Who is Ai Weiwei?  What is really going on in China?  Why is Twitter important?  Big questions!  And big answers are in store in Alison Klayman‘s all over the place, all awesome in all those over the place places, incredible doc Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

So, really, who’s this Ai [eye] Weiwei [wayway] character?  He’s like the Chinese Damien Hirst (or Andy Warhol for those who don’t know who Damien Hirst is).  And why is he ‘never sorry’?  It’s actually a play on words, on the title of his Munich exhibition ‘So Sorry’, and he’s actually never sorry cause he does things that cause big brew-ha-has, in a good way.  He’s not just an artist, but an activist and champion of human rights, in his motherland that doesn’t let anyone be champions, humans, or right. He’s constantly asking for trouble, and he often gets it, cause Big Brother watches him, but he watches Big Brother, but someone needs to do this, cause if not him, then who?

Before seeing this, we knew next to nothing about Ai Weiwei.  After seeing this, we want to kiss the man, and stroke his beard, and see his art, and love it, and smile, cause he does, LOTS, in the face of misery and bureaucratic crap, and cause his smile is the best jolly fat Asian-man smile since Oddjob’s in Goldfinger.  it’s true, even if it sounds racist, but enjoying Asian smiles isn’t racist, is it?

Let Weiwei show you the wei.  The doc does the showing, and the telling.  It will show you a lot, and tell you even more, and has something for everyone (a cat that can open doors!), and everything for somebodies (call your mother, she worries!!).  It will make you glad you don’t live in China, but sad that China is the way that it is.  It will make you feel better about using Twitter, but make you feel bad that yer wasting your tweets on recaps of what yer eating and blabbing bout how amazing the Nationals are (#NatsBatsStats).  Weiwei is wei awesome, as a person, and a doc, so make your wei wei to a theater and learn, then help, and tweet, and smile, in the face of frowns

Finger Pointing Good:

Study of Perspective 1995-2003

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

go all the way with Weiwei in NY/SF/DC tomorrow, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed

The Dark Knight Rises
Catty, Batty & The Bane of Its Own Existence
Official Website | Trailers & MoComments 1
PG-13 | 164 min

One thing is for certain, Christopher Nolan did a wonderful job making a different kind of a super hero movie, and now that it’s all come to a conclusion, we can finally say – thank gawd it’s over, lets move on with our lives, and bring on the reboot!!!  If only Kubrick were alive.  COULD YOU IMAGINE A KUBRICK BATMAN?!?!?!?  we’d settle for a Fincher one

Honesty time – we liked Nolan’s Batman films, but we didn’t outright love them.  Sure, the one with Heath Ledger was batsh!t awesome, but remember how it was like 9292828 hours too long?  You LOVED these movies, and that’s fine, but his Batmans didn’t look like the way we like our Batman to look.  In our book, the 60s Batman TV show is the gold standard of how Batman should look.  Tim Burton’s wasn’t perfect, but it looked perfect.  The 90s Animated Series put the dark in DARK Knight, cementing the way the Knight should be darkened, 9ever.  How could it not, it was drawn on BLACK PAPER!!!  Combine those three batty-bestnesses and one could create the ultimate Batman movie.  Don’t, but include a brain, and you get something like Nolan’s Batmans

OK, enuff of that, and z-nuff about the final installment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy – The Dark Knight Rises.  It’s first hour is fantastic.  Its got Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) pissing in mason jars (off screen), and then he meets Catwoman (Anne Hathaway, proving us all wrong), who’s über sexy, and hot, and beautiful, and leathery, and so he decides to stop using his penis for urinating, and start using it for having boners.  Boners are awesome, but then some guy named Bane (Tom Hardy) banes capital and not Conrad Bain, and it’s kinda boring, cause there’s nothing to the character of Bane.  If you disagree, we dare you to name one memorable thing about Bane, besides having a face thing and his talking is stupid and he lives in a sewer and he’s hard and strong like the boners we got looking at Anne Hathaway in a catsuit.  Bane is lame.  Why?  This is why

yep, he’s like ROTJ Anakin Skywalker, cept we have zero sympathy or interest in him, cause he sucks, and you can’t see his nose, and the nose knows

So Bane does a bunch of sh!t that would seem amazing, like blowing up lots of Gotham and creating Marshall law, but it’s about as exhilarating as a full season of Sammo Hung’s Martial Law.  And this crap goes on for ages, and Marion Cotillard is like French and sexy (what a stretch for her), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays good cop, while Matthew Modine plays lame cop, and chameleon Gary Oldman doesn’t chameleonize himself in a role that doesn’t require the talents of such a talented actor, and Morgan Freeman doesn’t marry his granddaughter, and Michael Caine is pennywise and pound foolish, and so on and whatever

The final battle is more whatevs than whatevs.gov.net.tumblr.webs, but then at the very very very very very very end, all is well, and it’s back to awesome, but it is not enuff to make up for being stuck in some Timbuktu well-hole that looks like outtakes of the Golden Child and The Name of The Rose, cause it’s boring and sucks, and doesn’t involve Catwoman taking a shower

OK, enuff of that crap, and on to our #2 complaint of Nolan’s Batmans – why do all Bat-related-mobiles look like vehicles created by blindfolded two-year old children???  WHY???????  THEY LOOK REFARTED!!!!  Did you know that Battanks were made out of origami????  WHY?!??!

Burn Notice: we made love to Burn Gorman‘s name back in 2006, and you should today, and always

BURN GORMAN BURN!!!

Verdictgo: this is Nolan.  we expect the best, not Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Dark Knight sorta rises at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed, and hopefully not Catwoman

The Queen of Versailles
Thrown From The Throne
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG | 100 min

Once upon a time, the rich got richer.  So much so that they didn’t even know what to do with themselves, or their money.  So when you don’t know what to do with your endless piles of cash monies why not build America’s largest private residence, at the sum of 90,000-square-foot, (in)complete with 21.2 bathrooms, a 20-car garage, 3 pools, a two lane bowling alley, a spa, a gigantic chefs’ kitchen + 10 smaller kitchens, which was all inspired by the bowling-lane-less Versailles in France.  Did we mention that this Windermere Florida home has a balcony that overlooks Disney World’s nightly fireworks display??  Is this the American dream heaven?  It’s actually America’s nightmare hell!

Sometimes the rich don’t always get richer.  Sometimes they fall, and fall realllly hard.  Who cares, ammmmiright, when there’s averages Joes and schmoes losing their jobs and can’t even afford the dollar store [correction – everyone can afford the dollar store].  Average Joes and schmoes may buy things they can’t afford, but they don’t build palatial estates with 21.2 bathrooms that no one can afford.  Well, as you may of heard, the financial bubble gone did done burst, and the creators of this Florida Versailles monstrosity, David & Jackie Siegel, got mired in a quagmire that’s more quaggy than anything that could ever be quaggied in a mire.  Exactly

Ya see, the Siegels were never able to complete their gaudy Versailles cause their timeshare selling company, which took advantage of poor people who have no money that bought timeshares they couldn’t really afford, time or share, had trouble selling any timeshares, cause the normal poor people that normally would buy them when they so poor that they shouldn’t really be buying them, couldn’t really really buy em anymos, cause they had even less money than the no money that they had before the bubble done burst, which directly led the Siegels to not have as much money as they were used to living with, which means stuff they can’t even imagine doing with much much less money (like not having 3812812273838 maids!!!).  OH THE IRONY!!!!!

moral of the story – there have been enuff boring and exhausting documentaries that have over-examined how the financial system failed, why it did and what it done did to us the normal poor peoples who go to the dollar store.  So it’s a cool and refreshing tall drink of sparkling water to see how the other half percent lives, and what happens when they fall out of that half percent.  Lauren Greenfield started off making a doc about greed and the building upon greed, but then stumbled upon an even better doc of the haves having not, that’s equal parts comical & depressing, and endlessly fascinating to watch.  Let them eat cake, and crappy cake too!!

$65(Not O)K:  all this half-built half-baked American dumphole palace to end all dumphole palaces can be yours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers MOS DEF Worth A Peepers

Queen reigns in NY & LA this Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Snow White and The Huntsman
Babes In Woodland
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 127 min

THIS MOVIE IS NOT ABOUT JON HUNTSMAN’S HOT DAUGHTER OR HIS DAD WHO INVENTED THE MCDONALDS CLAMSHELL!!!  That’s already 28282839329393939 strikes against it.  Having Kristen Stewart play Snow White is like having 28283813292323932932 more strikes, and yet, yet, yet, somehow this Snow White movie was like a poor middle class man’s version of The Princess Bride!!!  Sorta.  And Chris Hemsworth‘s beefy beefness beefs up the fun, but not as much as Charlize Theron milking a milky milk bath or her brother Sam Spruell bobbing a man bob or the fact that they somehow shrunk many awesome normal sized actors (Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones, Johnny Harris, Brian Gleeson) be like tiny sized actors!  Bet Peter Dinklage and Warwick Davis was pissed!  Snow White?  More like Snow RIGHT!

Seeking A Friend for The End of the World
Apocalypse Tao
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 101 min

Do you like Steve Carell?  Do you like Keira Knightley?  If the answer is yes to both, say yes to this fun little diversion that’s like The 40-Year Old Virgin meets Pride & Prejudice.  Not really, but if you sat thru both of those movies, you can sit thru this one, and you may smile, while the world falls apart, in an amusing way that’s like Atonement meets Dinner for Schmucks.  Not really

Your Sister’s Sister
Oh Brother, Where Art House Thou?
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 90 min

Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister is about two sisters, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt, who go to a cabin in the woods and take turns banging one non-related fellow, Mark Duplass.  Sorta, not really.  It starts off dark and heavy, but somehow that’s all forgotten in about 8 minutes, and for the better, cause the gloom gives way to fun and lots of words, so if you want explosions and car chases, this isn’t you movie.  But then the movie tries to do stuff towards the end, and it’s more implausible than me becoming a vegetarian Cowboys fan who licks swastikas for breakfast.  Sorta

Verdictgo: ALL THREE be Jeepers Worth A Peepers

ALL THREE might be playing at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…