TV RED ALERT

Hey, keep your eyes peeled, there's a great little documentary running on VH1 called The Night James Brown Saved Boston. 

It’s an incredible story. After the assignation of MLK and the urban rebellions in Detroit and Watts, the nervous white mayor of Boston was uptight about black people coming to the Garden for a James Brown concert, they might ruin our 'honky paradise'. So they talked Brown into letting Boston televise the concert hoping the black concert-goers would stay home and watch it on TV.

It's a blast. Seek it out.

UPDATE: I was going to say... It’s only about an hour long, they could of added another forty minutes (more concert footage) and it could be a theatrical release.

But I just found that a 74 minute version will be released on DVD in August.

It seems that VH1 and MTV have joined Bravo and other cable outlets as 24-hour reality-bullshit but these VH1 ‘RockDocs’ are really good. This comes on the heels of last years terrific The Coolest Year in Hell and The Amazing Journey Of The Who (now on DVD). I gotta keep on the look out for more.

As long as we’re on the subject of Docs On TV....

Last weeks Frontline on PBS, Bad Voodoo's War was about as powerful a soldiers-eye look at the Iraq war as I’ve seen.

I caught some of Nature the other night, it was all about What Female (animals) Want from males (animals), in order to mate with them. It was excellent. I gotta see it from the start, cause I wanna go out, maybe to a bar one night and apply some of the things I learned.

There was this awesome thing on The History Channel called Life After People (2008), though on my TIVO it’s listed as Last Days On Earth (2006). Whatever it is, it’s a really cool look at what will slowly happen to the earth and animals and buildings and whatnot, if man just vanished from the planet.

Which I’m expecting to happen any day now. 

All Highly recommended.

UPDATE:

Saw Helen Mirren pitching her biography on Charlie Rose. She is still about the sexiest seventy-year old, ever. Though Charlie always kisses-ass, here he seems to be passive-aggressively hitting on her. First fawning over her tattoo and then by drooling over the pictures in her book. And by the end of the chat he just starts blurting out random woo. 

Fascinating to see his moves, he needs to watch that Nature: What Females Want, to get his game up to snuff. 

If you ever wanna see his worst performance of all-time, see his clueless, ill prepared interview with The Beastie Boys, he makes Larry King look like Edward R Murrow.

-sweeneyrules

DON'T TOSS YOUR VCR YET - Eyes On The Prize

(Continually we will spotlight films that are only available on VHS and of course are available at Rocket Video)

Maybe the most important videos in Rocket are the 10 VHS tapes that make up the monumental PBS documentary six-hour series Eyes On The Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 (1987) and the four-hour follow up Eyes On The Prize II: America At The Racial Crossroads 1965-1985 (1990), both directed by Henry Hampton.

For years  Eyes On The Prize had been out of print due to legal issues over the rights to the footage, and Rocket was about the only place you could find it. Recently those thorny issues have apparently been been settled somewhat. Now PBS has been cleared to rebroadcast the epic and sell the videos for educational purposes.

This is a must. It’s a candy shop for anyone who loves historical documentaries. The footage and the recollections from the participants are perfectly placed. And it digs deep. It doesn’t just ‘hero worship’ or mythize it also reveals the in fighting and complicated legal and political shell games played between such titans as MLK, JFK and LBJ. 

And what a ‘fight the power’ all-star cast... 

Julian Bond, James Bevel, John Lewis, James Meredith, Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Angela Davis and Medgar Evers. 

With special apearences by Malcolm X, Huey Newtonn and Bobby Seale 

and introducing Police Commissioner Bull Connor as "The Dickhead".

 • Episode 1: Awakenings (1954-1956)

 • Episode 2: Fighting Back (1957-1962)

 • Episode 3: Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)

 • Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1961-1963)

 • Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)

 • Episode 6: Bridge To Freedom (1965)

 • Episode 7 - The Time Has Come (1964-1966)

 • Episode 8 - Two Societies (1965-1968)

 • Episode 9 - Power! (1966-1968)

 • Episode 10 - The Promised Land (1967-1968)

 • Episode 11 - Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-1972)

 • Episode 12 - A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

 • Episode 13 - The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-1980)

 • Episode 14 - Back to the Movement (1979-mid 1980's)

ALSO OF INTEREST: currently playing on PBS I happened across a documentary on John Lewis called Come Walk In My Shoes (2008). As one of the original students taking part in the Nashville lunch-counter boycotts and later a Freedom Rider, where he was famously almost beaten to death by asshole Alabama state troopers during the march across the bridge outside Selma much of his story is covered in Eyes on the Prize) also told beautifully in David Halberstam’s brilliant book “The Children”).. But this moving one-hour doc updates Lewis’s story, he later was elected to the US congress, and annually takes his fellow politicians on a tour of the freedom march he and others gave their nearly gave their lives for...

-sweeneyrules