The biggest rap I have against this 'documentary' is not its veracity, but the way it was handled, particularly in its exposition. After recently watching 'The Love Machine,' an obvious fake doc that insulted the intelligence, I was in a snarly mood when I picked this up with all due innocence. I soon found I was being hoodwinked again, and my snarly mood returned.
Making a really believable faux doc requires tremendous skill, and first-time filmmaker Murray just can't deliver the goods. This is just too tall a tale, and there are a lot of ham-fisted clunks and cracks in the delivery of its story.
I was struck right at the beginning, when there seemed to be no real media coverage of this event, which surely is so unusual that it verges on the sensational. In this hysterical age of pop-cultured 'news,' this incident, if real, surely should have generated heavy-duty news in many newspapers and on many network news programs. The very absence of such hoopla made me smell a rat early on in the flick.
The film progresses with friends, family and girlfriends, but they just didn't engage me at all. I found the whole exercise rather boring. I honestly didn't much care if this guy was authentic or not, and I honestly don't believe he was.
The problem with docs like this, for me at least, is that the director must have an interesting character to begin with, and he/she must be able to sustain the artifice through clever plot twists and talented co-conspirators. Doug (a rather dull subject) and his gang just couldn't pull this off. A director must be able to float an improbable story and make it highly believable. And he/she must, most of all, have superb actors to propel the story and keep us guessing. This film didn't have those ingredients. In the end, I just found it all very irritating.
I recently saw an interesting faux documentary called 'Missing Victor Pellerin,' which sets up an elaborate story about an artist in Montreal who gives it all up and disappears. It really captures your imagination, and it's so skillfully done that you're just never sure down to the last frame whether you've been had or not, and even then you can't be sure. This film was also made by a first-time filmmaker, and it was a brilliant film that worked on many levels.
Making a really believable faux doc requires tremendous skill, and first-time filmmaker Murray just can't deliver the goods. This is just too tall a tale, and there are a lot of ham-fisted clunks and cracks in the delivery of its story.
I was struck right at the beginning, when there seemed to be no real media coverage of this event, which surely is so unusual that it verges on the sensational. In this hysterical age of pop-cultured 'news,' this incident, if real, surely should have generated heavy-duty news in many newspapers and on many network news programs. The very absence of such hoopla made me smell a rat early on in the flick.
The film progresses with friends, family and girlfriends, but they just didn't engage me at all. I found the whole exercise rather boring. I honestly didn't much care if this guy was authentic or not, and I honestly don't believe he was.
The problem with docs like this, for me at least, is that the director must have an interesting character to begin with, and he/she must be able to sustain the artifice through clever plot twists and talented co-conspirators. Doug (a rather dull subject) and his gang just couldn't pull this off. A director must be able to float an improbable story and make it highly believable. And he/she must, most of all, have superb actors to propel the story and keep us guessing. This film didn't have those ingredients. In the end, I just found it all very irritating.
I recently saw an interesting faux documentary called 'Missing Victor Pellerin,' which sets up an elaborate story about an artist in Montreal who gives it all up and disappears. It really captures your imagination, and it's so skillfully done that you're just never sure down to the last frame whether you've been had or not, and even then you can't be sure. This film was also made by a first-time filmmaker, and it was a brilliant film that worked on many levels.