FRI, MAR 6 / 6:45 pm
Dir. Alan Zweig | 2000 | Canada | 180 min
BRUCE MCDONALD INTRODUCES: VINYL
Not since the film Crumb has there been such a deeply funny and nakedly honest portrait of obsession – in this case, about collecting records. In a brutally honest manner, filmmaker Alan Zweig turns the camera on himself and on nearly a hundred others obsessed with collecting records.
Featuring unforgettable interviews with musicians, punk collectors, country music fanatics, blues and hot jazz collectors, sample searchers and DJ’s – including one who has memorized the playlist of every K-Tel record, another with half a million records crowded into a two bedroom apartment, and yet another who took four years to systematically clean and play each of his records in alphabetical order.
The first documentary in Zweig’s personal trilogy which also includes I, Curmudgeon and Loveable, Vinyl is one of his best.
One of Canada’s pre-eminent maverick filmmakers, Bruce McDonald has been a maverick on the Canadian film scene since making his breakthrough feature Roadkill (1989) which won the Best Canadian Feature Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Director of the best film ever made about rock and roll in this country – Hard Core Logo – his other classics include Highway 61 and the recent The Tracey Fragments (based on the novel by Winnipeg writer Maureen Medved) with Ellen Page, which opened the Panorama program at the Berlin Film Festival.
McDonald is also an accomplished television director, having worked for shows such as Queer as Folk, Degrassi: The Next Generation, The Tournament, This is Wonderland and Twitch City, which he also executive produced. McDonald’s most recent feature is the film Pontypool.
