Annie, are you OK?

Bad 25

WHC

Maybe if Bad had changed my life, instead of just being the source of another catchy pop song or two from the putative king thereof, I wouldn't have found this overlong and underambitious, even rote, almost lazy. Then too, if I had read more about the documentary beforehand, maybe I'd have known that it's an accurately titled 25th-anniversary paean to a single album and a tiny, sanitized slice of the life of the man who made it, and I wouldn't have expcted anything about that "other stuff," as director Spike Lee dismissively termed it in the question-and-answer session afterward.

That Q&A, though--far more A, 'cause frankly Spike doesn't need much Q--would have been worth the price of admission even had their been a price for admission, as Lee riffed on everything from the NBA Finals (he's rooting for the Spurs) to "Columbus Syndrome" among gentrifiers who lack respect for the existing cultures of the Brooklyn and Harlem neighborhoods they colonize. New Haven and the Fesitival of Arts and Ideas was lucky to get him here.