Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Documentaries, Cinematical, Festivals

Every year the film and music portions of South by South West merge in 24 Beats Per Second, a category of the film fest devoted to movies about music. This year, however, they’ll overlap like never before, thanks to the World Premiere of ‘Outside Industry: The Story of SXSW,’ a documentary that “follows the four founders as they navigate through the successes, backlash, criticism and even arson to become the biggest music industry event in the world.”

If you’re attending the fest, the film will premiere on 3/16 at 4:30pm with an encore on 3/19 at noon. But you don’t have to wait that long to catch a look at the film– Cinematical is happy to share a few pics and even a clip from Alan Berg’s continuation of his Emmy-winning short film ‘South by Southwest: The Business of Music.’

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Filed under: Documentaries, Cinematical

Silicon Valley, a haven for geeky computer programmers nestled in the heart of the Bay Area, doesn’t seem like the kind of place you’d find a fight club. In fact, you’d be more likely to find a group of guys gathered after work for a rousing round of Dungeons & Dragons than suiting up for serious combat — yet that’s exactly what the men at the Gentlemen’s Fight Club do roughly once per month. Thanks to filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, viewers can now get a firsthand look inside this geek fight club in the short documentary ‘Uppercut.’

At first glance, it’s hard to tell if ‘Uppercut’ is a legitimate documentary or a clever fake. The men fighting aren’t the battle-hardened warriors you’d expect to find in an underground fighting ring; instead they’re almost caricatures of what we think of when it comes to Silicon Valley workers — white guys in glasses softened by years of cubicle-dwelling. However, a quick search online reveals an ‘ESPN E:60′ segment that proves not only are these guys for real but that the Gentlemen’s Fight Club actually predates the Brad Pitt / Edward Norton film by a year. Apparently, it drew its inspiration from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel instead.

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Filed under: Documentaries, Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical

With ‘Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,’ Jon Chu has cooked up an ultra-slick biopic packed with enough concert moments, awww-inducing baby footage and behind-the-scenes details that even the most Bieber-averse will come away with a newfound respect for the tireless young pop star.

A few weeks ago, New York Times writer and editor Neil Genzlinger wrote a scathing review called “The Problem With Memoirs,” suggesting that our memoir-saturated landscape was full of people who were encouraged to share their otherwise unremarkable lives (in his opinion) when they’d do best to either shut up or start a blog. In Genzlinger’s opinion, “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment.”

This wasn’t a popular editorial, to say the least, especially among writers, and one could cop this attitude towards many biopics out there, if one were so inclined. I myself copped that ‘tude towards news of Justin Bieber’s biopic last August, writing, “That’s right, that Canadian dreamboat who was born in 1994 and isn’t even old enough to buy cigarettes? His life story is begging to be told, and soon all your Bieb-tastic questions will be answered … IN THREE DIMENSIONS.”

I was wrong.

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