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Paperboys review
:. Director: Mike Mills
:. Genre: Documentary
:. Running Time: 0:58
:. Year: 2001
:. Country: USA
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This DVD put out by the folks at Palm Pictures is
certainly one of the weirdest DVDs I've ever seen—and
I've seen weird stuff. The main feature, Paperboys, a
documentary which clocks in at a mere 40mn, offers a
glimpse at the lives of a group of paperboys in some
bland suburb in the middle of nowhere.
The filmmaker interviews and follows kids from
different sizes, ages and social classes. As different as they look, I wasn't able to learn anything more than the fact that most of them ride their bikes
fast, wear football jerseys, are obsessed with
wrestling and think that in 20 years they will be
replaced by some automatic process—maybe even by
robots. The piece is pretty unbalanced time-wise,
spending more time with the first paperboy than any of
the others, and neither the style nor the
content—nor its treatment—are that interesting; a
fact even more surprising given that the author, Mike Mills,
is a graphic designer and music video director known
for his edgy collaborations with "avant-garde" acts
such as Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Air, Beck and
Moby.
Fairly disappointed, I then decided to venture into the
extras and to my surprise, after the kid-friendly
Paperboys, I discovered Deformer, his provocative 17mn
documentary about skateboarding artist Ed Templeton.
The piece is a montage that gives a pretty disturbing
portrait of Templeton, a typical Huntington
Beach—a.k.a. surf city—bum, who shares with us his
thoughts, which border on insanity and pedophilia, his
photo shoots and paintings of nude models as well as
some intimate—and X-rated—polaroids of him and his
girlfriend. Widely contrasting with Paperboys and more
amusing than shocking, Deformer came closer to the
idea I had of Mills, allowing me to quickly digest
Paperboys.
Fred Thom
 Documentaries: 1998 - 2011 Reviews
Documentaries: 2012 - present Reviews
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