The Screengrab : guest of cindy sherman

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

Screengrab Review: "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Nick Schager — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

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.

Guest of Cindy Sherman’s narcissistic opening tracks the rise of H-O and Gallery Beat, a trifling success story that’s propped up by H-O’s forthrightness even as it fails to register as anything more than a footnote – albeit a sometimes amusing one, as when a confrontational Julian Schnabel denigrates Gallery Beat and, in the process, makes himself the epitome of artistic pomposity. This early material, however, is mere prologue for H-O’s developing relationship with Sherman, whose illustrious photographs feature her embodying various female roles and disguises – a means of confronting, among other things, issues of female/gender power dynamics – and whose public persona is that of the mysterious recluse. H-O’s on-camera chats with Sherman for his program are thus somewhat revelatory, showing a charming, understated personality far different than one might have expected on the basis of her often-confrontational work. It’s that friction, as well as Sherman herself, that soon proves most transfixing, and considerably more intriguing than H-O’s career recap of his famous ex-girlfriend, which indulges in lazy, tossed-off family-history psychologizing and talking-head analysis (from colleagues, friends, and editors and critics of Artforum and The New York Times) that only manages to skim the surface of both the artist and her art.

Though it’s Sherman who clearly warrants an in-depth non-fiction portrait, Guest of Cindy Sherman remains diligently focused on H-O, whose own marginalization in the relationship (and the glamorous, ritzy life that Sherman leads) comes to dominate the proceedings, as well as lends the film its title. H-O’s struggle to exist in the shadow of Sherman’s spotlight is a losing battle. And moreover, it ultimately derails his doc, which quickly devolves into off-putting egomaniacal boo-hooing, with H-O – and the similarly ignored and/or disrespected husbands of Elton John and Molly Ringwald (?) – recounting their trivial woe-is-me anecdotes about being cropped out of red carpet photos and seated at remote dinner tables at galas. Shallowly attempting to cast these second fiddle-plights as case studies of the flawed male ego, Guest of Cindy Sherman instead simply reduces itself to a vain investigation of a former affair in which listening to H-O complain (on radio, or at a public speaking gig) about the disproportionate paparazzi love showered on his star girlfriend is to hear someone mistake themselves as far more engaging and noteworthy than their life story indicates.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman is the unchallenged hot-gossip item of the Tribeca festival. The film, which credits Paul H-O (that's "Paul Hasegawa-Overacker" to his mama) and Tom Donahue as co-directors, uses a lot of footage from Gallery Beat, a New York public-access show that Paul H-O starred in during the 1990s, applying a snarky, "in" tone to coverage of the local art scene. Over the years, Paul — I don't really feel comfortable acting as if I'm on a first-name basis with the guy, but I'd just feel silly calling him "H-O" — became an accepted fixture of the New York art scene from barging into galleries on opening nights and shoving a microphone into people's faces, which may say something about how small and in-bred the scene is, though some would probably insist that it says something about how important New York public access broadcasting was in its glory days. Anyway, after the art star Cindy Sherman agreed, to the surprise of everyone, Paul included, to appear on the show, she and Paul became a couple, to the flabbergasted bewilderment of everyone, Paul included. All seemed to be going well in Paul's world for quite a while, as well it might, considering that Sherman was rich, acclaimed, beautiful, sweetly nurturing, and to judge from the photographic evidence available here, has aged less in the past twenty years than Paul has in the last two. But Paul, who had tried to crash the scene by making his own career as an artist before public access called out his name, felt increasingly self-conscious about the fact that his significant other was a big, big deal and he was a measly little nobody. (To give him his due, it does sound as if this situation was brought to his attention through some pretty cringe-worthy slights.)

Work began on the film when the two were still together, and there must have been a point when Sherman at least gave the impression of wanting to encourage Paul to make it; otherwise, it seems doubtful that the filmmakers would have had such easy access to many of the interview subjects who've worked with, or for, Sherman. But by the time the documentary was finished they'd broken up--or, as Paul puts it, he was "downsized" out of her life--and in the movie itself, Paul muses that Sherman may have begun to feel differently about his little make-work film project after it dawned on her that someone might actually see it. The film attracted considerable buzz in the days leading up to its first Tribeca screening, and this past week Sherman herself sent out a disclaimer: "As my name is in the title and my work and self are so abundantly represented, I would like to counter any assumption that I am or wish to be personally associated with it. I am not a participant in any events related to the film's screenings in this festival or future presentations. I apologize to all those who participated, thinking they were doing me a favor in giving interviews and otherwise assisting in the fabrication of this film. Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at it's inception."

It's easy to sympathize with Sherman's queasiness over having her ex-boyfriend showing their home movies in theaters and charging admission, but it must be said that Guest of Cindy Sherman adds up to more than a public display of ungentlemanly behavior. Sherman herself actually comes out pretty well in it, both as a person and as a counterweight to the preening macho men with whom she competed for attention in the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel (seen here in an especially ludicrous clip from an old British TV documentary) and Robert Longo (who's glimpsed in an old TV interview wearing a hairdo that looks like an H. R. Giger creation that's eating his head). Paul himself comes across as a likable jerk and a schnorrer, with a surprisingly sharp grasp of who the trendy, market-driven art scene of the '80s and '90s worked. (The falsest touch, and the part of the movie that most smells of bad faith, has nothing to do with Sherman and their relationship: it's an eleventh-inning lament that Paul delivers about the hollow, corrupted values of the art scene today. It's not that what he says is wrong so much as that nothing you've seen up to that point has convinced you that he ever actually cared that much about art for itself. I do believe that he cared about Sherman, though; the movie may feel painfully personal to those whose lives he documents, but it's in no way a slag job. And maybe because of the discretion that Paul himself shows in his depiction of Sherman, she retains her distance from the camera; at the end she seems attractive, likable, even hard to resist, but essentially, mysteriously unknowable, while Paul is happy to cariacture himself as an insecure party crasher who got lucky, for a while. For all its flair and smart talk, Guest of Cindy Sherman ends on a note of genuine sadness and loss.