The late Kitty Genovese whose short life and death are shrouded in urban legend and lore. According to the New York Times, Genovese was a single woman murdered on the street outside her Queens apartment, screaming for help while 38 of her neighbors looked on and did nothing. Unfortunately, a follow-up report by the Times on the 40th anniversary of the crime revealed that the original report got the story entirely wrong.
And Genovese was not single. It also led him to journalist and screenwriter James Solomon who was working on his own project about the Genovese murder. What Farrier thought would be a quick two-minute story about an unusual fetish soon spiraled into a flurry of threats and lawsuits. He came out during the successful campaign for marriage equality in New Zealand. With his trademark humor and determination, he and Reeve traveled across America, visiting the studios where the very homoerotic videos are filmed and tracking down the mysterious and litigious man behind the tickling empire.
Farrier even agrees to be tied down and tickled himself to gain the trust of one of his subjects. You start with this film that sounds so quirky but it becomes this well-made investigative journalism documentary that just digs deeper and deeper and deeper into this bizarre world. And off the record, Farrier admits he is very ticklish. If you were alive in the s, an awareness of Liza Minnelli probably feels hard-coded into your DNA. For gay men, who found in her a similar connection as they had found in her mother β an earnest, genuinely positive spirit attempting to navigate a complicated life and find a place of her own in a world that viewed such enthusiasm with skepticism and judgmental disdain β she became more than just a star.
She was a free spirit who, in her struggle to overcome expectation and assert her own unique stamp on the world, became not only easily relatable, but a kindred spirit. Eschewing any attempt at a comprehensive career retrospective, it puts the focus on the story of her life, and the pluckier-than-expected Liza emerges with a canny and self-aware authenticity, complemented by enough hard-earned comfort in her own skin to not only hook a built-in audience of lifelong worshipers but win over a whole new crowd of acolytes.
Instead, the film and its still precocious year-old star choose instead to turn their attention toward celebrating the various key collaborators with whom her career became symbiotically entwined. Brassy, generous, endlessly and authentically positive even when discussing the various missteps and low points that have marked her career, her extensive screen time gives her plenty of opportunity to show us that, even after a lifetime of struggling against scoliosis, bodily injury, and a well-publicized addiction to prescription drugs, the Liza we all know and love β endlessly positive, big-hearted, effusive in her praise of others and her appreciation for life, with a song or a show-biz story never far from her lips nor her heart β is exactly who she really is.
