Teen A Go Go (now on video)

[TEEN A GO-GO is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I'm still kind of amazed, even three decades after the announcement, that pariah metropolis Cleveland actually got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The thing is, as everyone should remember, cities from New York to LA all campaigned mightily to build the official rock museum. Memphis, I understand, put up a particularly strong fight. That the facility wound up in Cleveland I can only ascribe to the most astounding act of diplomacy since Jimmy Carter brought Israel and Egypt to the peace table...or maybe blackmail. Someone in Cleveland City Hall or the old Growth Association learned that top Rock Hall guys were really Watergate informant "Deep Throat," skyjacker D.B. Cooper, the true JFK assassin, missing heir Michael Rockefeller, the bushy-haired stranger who killed Marilyn Shepard, and an incognito Jimmy Hoffa, all hiding out together. If we didn't get the Rock Hall, Cleveland would release to the media the secret files J.Edgar Hoover had on all of them. Can you prove it didn't go down that way?

Boxing Gym (February 18th and 20th at the Cleveland Museum of Art)

[BOXING GYM screens  Friday, February 18th at 7 p.m. and Sunday, February 20th at 1:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“It’s viewed as a violent sport, but everyone here is super-nice and friendly. If anyone comes in here acting like a tough-ass, they wouldn’t last very long.” So says one of the habitués of BOXING GYM, the latest documentary from the estimable Frederick Wiseman, which takes us inside Lord’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas. Wiseman’s unobtrusive camera reveals the quotidian rhythms and casual camaraderie among the men and women, some of them amateur and professional fighters, who work out at Lord’s, an uncommonly friendly, low-key training facility.

This is Wiseman’s 38th documentary for PBS; the filmmaker, now 81, created and perfected a non-directive technique of planting himself and his camera in the midst of an institution – a high school, a battered-women’s shelter, the American Ballet Theatre and the Paris Opera Ballet, the Idaho state legislature, a welfare office, Army basic training – without imposing any outside narration or point of view. The result is a vivid, unvarnished portrait of human behavior within a social milieu. His first film, the controversial 1967 TITICUT FOLLIES, took viewers inside an asylum for the criminally insane, the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater (the title was taken from a talent show performed by the inmates).