Guest of Cindy Sherman fixates on a peripheral nobody residing in the orbit of a somebody, a tack that allows for an intimate, unguarded view of said luminary while simultaneously casting into sharp relief the wrongheadedness of its focus. Beginning in 1993, Paul H-O made a very minor name for himself as the host of Gallery Beat, an off-the-cuff public access television program in which (as director and host) he attended premiere shows and interviewed artists with an enthusiasm and candor that helped deflate the scene’s air of self-importance. A devoted fan who nonetheless refused to simply act the sycophantic PR mouthpiece for those he covered, H-O hardly qualified as a journalist but nonetheless provided a modestly unfiltered view of the art world. His gig eventually brought him into contact with celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman, who, bucking her usual protocol, let down her media-shy guard for a series of interviews with H-O and, later still, became his girlfriend and the frequent subject of his incessant filming, of which this absorbing yet lacking doc is primarily comprised.

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Paul Arthur, an influential film scholar and critic (and author of A Line Of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965) died recently; one if his last pieces has now appeared in Artforum, in which he examines the techniques of "nonfiction filmmaker" Errol Morris, whose forthcoming Standard Operating Procedure is about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Arthur finds Morris guilty of choosing "to substitute metaphor for analysis"; he compares Morris's approach to that of Alex Gibney's in Taxi to the Dark Side--whose "gritty reenactments, lush landscape shots, interviews lit like Dutch portraiture, and ... ominous music track replete with vaguely religious wailing suggestive of cries of another sort... never supersede or distract from Gibney’s inflamed political indictment"--and find Morris's approach wanting.

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