“Stretch & Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, opens October 1I’ve been waiting for this documentary since I was a teenager. I was one of those kids who used to stay up late into the night, the radio close to my ear, taping that week’s episode of Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia’s show on Hot 97 (I was too young to catch them during their original run on WKCR, and the signal would never have reached me in upstate New York anyway). When the two parted ways, I was devastated. I bought cassettes of old episodes of the program from Fat Beats on Sixth Avenue (now gone as well) and listened religiously to Armstrong’s solo turn late Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning, recording it before going to school, where I listened to it again, and again, and again.Because of my personal connection, it may sound as if I’m overstating the importance of Stretch & Bobbito. But for hip-hop fans and performers in the late 1990s, the show was huge: Any rapper who didn’t appear on it simply wasn’t worth listening to. The film makes this clear through the big names it enlists to talk about their time on the program, names like Jay-Z, Nas, and Fat Joe. Hip-hop histories credit many figures in the field, from producers to creators. Largely left out, however, are the radio hosts who took risks on the artists and helped shaped the sound of the music. The film’s subtitle, “Radio That Changed Lives,” may sound like an overstatement, but I can attest to its truth: Stretch & Bobbito changed my life.“Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem,” Museum of Modern Art, September 29The ostensible subject of Akram Zaatari’s latest offering is Hashem el Madani, a photographer who ran a studio in Saida, in southern Lebanon, for five decades. The film shows the pictures he created, of shopkeepers, couples, children, and strangers on the street or who passed without a word through the door of his studio. Zaatari complements this rotating cast with video and images from the popular culture of the period, creating a rich portrait of the time and place.But the film has more on its mind than a simple history lesson. Zaatari, whose Arab Image Foundation is committed to collecting and preserving photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora, is interested in how we access and view pictures and how this has changed. His film often juxtaposes el Madani’s photos, sometimes within the same frame, with something else on a digital screen — different windows into different ways of looking opening up for the viewer.“Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon,” IFC Center, through October 1This is an essential chronicle of a still-underappreciated magazine and group of writers who paved the way for modern comedy. National Lampoon today is best known for the1980s movies starring Chevy Chase, but during its heyday — sometime in the 1970s through ’90s, the exact beginning and end a matter of dispute — it was as transgressive and poetic as anything out there. The magazine was closer in spirit to the period’s underground comics than to what passed for comedy in the popular culture — funkier, dirtier, and way more obscene. This is especially evident when you put it next to “Saturday Night Live,” which, at least in the beginning, offered merely a watered-down version of what National Lampoon was doing at the time, even after stealing of bunch of its core members.“Western,” IFC Center, through October 1The latest documentary from Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV, which I loved at New Directors/New Films earlier this year, is now in theaters, and it’s definitely worth seeking out — “Western” is the kind of movie you could well miss in the deluge of film happenings in New York at the moment, and that would be a shame. The immersive film follows the charismatic mayor of Eagle Pass, Texas, Chad Foster, and cattle rancher Martin Wall, using these two characters, as I wrote back in March, to “chip away at masculine stereotypes and Southern myths, [ultimately creating] a multifaceted portrait of a town and its people in the process of change.”“Heaven Can Wait,” New York Film Festival, October 1Speaking of the deluge of film happenings in New York, if you don’t attend the New York Film Festival currently rolling into Lincoln Center, you’re missing out on one of the festival’s best editions in years. Pretty much everything is worth seeing, but in this final slot of this week’s column, I want to single out a movie that might get ignored among all the glitzy premieres and big-name indie showcases: Ernst Lubitsch’s still-funny “Heaven Can Wait,” from 1943, will be screened in a 35mm restoration as part of the festival’s tribute to the Film Foundation, whose founder, Martin Scorsese, will be on hand to talk about the movie.
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