The wonderful summer-long Amoeba's Monday Movies @ Space15Twenty in Hollywood (the weekly free outdoor screenings of music-related films curated by Amoeba Music) ends tonight with a screening of the highly recommended Anvil! The Story of Anvil. If you have to miss the screening, the DVD of this underdog story about endearing Canadian metal band Anvil comes out next week, October 6th, on DVD, and will be available at Amoeba Music. Last Monday evening there was another Amoeba-curated screening of the film up in the Bay Area at Elis Mile High Club. 

I just loved this film so much since it is totally unlike your typical, run of the mill music documentary. LA Weekly summed it up pretty well when they dubbed it "Hilarious and achingly touching." In fact, it is so touching and personal, yet always respectful of its subjects, the two lifelong metalhead buddies Robb Reiner and Steve "Lips" Kudlow, that you instantly connect and feel watching it that it has to have been made by someone whom the band members really, truly trusted and felt totally comfortable around.

Not surprisingly then, Sacha Gervasi, the director of the documentary, was once a roadie for the band. And for this riveting documentary he went out on the road again with Anvil, a band who looked all set to make it big in the 80's metal world but somehow never did. He's made a film that will remind you of Spinal Tap except that it is real, and more importantly, reverential. Last week I caught up with the film's director to ask him about this refreshingly unique music documentary. 
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Amoeblog: I love your film, including how it flows so naturally and seems to have taken on a life or direction of its own. Did the film turn out differently than maybe what you had initially expected?

The most accurately profound observation in the trailer above for Trouble The Water -- the award winning documentary about Hurricane Katrina -- is the statement that the disaster that happened this time four years ago, "is not about a hurricane. It's about America." The movie screens for free in LA at 8pm this evening (Monday 8/24) as the launch of the new series -- Amoeba's Monday Movies @ Space15Twenty. Amoeba will be selling the DVD at the screening tonight, though it is not due in stores till Aug 25! Click here for more info on the screening. It is an important film; as the last subject in the trailer from the film points out, "Katrina is still going on" in this country's treatment of its poor and underprivaleged.

In the four years since Katrina there have been many portrayals of the this American tragedy both produced for the screen and published as the written word, including Spike Lee's wonderful HBO documentary When The Levees Broke (also available on DVD at Amoeba). But most of the stories told relied on photos or film footage recorded either after the fact or from afar -- including the numerous aerial shots of the devastating hurricane's aftermath. In contrast, Trouble The Water offers footage shot from the inside, from the ground (or water, to be speciific) by two victims of Katrina: the husband and wife team Scott and Kimberly Roberts of New Orleans' Ninth Ward district, who captured their amazing survival tale on video.