It was a Sunday night and nothing else was on. That’s my reason for tuning into the Britney Spears doc For the Record. But once I started watching, I was mesmerized. The girl is more in touch with reality in this authorized documentary special than she seems to have been in the past year or two. I actually had a hard time connecting the girl quite coherently and contemplatively answering the questions about her troubled past with the gal that was splashed all over celebrity magazines shaving her own hair and spontaneously running into the ocean in her underwear. The dazed look is gone these days, perhaps due to her father running a tight ship–as he has legal permission to control her financial and personal affairs–and the doctors she says she checks in with frequently. At the same time, these are the same people Spears blames for making her feel locked in and are too in control of her life. Sometimes a gal just wants to be able to drive down the freeway with her baby son on her lap.

I have to admit upfront that I don’t know much about Patti Smith, the rock singer-songwriter, poet and artist. Coming out of the theatre after Steven Sebring’s documentary Dream of Life, I can’t say that I now know that much more, especially in the details of why she came to perform, why she retired briefly in the 80s and why she’s still rocking at the age of 61. Instead, Sebring presents a beautifully shot 11-year portrait of this woman’s day to day existence, without falling into the trap of presenting an argument for why she is an iconic figure. Patti Smith is just Patti Smith, a woman who goes to visit her parents (her father asks Smith to speak up because he’s hard of hearing from her concerts), takes a carriage ride in Central Park with her daughter, and visits the grave of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. She takes photos of seemingly everything, finding angles and subjects everywhere around her. Yet at other times, she can be found headlining concerts and talking about successful and unusual make-shift toilets with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the beach. U2’s Bono is at the sidelines of one of her concerts. R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe is on the tour. But none of these events or relationships comes across as glaring rock star moments in Patti Smith’s life. Sebring instead gives us a wonderful doc to look at, an interesting artist/singer/songwriter/poet to follow, and if I don’t learn about the deeper recesses of Smith’s mind, that’s fine by me.

And since the doc follows Smith through her older years, I suggest for anyone interested in seeing an earlier incarnation of Smith, to check out this hilarious less-than-stellar interview with her from 1979.

Los Angeles’ official nickname might be The City of Angels, but there’s no denying it’s also the city of dreams, both realized and broken. Hollywood is the place to be if you want to be famous and, more importantly, be remembered. Matt Ogden’s 2007 film Confessions of a Superhero follows four people who want to be remembered so badly they’re willing to live and work on the streets of Hollywood just to realize their dreams.

No, they’re not hookers, though they do pimp themselves on the street in a way. The subjects of this doc are the people who stand outside of Graumann’s Chinese Theater dressed as Batman, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk and Superman to have their picture taken with tourists and garner a little bit of fame while dreaming of their big break.

The film follows Christopher Dennis, Maxwell Allen, Jennifer Gerht and Joe McQueen, four superheros by day, as they struggle to make it in a cut throat town. McQueen suffers inside his foam Hulk suit, Allen is a Batman with anger management problems, Gerht plays Wonder Woman while struggling with a failing relationship and body image issues, but Dennis is the star of the film, and the street. One of many Supermen on the strip, he is probably the most dedicated to the role, as we see when the film follows him to his home to look at his giant collection of Superman memorabilia that takes up over half his apartment. Unlike the other subjects, who are just playing the part of a superhero to get by, Dennis really identifies with his character and idolizes Christopher Reeve. Dennis claims to be the son of late actress Sandy Dennis, but her family denies any knowledge of his existence. If one were to argue he’s making up the connection just to further his career, the love of Reeve might point to the origin of the first half of his moniker.

Though, like the rest of the characters in the film, Dennis dreams of making it in Hollywood, he takes his superhero job quite seriously. There are many moments in the film of him marching up and down the strip explaining to a Ghost Rider on break that superheroes don’t smoke, and telling Marilyn Monroe that they can’t expect tips in this line of work.

Confessions of a Superhero is both hopeful and depressing. While Dennis seems to live a life full of delusions, other characters such as Gerht leave us with hope that she will at least be able to get by as a working actress and leave her alter ego behind. While documenting the lives behind the masks, Ogden’s opus uses a bizarre slice of life to show the different tolls the aim for fame can take.

Reclusive artists are always good subjects for documentaries. In the cases of Jandek (the subject of Chad Freidrichs’ Jandek on Corwood) and Henry Darger (the subject of Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal) one releases his music from a hiding place while the other never showed his art to the public.

The intrigue of Jandek on Corwood by Chad Freidrichs is the prolific nature of the artist (he’s put out 34 albums in 25 years, but chances are you’ve never heard of him) along with his mysterious existence. Because Jandek seems to just make music for himself, and only started playing live in 2006, the doc tells his story through interviews with fans, journalists and people in the independent music industry who each have their own theory about the Jandek myth. Some assume their is loneliness in his life, not just his art. Others think he might be more than a loner; he may be a sociopath.

Jandek’s music is a mix between noise-rock and folk, but Angela Sawyer of Twisted Village Music describes it best when she muses in the film: “I usually tell people that it’s someone who has a completely untuned guitar and is just sort of meandering and yelling over it.” Its for a select audience, that’s for sure. And without the interest created by his anonymity, his already small following could be cut in half. All the speculation in the film is interesting and amusing, particularly the deep examinations of each album cover and the meaning behind the very basic, sometimes blurry, photographs.

In the Realms of the Unreal is the story of Henry Darger, another mysterious artist who, in this case, was known by a select group of neighbors and coworkers, but created his art in solitude. Darger wrote a 15,000 page story complete with artwork that was only found by his landlady when he was in the hospital, near to death. Narrated by Dakota Fanning, the doc is told through his illustrations, pieces of his huge text, his autobiography and interviews with the few people who knew him. Like many great artists, Darger doesn’t get his due until he dies.  Since the discovery of his work and his death in 1973 Darger has been noted as an influence to many contemporary artists and a Chicago gallery called Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art has set up a permanent recreation of his bedroom.

Of the two, Darger’s story is ultimately more compelling. Albeit Jessica Yu is blessed with an infinitely complex and fascinating story, both that of Darger and more so of his text — the story of a group of young sisters leading the fight against against child slavery — but it’s her treatment of the subject and her ability to tell the story with limited images by animating his own art that really give the film life. Also, being able to sum up a 15,000 page text is a feat in itself.

If, like me, you’ve never played a game of dungeons and dragons in your life, there’s a good chance you have a vague idea of what it’s all about but have no idea how to play. Well, you’re not going to learn by watching Dungeon Masters. Smartly, this film doesn’t try to take the viewer through the rules of the game. Based on all the guide books that have been made to accompany Dungeons and Dragons, that approach could have potentially been the most boring thing to watch on screen. Instead it starts by giving a general impression of how the game play is framed and then takes us into the lives of three game masters who are passionate about the game and, to some extent, live it.

Scott is married, unemployed and trying to make it as a writer of fantasy novels. Early on he tells the story of how, when he started high school and the teacher asked what name each student preferred to go by, he said “My name’s Scott but you can call me Sherlock.” From then on you get a sense of how his social life has gone.

Richard is a game master who was run out of Florida when all of his players were lead to their death during one of his games. He took all their character sheets and they walked out on him; then he left the State. Now he’s only allowed to play once a month, as a promise to his wife.

Elizabeth is a dark elf. Through 80% of the film she is dressed in full costume: black makeup covering her arms, hands, neck and face, a long white-blonde wig and pointed ears. She has a sad background of abuse but her passion for D&D, LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) and online video games like World of Warcraft.

The three characters all serve the same role in D&D, but live very different lives. Each life is tinged with sadness, disappointment and regret, but there is hope and a lot of laughs throughout the film.

The highlight of films like this are the moments when the subjects get visibly emotive about their passion. In Dungeon Masters that moment is when Scott explains how he punishes his dice. (Hint: it involves the freezer, a hammer and lining up all your other dice to see what happens when you’re bad).

As an aside, if you like that kind of thing (and don’t mind watching seven minutes of profanity), check out Cannibal Corpse’s singer Corpsegrinder’s heated rant about his love for Warcraft.

Apparently good deeds don’t go unpunished. Actor/director Liev Schrieber thought he was giving an Iraqi film student a great opportunity by bringing him onset of his film Everything is Illuminated in the Czech Republic. Instead, the film student turned out to be more of a problem than expected.

Filmmaker Nina Davenport is brought on board to capture Muthana Mohmed’s experiences on set. She quickly becomes part of the film when she begins to intervene in Mohmed’s manipulations of Schrieber and others in the film community (including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on set of Doom) for an extended visa and money. The movie quickly turns into a power struggle between filmmaker and subject.

There’s also a desire to mirror the “freeing” of Mohmed with the fleeting George W. Bush imposed freedom of Iraqis. Sometimes Mohmed is acutely aware of what Davenport is doing. After she asks him about the war, Mohmed replies “We are spoiling a beautiful trip in Prague by speaking about the war,” and also shoots back, “You just want an interesting story, that’s it.”

Other times, he is blissfully oblivious to Davenport’s intentions. While Mohmed is asking his landlord to translate a text message from his girlfriend, Davenport pans to the news of Abu Ghraib on the landlord’s television. Mohmed is clearly more interested in the text message.

Davenport even sends cameras to Mohmed’s friends back in Baghdad to film their experiences. Their messages urge him to stay in the Czech Republic and not to come back. Their fun joking messages quickly change over the course of the U.S. invasion. Suddenly Mohmed’s friends are no longer filming outside near the rubble of their film school. It’s no longer safe to go outside.

The film that Davenport was originally called in to capture, the nice deeds of some Hollywood types, becomes much more interesting and uncomfortable when it turns into a struggle between the filmmaker and subject.

A cameraman who had backed off the project earlier on tells Davenport that their jobs entail creating “a semi-fictitious story about other people. In this case, the other person is a desperate Iraqi who will really do anything, and we have to stop blaming him for that.”

About a month ago I was in a tattoo shop when I overheard four of the artists discussing a documentary. When I heard one of them say “It’s the best documentary since American Movie. In fact, I think it’s better than American Movie,” I had to ask what they were talking about. It was King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

While I disagree with this assessment, King of Kong is as entertaining as films like Spellbound, Word Wars and even Pumping Iron. And like them, Kong follows a group of people obsessed with one thing, and who are determined to be the crowned “the best.” In this case, it’s the video game Donkey Kong.

It’s also infinitely frustrating. The doc follows Billy Mitchell, the undefeated 1982 champion (who also happens to be the champ of Centipede and played the first perfect game of Pac Man), and Steve Wiebe, a guy who doesn’t play many videogames but is incredibly good at Kong. There’s a definite good guy, bad guy scenario at work throughout this film. Mitchell, a charismatic man who appears to be good at everything he tries his hand at, is a sleaze ball when it comes to the way he handles the competition against Wiebe. Meanwhile Wiebe is the underdog who is treated poorly because he’s not an insider in the world of classic gaming. The injustices in this world of competitive gaming are frustrating, but it’s the unfairness that also brings most of the drama to this film.

One of the most interesting things about this doc is the background on the game itself. Apparently, Donkey Kong is one of the hardest games ever invented because of how random all the obstacles are and the fact that there really is no ending to the game. The DVD has some great special features such as two video game experts comparing Billy and Steve’s Donkey Kong playing screens to discuss their strategies and a Very Very Brief History of Donkey Kong animated featurette created by I am 8-bit.

Director Nanette Burstein wanted to create an entertaining honest portrait of the often misunderstood and written off demographic - the American Teen. Giving a fresh take on the genre highly defined by the archetypes of the popular girl, the jock, the geek and the rebel seems like a daunting task but Burstein took those labels and applied them not to the new Brat Pack, but instead to real kids from Warsaw, Indiana. At first, the four teens seemed like they’d been written: Megan is the queen bee who toilet papers a house after she’s been crossed, Colin has mad basketball skills; Jake plays in the school band and hasn’t gotten a handle on his teenage acne just yet; and Hannah is a free spirited artistic type who flails about at school dances and thinks everyone else is weird.

But those are all the things that Burstein wants us to notice on the surface. The queen bee actually has a traumatizing family history that might explain why she’s got a quick temper. Colin must get a college scholarship otherwise he’s off to the army. Jake has been a social outcast ever since he was bullied in grade school but is funny and cool but doesn’t know it yet. Hannah has a bout of depression early in the film, and is partly concerned she’s inheriting her mother’s manic-depression. She recovers (with off-camera help from Burstein) and returns to the lively girl who desperately wants to get out of Indiana.

The audience gets more into these teen’s lives than any fiction or reality show would allow, and on top of that, they’re treated to animation sequences that wonderfully illustrate the inner psyche of the teen that a talking head just wouldn’t have done justice. A narrative style borrowed from fiction films also brings the film a fresh take, almost teasing the teen fiction films that it’s so easy to elevate the teen genre.

When Sam Dunn’s second installation of his personal study of the anthropology of heavy metal music begins it appears to be more of the same. A return to the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany, another introduction to Dunn and his history as an anthropology graduate and a major metal fan, and a kind of “last time on Metal…”-style summary of the last film, Metal: a Headbanger’s Journey; but within ten minutes the film begins to show its true colors.

Rather than a rehash of his previous work, Dunn delivers a film that examines how metal fits into cultures you wouldn’t expect to find rocking. Starting in Brazil (one of the least surprising stops on the tour because of the popularity of Sepultura and the Rock in Rio festival) Dunn relates the country’s political history to the mass appeal of heavy music in the region, juxtaposing the launch of Rock in Rio with the beginning of freedom and democracy in Brazil.

What’s makes Global Metal more compelling than Headbangers Journey is that while the latter relied on famous talking heads such as Bruce Dickinson, Tony Iommi and Ronnie James Dio to tell the story, Global Metal relies on the lives of regular people to compel the viewer. Heading from Japan to China, from India to the Middle East this is more than just a study of a genre of music, it’s an overview of the similarities between metal fans the world over as well as how youth living in very different cultural regions have adapted one form of music to fit their lives.