Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary that puts a new spin on the concept of "world music." The Monks consisted of five American GIs who began playing together when they were all stationed in Germany in 1964. It was after they were discharged from the service that they fell in with Walther Niemann and Karl-H. Remy, a couple of artsy types who repackaged them as "the Monks", complete with Friar Tuck haircuts, black clothes, and nooses worn as neckties. The look made it a lot harder to confuse them with the Dave Clark 5, but the Monks already stood apart from the '60s pack for their lack of interest in lush and catchy melodies in favor of a focus on minimalist rhythmic experimentation. Heard today, it's easy to take them for a likely influence on the Velvet Underground and such post-punk giants as Wire and Gang of Four. Both well-informed and worshipful towards its subject, the doc achieves a tone somewhere between a 33 1/3 book and a raving fan who acts as if he's been up for three days, which is kind of appropriate. It makes its cable debut on The Sundance Channel on Friday, May 1, 11:00 PM central/midnight eastern, four days before its release on DVD, and four months after founding member Dave Day died of a heart attack.

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Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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