Netflix pick for 9/9/13 – ‘Tabloid’

What’s better than a super juicy, scandalous, over the top, so crazy it has to be true tabloid story? Getting all the facts and claims from the people directly involved in said juicy scandal. And that’s ‘Tabloid,” a retelling of a very notorious sex crime case which fascinated the world in the 1970’s involving a former beauty queen, a Mormon missionary, and a sex-filled weekend that the beauty queen claimed was consensual and which the missionary claimed was rape.

This crazy story and it’s various players are all brought under the microscope by the great Errol Morris, he of the great documentaries “The Thin Blue Line,” “Standard Operating Procedure” and “The Fog of War,” and as per usual, this is a great Errol Morris documentary because not only did he find a fascinating story with incredible real-life characters, but he also uses his great storytelling style and techniques to wrap up this crazy story in an aesthetically pleasing package, and BOOM, we have “Tabloid.”

And possibly the most interesting aspect of this movie is how this particular story made huge news in the UK tabloids in the 1970’s and was an even bigger story there than it was here in America where the crime happened, and this intense focus from the rags and papers of the 1970’s closely echoes the horrible tabloid-filled celebrity culture in which we currently live, a culture in which a person who commits a crime and gets tried in public ends up attaining a level of noteriety and celebrity that shouldn’t even exist for these people, yet it does. And that’s a shame.

Check out this great documentary right here on the Netflix Instant. Enjoy!