But you can photograph eyes and smiles, and the pride on parents' faces. There's no cinematic way to show the progress of a chess game. "Brooklyn Castle" faces the same challenge as other recent docs about Scrabble. Eliminate the school paper, not the football team. Yes, because such programs are always the first on the list when legislators look for ways to cut the budget. During the two years covered in Katie Dellamaggiore's documentary, one team member, Rochelle Ballantyn, approaches her dream of becoming the first female African-American grandmaster in U.S history.ĭuring the same two years, the team is under a constant threat of losing its budget in state financial cutbacks. Chess is an unforgiving sport: You either win, lose or draw. " Brooklyn Castle." A documentary about Brooklyn's inner-city Intermediate School 318, whose chess team became the first middle school team in history win the United States Chess Federation's national high school championship. As the wife of one man observes: "It gives him something to do." One man's job has been outsourced and he invests his severance pay in creating a year-around Ghoulie Manor, thinking he could charge admission and replace the lost income. Some of these are year-around projects the homeowners tour garage sales looking for props. What looks like a shabby old sofa to you may look like to these guys like it belongs in a creepy Victorian parlor. They also haunt, if that is the word, local garage sales. In some cases, there are "tours" with scary blasts of air and grotesque faces popping out of the dark.Īll three families have cluttered home workshops in which they make ghastly masks, animated props and yawning graves. But at Halloween, on their lawns, corpses rise from graves, skeletons dance, dead victims hang from wrecked cars, ghosts float and eerie music haunts the air. They don't seem particularly macabre or doom-ridden.
I'm not sure if they even know one another. " The American Scream," by Michael Stephenson, considers three men who live not far apart in Fairhaven, Masachusetts, and every year turn their homes into haunted houses at Halloween.
(Stars are also a nuisance, of course.) Nor are these all necessarily great films. Nor does it bother me that I'll be writing about 13 docs, instead of the "official" ten. I really don't care if it's third or fifth on a list. If it sounds interesting to you, it might be worth seeking out.
All I can do with any film is tell you that I've seen it, and what I thought about it.
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