One of the films screened at last month's New Hampshire Film Festival, We Are the Shaggs covers a local topic with national, even global, reach (of the most unexpected kind). I'd vaguely heard of the sixties girl group the Shaggs before seeing the documentary, but was not prepared for their unique sound nor their eccentric background: avant-garde garage rock born as an attempt at living room pop, forced by a disciplinarian father rather than formed in joyous rebellion to the parental order. That history takes up a good deal of this month's "Scene and Heard" column written for The Laker, but I also hone in on this particular film's perspective, and the merits thereof. While it didn't make the column, I was incidentally delighted to learn that the documentary's director Ken Kwapis has quite a diverse filmography including episodes of Freaks and Geeks (which I happened to recently re-watch) and - of all things! - the Sesame Street feature film Follow That Bird as well as the orangutan-in-a-hotel nineties kid flick Dunston Checks In, a movie my sister must have viewed dozens of times in the space of several months circa 1996.
One other note, unrelated to this piece or publication: in twenty-four hours, I'll be offering a major announcement related to the TWIN PEAKS Character Series which has been suspended for over three years. This will also relate indirectly to the other two big Twin Peaks projects I've been working on behind the scenes. A new era is about to begin...
LINK TO DIGITAL VERSION:
The Laker on November 2 - page 6
w/ a blurb on Under the Skin as the highlight of the listings
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