 What, according to the author, is the main flaw of The Slums of Beverly Hills?
Dirty Laundry Now and then, a documentary film comes along that makes us re-examine the rules that unofficially govern the genre: Can there be a middle ground between fiction and fact? Can a documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? The movie tracks four aging New Yorkers--two men, two women--through their lonely dating rituals, in the process depicting a universe of lusty, coupled-up haves and downcast, excluded have-nots, all viewed Rear Window -style through rectangular openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside. The director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates, followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in mendacity," Barker goes on, "I'm quite happy to tell lies about my characters and even collude with their self-delusions if it enables me to communicate larger dramatic truths." In part due to smart publicity, which has bannered some of the bad reviews and commentary ("I have to tell you that this film upset me so much that I really don't want to have anything to do with it"--a New York publicist), it threatens to become a cause célèbre --and to be coming soon to a theater near you. Unmade Beds isn't just bad--it's obnoxiously, noxiously bad, a freak show for the empathetically challenged. The outrage it has prompted isn't the Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths." The larger dramatic truth is that Michael has lots of trouble getting dates and is very bitter about it. Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however, Barker is careful to include a homophobic monologue in which Michael complains about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males. Michael turns out to be the film's most sympathetic subject--by a wide margin. At least he's not Mikey, a paunchy 54-year-old who writes but can't sell screenplays and who always flees blind dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts." He also reminisces about that 24 hour period in the '70s when he managed to sleep with three different beautiful women, whose pictures he shows off. He comes off as a pathetic little loser--a mutt. Aimee, on the other hand, is a pathetic big loser, weighing in at 225 pounds.
 The audience never gets to see the children interact within the context that motivates their father to uproot their lives
 The female characters are reduced to naive, sex-obsessed girls, when they are much more complex in reality  The director too obviously uses the film as an outlet for resolving her own childhood devastations  It is difficult for the audience to make sense of the director's absurd juxtapositions  The audience never gets to see the children interact within the context that motivates their father to uproot their lives