It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

FRIED SHOES COOKED DIAMONDS documents a gathering of Beat Generation figures (Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, and more), plus some non-Beats such as Meredith Monk and Miguel Pinero, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. They give readings to audiences, converse with each other, and Ginsberg performs a couple of songs. They leave campus for an anti-nuclear protest at Rocky Flats, where they read more poetry.Naturally, this documentary won't be of much importance to you if you aren't interested in any of the figures involved. If you are a Beat Generation fan, you will enjoy the chance to watch them interact with each other, and hear their spoken-word performances. Conversations revolve around the expected topics, such as literary composition and politics. The politics are not monolithic, ranging from Baraka's opposition to capitalism to Burroughs's opposition to Marxism. Best of all is hearing the poetry performed aloud, really the way it was meant to be experienced, rather than just eyeballed on a page. Unfortunately, most of the Beats are no longer around to give readings, so we only have recordings and films like this to give us the full impact.FRIED SHOES COOKED DIAMONDS is nothing like a comprehensive overview of the movement; it is a documentation of a particular moment in time, when the writers were no longer young scandalizers but were beginning to find their niche in academia, and attract young followers of their own. It's under an hour, and hard to find as of this writing (I saw it on an old Mystic Fire Video VHS), but where else are you going to get to see Anne Waldman in a bikini?