Spitball Army

The currently ongoing Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFB) is one of the best indie film showcases in the country.  The IFFB has just shown a documentary film about the independent record store culture, entitled I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store.  Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Victoria Large has posted one of the first reviews of this film at notcoming.com.  Here’s an excerpt (and you can read the entire post at their very fine website here):

“What the hell happened to all of our record stores?” asks Matt Newman, the twenty-two-year-old writer-director of I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, and his film provides viewers who share his indignation ample opportunity to celebrate and mourn. As someone who has managed to wax rhapsodic about the bygone days of hometown video stores, I’ll confess to being pretty sympathetic to Newman’s cause. Indeed, it’s easy to make a case for the romance of record stores as we once knew them: there’s something magic about an orphaned old record in a slightly musty sleeve bidding to make its way into your life, and something utterly charming about stores with real, distinct personalities in our era of slick big box retailers who only ever stock the new releases and Greatest Hits. As with old school video stores, indie record retailers held (and, when you can find them, still hold) the promise of discovery, and as Newman and many of his interviewees emphasize, they also fostered a genuine sense of community.