This is a charming documentary about people who raise chickens for competition, and the people in this movie take their craft seriously.

There’s the mom who got over a drinking problem by focusing on her chickens, resulting in a sense of career purpose and a few awards. There’s the singer with a gig in Branson, Missouri who longs to be home with his family, taking care of his chickens and attending the major competitions. And then there’s the engineer who designs racecar and tractor pull engines, but works obsessively on the side with chickens for show.

If anything, the movie teaches a lot about the actual chickens, the many breeds, and their kind of adorable mannerisms.

Let it be said, some of the chickens the folks raise in this movie are pretty impressive. Director Nicole Lucas Haimes has made a fun movie that leads up to a final competition where all those mentioned above are involved. I never thought I’d find a chicken beauty pageant interesting, but Haimes makes it so.

Chicken People is having its Arizona premiere at The Loft during this year’s annual Loft Film Fest, Friday, Nov. 11.

Few Tucson bands in recent years have been as polarizing as Burning Palms. Regarded and derided equally as soulful psych-rockers and charlatans, accomplished, economical players and untrained musicians who can barely hold together a primitive racket, visionaries and overly reliant on image—Burning Palms are actually all of these things. The group, under the tutelage of singer/guitarist/songwriter Simone Stopford, is a complex and multi-layered animal.

Ostensibly a psych/garage revival band, Stopford’s songs are handcrafted pop under the veneer of swirling guitars and tribal drums, which means that the band’s music has aged far better than many of its early-2010s garage revivalist peers. Furthermore, I have little doubt that the upcoming Burning Palms record (recorded by Stopford with a completely different line-up than 2014’s self-titled album) will contain nary a trace of the previous ‘60s-flavored sound.

“Hologram” skitters along on a divided Bo Diddley beat that starts and stops until the familiar shuffle is gone. Stopford and co-vocalist Julia DeConcini stomp and dance atop the rhythm, disappearing and appearing again in the holes in the music like the artificial image of the track’s title and mumbled, sighed lyrics.

The song marches around in a circle for a couple of minutes, almost aimlessly. But the abrupt ending pulls the preceding sounds into focus—by playing around with silence and noise and beats, “Hologram” actually resembles its namesake. And for a band with a seemingly unlimited bag of tricks, banishing the laws of reality in their own music ranks with the best of them. Go see see them Tuesday, Nov. 1 at 191 Toole with Thee Oh Sees. Doors at 7.