In director Genevieve Coleman’s documentary “Monday Night at the Rock and Bowl,” a bowling-alley owner points out that while bowling as a sport has decreased in popularity over the last ten years, knocking down pins for shits and giggles has conversely soared to an all-time high. True, glow bowling to a Shadow Stevens backdrop brought the youngsters out in the early ’90s. But those days died with Hypercolor and left recreational ten pin for the hipsters to devour.
Coleman, who premieres her film Friday night at the Wisconsin Film Festival, examines Chicago’s Diversey River Bowl in an hour-long documentary shot mostly on rough, mini-DV — seemingly a perfect match for her raggedly chic, punk-rock subjects.
Diversey is the typical blue-collar dive that one expects when strapping on the moth-ball-scented kicks for a night at the “sealed” lanes. Yes, at the Logan Square neighborhood alley, the wooden panels in the lanes are glued shut because of the large number of spilled beverages past the black line. The owner asserts that he is working on clearing a patent for his unique technology.
Ten minutes into the picture, it is clear that the director isn’t breaking ground with off- kilter camera swishes or post-production wizardry. The intro consists of several subjects drunkenly canting, “So you’re filming a documentary about Monday-night bowling?” Not quite earth-shattering cinema. But really, the topic is so affecting, visual freshness is easily overshadowed by an amazingly poignant aim — shooting a regular gathering of acquaintances (an almost religious act for many) to examine the punk subculture.
“These were not the large, beer-bellied old men that I had imagined at a bowling alley,” says Coleman. “These faces were fresh and young. Each face had a look of individual glee and, as a whole, the crowd seemed a teeming mass of good feeling and friendship.”
Through grass-roots fundraising efforts, including a benefit concert at the lanes, the director was able to raise the appropriate funds to push the project into post-production, where Michael Palmerio soon trimmed the 30 hours of footage down to a lean hour.
“Monday Night at the Rock and Bowl” does truly rock, with around a quarter of the picture devoted to music video like montages of, what else, punks bowling (and pretty terribly, by their own admissions).
The soundtrack is all over the radar. Modest Mouse to Jinxpack with Social Distortion’s “Story of My Life” finishing things out in a very 90210-series-finale-meets-“Kiss My Grits” kind of way. And the keen placement of The Stereo’s “Three Hundred” beats everything when backing a section devoted to bowling-related injuries (broken thumbs galore). The Tuesday night Dise crew must peep this flick. It puts everything truly in perspective.
