What's Up? Docs.

Quick hits from real life:

ZIPPER: CONEY ISLAND'S LAST WILD RIDE (B) - PBS offers up a rich slice of classic New York: the real estate battle to save Coney Island from developers. The film's framing device is the Zipper, the tossing-turning ride that is threatened with extinction by the political maneuvering that is killing off the old-fashioned amusements

Eddie Miranda and his decidedly blue-collar crew on the Zipper provide the Brooklyn attitude. They represent the working joes, the powerless community, and the end of an era.

The bad guy is Joseph Sitt (who likes to style himself as Joey Coney Island), a low-rent mall developer (under the heading Thor Equities) who comes off like a Jerry Lewis character. He likes to whip out his Blackberry and tick off the names of the classy tenants he hopes to bring to Coney Island. In order to develop all the land he has bought up, he must conspire with the Bloomberg administration (and his Botoxed head of city planning) to effect a zoning change.

The local City Councilman starts out with a populist fervor but eventually melts into a middle-of-the-road voice for compromise. Surprise alliances are unveiled. The city starts carving up the area committed to actual amusement, in favor of retail, condos and hotel developments.

Writer/director Amy Nicholson enlightens and entertains. We visit the Midwest company that manufactures the Zipper. Riders and operators tell stories about wild rides that evoke screams and send pocket change flying. And stay tuned for the credits to find out the fate of the Zipper.

In the end, this is a classic New York story, full of colorful characters.

DOGTOWN & Z-BOYS (B-minus) - This nostalgia trip about the early days of skateboarding is fun for a while, but it gets dragged down by repetitive footage and an incestuous production.

Former skater Stacey Peralta rounds up all his old SoCal buddies, including Tony Hawk and Tony Alva and the rest of the guys who were present at the dawn of a phenomenon. The extensive footage documenting the transition from '60s surfers to '70s skateboarders is fascinating. But it's one thing to reveal the origins of the Dog Bowl -- finding empty outdoor pools to frolic in -- and another to show footage from pool skating over and over and over. Neat tricks soon grow old.

Peralta himself is included as a talking head. The production was financed by his sponsor, Vans. All his old pals agree that they were quite the cool bunch. Their group high-five, however, gets old quickly. 

THE LAST GLADIATORS (C+) - Pre-eminent documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side") slums with hockey goons. More precisely, he hangs out almost exclusively with Chris Nilan, a notable tough guy with the Montreal Canadiens from the late 1970s and early '80s, who struggled with addictions in retirement.

This is really a 90-minute profile of Nilan, a good ol' Boston boy, but his story just doesn't have the heft to carry the whole film. We get snippets of other enforcers from the golden goon era, as well as some fun clips, but Gibney keeps dragging us back to present-day Nilan, unfolding his history as we go along. A snippet of the funeral

If you're looking for a thorough examination of that era and its impact on the NHL and the men who played the tough-guy role, this isn't it.

BOLIVIA BEYOND BELIEF (D+) - More of a home movie than a real documentary, this looks at Bolivia's transition to socialism under its first indigenous leader, Evo Morales. Director Robert Dunsmore happened to be there, rolling film, and he interviews a bunch of talking heads. Dunsmore himself provides the translated narration from these interviews, which drag on, in need of editing. We literally get the same voice for 90 percent of the film.

This is somewhat educational, but rarely rises above the production values of an old-fashioned film strip. It's heartening to hear world leaders take on capitalism's attack on human dignity; there must be a decent documentary out there.

BONUS TRACK
Speaking of amusement parks, here's Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices, backed by Doug Gillard's buzzing guitars: