Tabloid

Director: Errol Morris
USA, 88’, 2011, color
English with Turkish subtitles

Academy Award-winner Errol Morris’ Tabloid follows the much stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former “beauty queen” whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe and directly onto the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers. Joyce’s crusade for love and personal vindication, as illustrated by Morris, takes her through a surreal world of gunpoint abduction, manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, magic underwear and dreams of celestial unions. This notorious affair is barking mad. Equal parts love story, film noir, brainy B-movie and demented fairy tale, Tabloid is a delirious meditation on hysteria – both public and personal – from a filmmaker who continues to break down and blow open the documentary genre with his penetrating portraits of eccentric and profoundly complex characters. In Tabloid, Morris concocts another jaw-dropping portrayal, this time of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal-sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life. Long before the days of Lindsay, Britney and the 24-hour news cycle, Joyce McKinney reigned as the ensnaring Femme Fatale accused of sexual defiance. In Tabloid, she is back, and Morris offers up his best guilty treasure.