Errol Morris’ lightest, most amusing film since 1997’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, and yet nonetheless a companion piece to 2008’s Standard Operating Procedure in its investigation of media-filtered truth, Tabloid tells the truly outrageous tale of Joyce McKinney, a wannabe model and former Wyoming beauty queen who in 1977 became a UK gossip-rag sensation when she was charged with kidnapping her pudgy Mormon boyfriend at gunpoint and chaining him to a bed for sex (“The Case of the Manacled Mormon!”). That’s just the beginning of this it-keeps-getting-weirder story’s sordid twists and turns involving S&M photos, dominatrix call girl massages, and parties with Saturday Night Fever luminaries. It’s craziness that’s far better experienced without any prior knowledge of McKinney, and which Morris reveals through his usual style: prolonged interviews with his subjects, home movies and archival film footage and photographs, and graphics – in this instance, newspaper headline-style words superimposed on top of his speakers – that both augment the material’s tawdry energy as well as subtly contradict and critique his speakers’ accounts. Morris is fascinated by McKinney’s unbelievable life, which features two separate 15-minutes-of-fame stretches, the latter one thanks to her successful efforts to have South Korean scientists clone her dog Booger. Tabloid both revels in the un-self-aware, deluded McKinney and her sleazy exploits and regularly undercuts them with pointed questions and on-screen textual suggestions, all while using her stunning saga as an extreme case study of media sensationalism, the slippery line between fact and fantasy, and cultural obsessions with celebrity.
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