Party Monster: The Shockumentary

These days, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are kings of reality TV, producing such shows as "Sex Change Hospital" and "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." But they started out as documentary filmmakers, getting their first major attention with a doc and then a feature film about New York's king of the "Club Kids," Michael Alig, who's now doing 10-to-20 for killing a fellow partyer. The feature-film version of Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, is better known, but here at Doc-a-Day, we believe fact is more interesting than fiction, so we looked at Party Monster: The Shockumentary, released in 1998.

The story is a familiar one: gay kid comes to New York from the midwest, drops out of college, gets involved in the downtown party scene, the drugs flow, bad shit happens, and it all ends in tears. Lou Reed built a career on songs about this type of thing, and you can save some time by getting a copy of Transformer and forgetting about this derivative 80s scene.

But I guess if you came along in the 80s, as Bailey and Barbato did, you missed the whole Warhol Factory thing, and this was all you had. And what thin gruel it is. Party Monster feels long at 57 minutes not just because the Club Kids are unidimensional, but because it tells a story that everybody already knows. The film provides no perspective or insight, and lets barely coherent drug addicts - including Alig himself - prattle on and on. There is no art in this film, no metaphor, no psychological insight; just a predictable tabloid story without a single surprise. We've seen it all before on Geraldo, where the Club Kids were apparently frequent guests. Party Monster treads the same ground, scratching no deeper than insights such as "they wanted to make fun of consumer culture and be part of it at the same time." There is a story to be told here, but Bailey and Barbato weren't interested in exploring it. They were just practicing for their brilliant career as reality kings.

Dance with a Serial Killer

It’s an irresistible premise: a dogged police detective trying to get the goods on a brutal serial killer who’s hiding in plain sight. Dance With a Serial Killer is a true-life policier, like a season-long storyline on Homicide: Life on the Street. How can you go wrong?

The story: a woman is stabbed to death on a busy beach in France. No one hears anything, and there’s nothing in the woman’s life that points to a possible motive. The police zero in on a drifter staying at a nearby homeless shelter, one Francis Heaulme, who admits to having random homicidal urges. But the cops have no evidence to tie him to the crime, and have to let him go. What follows is a two-and-a-half-year cat-and-mouse game between detective Jean-François Abgrall and one of the freakiest, most dangerous homicidal maniacs I’ve ever heard about. Dangerous because there is no pattern, no rhyme or reason to his crimes – just opportunity and a desire to kill.

So, a hero, a villain, and a chase. What more do you need to make a good documentary? Well, actually, a lot. The film simply follows Abgrall around France, interviewing him in the various places where the story unfolded almost 20 years ago: police stations, isolated fields, etc. There are a few interviews with other cops who worked on particular aspects of the case, but that’s it. The filmmakers make virtually no attempt to give us any social or political context. We learn nothing about the justice system that apparently left Abgrall to work on the case virtually alone, nothing about Heaulme beyond the police perspective, and nothing about the French people’s reaction to having a serial killer among them who may have killed more than 40 people.

In other words, the film focuses exclusively on the cat-and-mouse game without telling us anything new about either cats or mice. Abgrall is certainly a great interview and a really smart cop – his explanation of police techniques and the way he pieced the story together are very interesting. But the filmmakers seem to be so enamoured of their detective that they forget about the rest of the story. The lesson of the day? Don't fall in love with your subject so much that you see your story from only one angle.

Monster in the Family: The Struggle Continues

Last fall, CTV aired a two-part documentary called Monster in the Family, which was one of the first things I recorded after mastering the use of my new DVD/hard-disk recorder. I liked part 1 very much (and hadn't realized that it had first aired more than a year earlier), but I never got around to watching part 2 until now.

Interesting story. Too bad it wasn't a 15-minute magazine piece.

The original Monster in the Family was a great investigative piece - the kind that once would have found a home only on the CBC's Fifth Estate. It examined the case of Martin Ferrier, a man whose own mother campaigned to have him declared a dangerous offender, claiming he was an incurable psychopath. Ferrier was even singled out by Stephen Harper in a campaign speech as the kind of guy the Conservatives would lock away forever. The filmmaker, John Kastner, built a solid case arguing that Ferrier wasn't terribly dangerous at all, pointing out that his actual crimes were far less serious than the media had reported, that at worst he was a serial passer of bad cheques and not a serial rapist or wannabe murderer as had been reported. By the end of the film it was clear that it was his mother who was the monster - abandoning him as a child, then later making wild claims about him that were contrary to all the actual hard evidence, and campaigning to keep him locked up. It was a great piece of journalism - taking a closer look at a story that had been widely reported and showing a very different reality. This is crusading television at its best. Would that there were more of it.

And part 2? An epilogue stretched into a TV hour. It picks up Ferrier's story a year after his release, and shows that he is indeed doing much better, staying out of trouble and learning how to live as a free man and a responsible citizen. But there just isn't much there aside from some interviews and b-roll. Ferrier, understandably, doesn't want to call attention to himself by having a camera follow him around. So we don't actually see him interacting with anyone except a volunteer mentor and a sympathetic landlord. We don't see him at work, we don't see him with friends... With the exception of one significant scene towards the end, the film feels entirely like an afterthought.

Kastner had a long and distinguished career as a CBC producer, winning three Emmys and various other honours. He's been an independent for many years now, but somehow, unfortunately, seems stuck still in the current-affairs style of filmmaking. There's heavy narration in the CBC style, we keep hearing him asking questions... I kept expecting the Fifth Estate's Linden McIntyre to step out of the shadows and do a stand-up, except that it was Kastner's voice that we heard throughout. There are lots of standard current-affairs shots, such as the guy being introduced in narration as he's walking down the hall. One might argue that this doc is largely a journalistic enterprise and demands this approach because a lot of information must be delivered. But to me, it just isn't cinematic.

So what to conclude about Monster in the Family: The Struggle Continues? It never should have been a separate film. The original could have been re-edited into a 75-minute feature with a one-year-later final act. But the reality of independent filmmaking is, you make a lot more money from a new one-hour than from a re-cut.

Errol Morris's First Person

I've been out of town; hence no posts for a few days. Because my flights were relatively short, I took along Errol Morris's First Person series, figuring it would be easier to get through a few half-hour episodes than to try to watch a feature-length doc bit-by-bit.

Morris is one of my favourite filmmakers, largely on the strength of The Fog of War, his biographical film about Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-War-era U.S. Secretary of Defense. That film is essentially a 100-minute interview with McNamara, cut with a mix of archival footage and whimsical images created by Morris. The interview is a dance between McNamara and Morris, who is occasionally heard off-camera, asking a question or challenging McNamara's answer. To me, The Fog of War is one of the great examples of the art of the interview.

First Person ran on the U.S. Bravo channel for 17 episodes around 2000-01, presumably while Morris was between Mr. Death and Fog of War. It's a series of interviews, conducted and shot in the signature Morris style, using his Interrotron contraption, a floating camera, and lots of jump cuts, as well as the requisite Morrissian illustrative shots and archival images. Judging by the four episodes I watched, it's a great example of a doc filmmaker parlaying his creative success into a money-making venture that keeps the rent paid and a few people employed. Occasionally, it reaches a level of deep weirdness that encourages second viewing, but as in most series, the formula usually takes precedence over the subject.

Of the episodes I watched, by far the strangest was Sondra London, a serial dater of serial killers. Morris's camera lingers over her creepy face as she talks lovingly of her jailed paramour-du-jour, known elsewhere as the Gainsville Ripper. We don't learn much here, but watching this woman is a deeply voyeuristic experience. She's a profoundly disturbed nutbar, but how can you not put her on TV?

Another episode engages us on a higher plane. Clyde Roper is a marine biologist who's on a lifelong quest to find and study the semi-mythical giant squid. He's a great storyteller and a serious scientist, as well a charming eccentric - the kind of scientist who performs well on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. He also sounds like he could have been an alternate for Morris's Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and perhaps he was. He and Morris clearly have a rapport, and you get the feeling he could easily carry a full-length doc.

I don't have much to say about the other two episodes I watched - famed autistic animal-behaviour expert Temple Grandin, and grandstanding lawyer Andrew Cappocia. In both cases, the show feels formulaic - the former because I just don't find Grandin especially compelling (though the shots of Grandin getting into her, um... hug machine certainly add some weirdness), the latter because the guy's a big self-promoter who doesn't back up his claims and delivers nothing but schtick (turns out, he ended up going to jail).

So, in the end, does the series work? Yes and no. It's a diverting way to spend a half-hour, and Morris's schtick is certainly a lot better than most. His well-practiced tricks - both his interviewing style and his use of images - work pretty well. But I can't help but feel that the series doesn't quite rise above radio with pictures.

Bus 174

When I was done with Mozartballs, I went to a pile of DVDs that I'd bought a few months ago on eBay for next to nothing. (Here's a secret that I don't want to spread around too widely: eBay has tons of great documentaries and foreign films that you can get for a song - especially if you can buy a bunch from a single dealer and save on shipping.) The one I was most interested in was Bus 174, a Brazilian film that examines a notorious bus hijacking that was televised live all over the country.

Bus 174 weaves together footage from the multiple cameras that captured every minute of the stand-off, interviews with hostages and police officers, and a meticulously researched examination of the highjacker's life. It starts with a breathtaking aerial shot of Rio, floating over the green of the mountains that surround the city, the mountainside favelas, the famous Copacabana beach, and the middle-class neighbourhood where the stand-off takes place. It's an organic and intriguing beginning that had me riveted. Director José Padilha carefully builds the backdrop for the story: Rio's street-kid problem, the effects of child poverty and homelessness, etc. By the time we get into the hijacking, we have an inkling of what we're in for, but not where we're going. And that's when the film really takes us on a ride.

I won't reveal too much, but the hijacker - who's high, desperate and very angry - turns out to have a history that's both predictable and surprising. The structure is masterful - things that happen during the stand-off lead seamlessly into elements of the backstory, which becomes more and more complex and surprising as the film goes on. And for viewers outside Brazil, who don't know how the story ends, there's edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film does lose its way a bit here and there. At two hours, it's at least 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, too long. Some points are made over and over and interview subjects are allowed to ramble. This is a common problem with documentaries that aren't subject to the discipline of a broadcast length. I know the disciples of Peter Watkins - who decries the monoculture of "the universal clock" - will disagree with me emphatically. But the lack of any kind of clock just leads to a lack of rigour.

And finally, another thing I found fascinating about the film actually came out in the making-of featurette. To get fresh, insightful interviews from the survivors - who'd been interviewed so much that they had stock answers for everything - Padilha sat them down in a studio with a TV and a remote control. They watched TV footage of the highjacking - which of course they had never seen - and when they felt like stopping the tape, he would ask them questions. It's a great technique.

From the point of view of storytelling and technique, I found Bus 174 one of the most inspiring documentaries I've seen in a long time.