Riot on the Dance Floor

[apollo828]

Hello. I just received this documentary on Blu-Ray. For those who don't know, this was one of many "Kickstarter documentaries" that was funded a few years ago. It focuses on City Gardens, a punk rock club in Trenton, NJ that became (in)famous for hosting all manner of wild shows. All this despite Philadelphia (much larger and prestigious) being very close and the club being in one of Trenton's worst neighborhoods, even by the low standards at the time. It's a cool little documentary for people into alternative/punk rock, or people who just want to see a documentary about a man who sacrificed an unremarkable but comfortable career so that he could follow his dream.

The disc is available in very limited quantities from Randy Now's Man Cave in Bordentown, NJ. It was released on Dec. 17, 2017 according to this Facebook event. You can email Randy via his website and order it, or drop into his shop. There aren't many copies right now but the director apparently drops by every few months with new copies. So, it's limited to however many copies the director can sell via Randy.

As for the disc itself, it's a mixed bag. The original Kickstarter offered a DVD to funders, with the DVD containing some bonus interviews and a live commentary session (the director, Randy, and quite a few crew members) hosted at Randy's shop. I don't have the DVD but it looks like those extras got ported over, not to mention the director autographing every copy of the Blu. The tech specs are disappointing, unfortunately. The disc is a BD-R. The video is 1080i MPEG-2, unlike the Amazon stream, which is 1080p AVC. Audio is 192 kbps Dolby Digital stereo. No other bonus material. The low bit rates (3 1/2 hours of 1080i video on a BD25) and MPEG-2 encoding lead me to wonder how exactly all this was authored. In motion, it really doesn't look that bad. Still, I can't help but think it could've been handled better.

Another reason I'm a bit disappointed is because of what happened when I ripped my copy onto my server. For some who don't know, a small handful of poorly encoded DVDs have weird issues where 4x3 video is displayed as 16x9 or vice versa. A little hacking fixes this, but still, it's annoying and sloppy. Blu-Ray pretty much did away with this, and the video is usually consistent no matter which player you use. This disc has a weird issue where some players I've used will default to trying to squeeze the video into 4x3. It looks awful. The players have ways of forcing 16x9 output, which results in the video looking right. Still, the fact that this disc came out last year and the video still has a 20+ year old MPEG-2 issue is really annoying. What makes it even worse is that whoever authored it did go to the trouble of making good (if occasionally misspelled) subtitles. Effort was put into the whole thing.

Is the disc worth your money? It depends. I like the doc and am glad that the director is trying. I also wish Randy well, considering how upfront he is about he basically sacrificed his future so that he could run the club. I just wish the disc had been handled better. I've seen official BD-Rs that looked and sounded great. Surely a little more legwork could've yielded an even better result. Oh well.

(By the way, I'll add this to the site DB eventually. I'm a little busy at the moment.)