Z Channel

If you thought Quentin Tarantino was a maniacal film geek, meet Jerry Harvey, the obsessive programmer of the 1970s cable service, Z Channel, who makes the Kill Bill director look like Paul "Eeyore" Ulane, Maxim Online's three-star movie reviewer. This two-hour documentary celebrates the channel and the programmer, both of which revolutionized the way film nerds looked at cinema by inventing the director's cut, restoring deleted scenes, and rescuing films and filmmakers from total obscurity. As a documentary about Harvey, Z Channel flounders while presenting boring tales recounted by former colleagues and friends. If you spend hours surfing IFC and Sundance every weekend, then you'll feel right at home with clips from cult movies, overzealous interviews with Tarantino, Robert Altman, James Woods, and Alexander Payne, and pieces from rarely-seen foreign and domestic films. But unless you're as manic as Harvey, as crazy as Tarantino, or as overweight as Roger Ebert, it won't take long before you change Z Channel.