Watchcast Schedule for April 2025: What's Up, Docs?

Greetings, Nextlanders! Gonna keep this one brief as technically I'm still on vacation, and it is ILLEGAL for someone in my position to be producing anything that resembles content while maintaining vacation status. But before I am summarily arrested, I wanted to make sure you knew what we had coming up for the Watchcast once we come back from vacation.

And what we've got coming up is a trio of documentaries, each picked by one of us and assembled into a mostly accidental theme of outsider artists and weirdos. That last part was absolutely not on purpose. We were just talking through the docs we thought we might want to do, and suddenly we realized that they're all connected by subjects who don't necessarily fit the mold for success for the art forms they've chosen, with each experiencing wildly varying degrees of success in spite of, or because of, that fact. None of that is going to make a whole lot of sense until I explain which movies we're doing, so let's do that right now.

Monday, April 14th: American Movie (1999)

This one was my pick, and frankly it was the very first movie I thought of when we started bandying around the idea of doing some documentaries. I'm not going to say this is the greatest documentary of all-time--there are way, WAY too many actually important docs out there for me to get away with that claim--but taken purely as a slice of life document and character study, few docs hit harder for me than American Movie does. Essentially the story of amateur filmmaker and frequently irresponsible artist Mark Borchardt, American Movie specifically captures the period in the mid-'90s when he was struggling to get his dream project off the ground, and as a result is forced to trudge through nearly two years of intermittent work finishing off a partially completed horror short called Coven (pronounced with an oh-ven) to get him the money he needs to make that other movie.

The resulting documentary is both a fascinating study of a would-be artist who might be out a little ahead of his skis, and the various oddball personalities he manages to rope into joining him on his questionable artistic pursuits. Without giving anything away for those who haven't seen it, I'll say this much: if you don't fall head over heels for Mark's buddy Mike Schank, then I'm not sure we can ever be friends.

Where to Watch

Monday, April 21st: Jurassic Punk (2022)

Next up is Brad's pick, and the only one on this month's roster that I haven't seen. I've been itching to though, ever since Brad started talking this one up I think last year. This one follows the lift and outsized personality of Steve "Spaz" Williams, an early pioneer in digital film effects at ILM. He's credited as the one responsible for the incredible dinosaur effects in Jurassic Park, but his acerbic personality and eventual falling out with ILM kept him from receiving the credit the subjects in the doc seem to think he rightfully deserves. I know very little about this guy beyond the name and what Brad's said in casual conversation, so I'm very excited to dig into this one and learn more.

Where to Watch

Monday, April 28th: Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

Finally, we come to Vinny's pick, a movie he hasn't seen yet but has apparently been itching to for a while. Though it is known colloquially as "The Banksy Documentary," Exit Through the Gift Shop isn't exclusively, or even primarily about Banksy and his work. Instead, it mostly follows the story of Thierry Guetta, known in the street art world as Mr. Brainwash. Guetta started out as a wannabe artist himself, mostly following around figures like Banksy and Shepard Fairey in an attempt to make his own documentary; but after years of collecting footage, nothing materialized. Instead, Banksy took the footage Guetta shot, and began taking his own footage of Guetta as his burgeoning career as a street artist--a career that seems more than a little indebted to the people he was documenting--took off.

I have seen this one, and in fact reviewed it for Screened back in the day. I was extremely smitten with it back then, but I have no idea how I'll feel about it today. There was a whole air around this movie when it came out about whether or not Mr. Brainwash was, himself, just another Banksy prank. In the years since, I think consensus has come to conclude that Guetta is more or less a genuine person and that at least the majority of what the movie shows was real. But even without that hook of real vs. not, I remember this movie being a total gas, and I'm honestly dying to know if it holds up to my now 15-year-old memory.

Where to Watch

NOTE: I'm including the Where to Watch link mostly for anyone who stumbles on this page in the future, as right now this movie isn't streaming anywhere, at least in the U.S. That said, the whole thing is on YouTube if you're looking for somewhere to check it out.

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And that's the month! Once this month is wrapped, we've got one more month of movies ahead of us before STAR TREK SUMMER begins in earnest. For now, I'm going to get back to my self-imposed vegetative state. As always, thanks for listening and watching along at home with us. We'll see you at the movies!

--A