Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary that puts a new spin on the concept of "world music." The Monks consisted of five American GIs who began playing together when they were all stationed in Germany in 1964. It was after they were discharged from the service that they fell in with Walther Niemann and Karl-H. Remy, a couple of artsy types who repackaged them as "the Monks", complete with Friar Tuck haircuts, black clothes, and nooses worn as neckties. The look made it a lot harder to confuse them with the Dave Clark 5, but the Monks already stood apart from the '60s pack for their lack of interest in lush and catchy melodies in favor of a focus on minimalist rhythmic experimentation. Heard today, it's easy to take them for a likely influence on the Velvet Underground and such post-punk giants as Wire and Gang of Four. Both well-informed and worshipful towards its subject, the doc achieves a tone somewhere between a 33 1/3 book and a raving fan who acts as if he's been up for three days, which is kind of appropriate. It makes its cable debut on The Sundance Channel on Friday, May 1, 11:00 PM central/midnight eastern, four days before its release on DVD, and four months after founding member Dave Day died of a heart attack.

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ED WOOD (1994)



Some idiots still go into the motion picture business to get rich...but the ones who stick around long after the dreams of fame and fortune have curdled into a nasty hangover of disappointment and massive credit card debt are the genuine addicts, driven by an overpowering, irrational desire to project their inner landscapes onto the real world in search of validation, a little fun and a taste of immortality. I’m guessing Tim Burton’s the type of guy who would’ve found a way to keep making movies even if his star had never risen over Hollywood and he’d wound up shooting cable access fantasias on his days off from Applebee’s. And without a budget, an art department or professional actors, his flaws as a director would have been more obvious, his obsessions would have seemed more silly, his distinctive aesthetic would have been reduced to cheesy, ticky-tack attempts at grandeur, easily mocked by a society incapable of distinguishing between talent and success. Ed Wood, Jr. was a similar addict, and it’s definitely arguable whether he would have eventually developed into a better director if he’d ever gotten the breaks and budgets he so desperately craved, but regardless of his ultimate worth as a filmmaker, Burton clearly recognized a kindred spirit in the cross-dressing auteur’s bizarrely inimitable proto-Goth sensibility, which (combined with a perfect storm of pitch-perfect career highpoints from Johnny Depp, Martin Landau and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, working from the fascinating Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey) resulted in one of the greatest films ever made about the potential for transcendence in even the shittiest art.

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