WALL OF SOUND: Carol Kaye of The Wrecking Crew.

The NW Film Center’s festival of tuneful movies continues this weekend with live performances by Filmusik: The Superman Orchestra (see Headout). Other highlights:

The Wrecking Crew
Everybody knows the iconic walking bass line in Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’.” But do you know who wrote the part? Though they played on hundreds of standards—from the songs on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In”—the group of Los Angeles musicians, dubbed at some point as “the Wrecking Crew” by drummer Hal Blaine, has gone unknown to everyone but the odd music curmudgeon for over 40 years. The Wrecking Crew, a lovely little documentary by Denny Tedesco, the son of a prominent Crew guitar player, sheds light on the story of the mish-mash gang of musical castoffs that made all of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson’s weird ideas come to fruition. The only downside is, the film never attempts to answer the burning question: If these players were so good, how come they never tried to form their own band? Still, with the way the industry is currently tanking, it’s hard to complain about a 90-minute film that features archival footage and new interviews with the creators of some of the greatest music ever put to tape. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. 7 pm Saturday, Jan. 24.

Song Sung Blue
Good times never seemed so good at the outset of Greg Kohs’ documentary recounting the rise and fall of Milwaukee-based Neil Diamond tribute duo Lightning Thunder. A phenomenon as Midwestern as potluck suppers, Mike and Claire Sardina were married at the Wisconsin State Fair, and their shows packed out Chinese restaurants until they peaked with a festival performance alongside Eddie Vedder. Yet soon a queasy atmosphere settles over Song Sung Blue: Lightning Thunder are…well, not pathetic, exactly, but permanently deluded and perhaps a little trailer-trashy. (Telling characteristics: Mike was once the only white member of a soul band, and never seemed to notice, and he and Claire fill many of their home-movie tapes chain-smoking at their kitchen table while screaming at her children about getting ready to dine at Ponderosa.) Kohs’ intimacy with the family has an unpleasant tang of exploitation: As bad luck buffets Mike and Claire—she is maimed in an absurd car accident; he begins to resemble Ernest Borgnine more than Diamond—their previously harmless exhibitionist tendencies begin to take on freak-show qualities. We’re back in the morally tenuous territory of American Movie and Capturing the Friedmans, where a director’s intention to portray working-class lives is tainted by delighted horror at their crudity. Yet the songs, and the Sardinas’ enthusiasm for performing them, nearly redeem all: As Lightning Thunder pack up the babies and crabby old ladies for a traveling salvation show, they bestow an unironic love of kitsch on everyone they serenade. AARON MESH. 7 pm Sunday, Jan. 25.