Peeking in

It was documentary film night last night, and we caught up with a couple of fine ones. The first was Startup.com, a 2001 look at a couple of young New Yorkers who, in 1999, launched an online company called govWorks.com. They assumed they would make scads of money, and you can guess how things turned out. It's a grim story that is in some ways atypical of the dot-com hysteria: these fellows never were twentysomething billionaires, probably because they got into the e-commerce game relatively late. In some of the most excruciating moments, they haggle with venture capitalists over $12 million, $20 million--more money than I can conceive of, certainly, but small change in those days. (One of the film's directors, Jehane Noujaim, also made Control Room; I reviewed that here.)

Then we watched In Heaven There Is No Beer?, a 1984 doc about polka. The film, a winner at the 1985 Sundance festival, captures a slice of Americana that isn't celebrated nearly enough: the small, Midwestern beer halls and festivals where polka bands play and revelers drink and dance. I didn't appreciate polka until I moved to Wisconsin, but the more I learn, the more I like, and I've never seen a more engrossing look at the milieu than this one. In my favorite scene, a young woman receives an award from a polka association, and she is completely overcome with emotion; if you can't get emotional about your polka band, what can you get emotional about?