BS HIGH (A-minus) - Netflix set the modern standard for outrage documentaries five years ago with "Fyre," about a sham music festival, and HBO jumps into the fray with this profile of a scam artist who fielded a motley high school football team in Ohio that got exposed big time on ESPN. "BS High" is another product of the Trump era.
The "star" of the film is Roy Johnson, who doesn't even try to hide the fact that he spews bullshit for a living. He is a narcissist who revels in the the role at the center of a movie, even if it tears to shreds any hint of credibility he might have ever possessed. He is downright giddy being a sociopath.
Directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe produce a slick, lively tick-tock of the incredible story of Bishop Sycamore, a school in name only, where Johnson recruited 19- and 20-year-olds, preying on their gap-year desire to make it to a Division I football school. Free and Roe let Johnson bob and weave in the hot seat, but they never let him off the hook.
They bring on entertaining talking heads -- an investigator for the high school association; a journalist who chronicled the catastrophe; and Bomani Jones, a plain-spoken TV sports guy who serves as the conscience of the film. The filmmakers also assemble the key players who got hoodwinked by Johnson; each one is thoughtful and sincere in revealing the scars that this saga caused them.
Bishop Sycamore is famous for ending up on national TV playing the biggest powerhouse in the country (IMG Academy from Florida, which would eventually get bought up by a billion-dollar equity firm) -- despite having little preparation or even enough helmets to go around. Turns out that Johnson was a con artist who didn't pay his bills, even if it meant his students would get evicted from the hotels they were housed in. BS got crushed on national TV, sending social-media critics into an instant feeding frenzy, and embarrassing the young men as the program crumbled and Johnson was exposed as a charlatan.
Free and Roe wring juicy quotes from their commentators, and their fascinating story zips along in 95 minutes, some of it so ludicrous that it is laugh-out-loud funny. But it's also heart-wrenching at times -- these are young men from rough backgrounds who got taken for a ride -- and it has some deep thoughts to offer about capitalism's football-industrial complex. It is highly entertaining but also wise and penetrating.
THE SKYJACKER'S TALE (2017) (B-minus) - This archeological dig into another scam artist -- a criminal from 1970s Virgin Islands who escaped a life sentence by hijacking a plane to Cuba in the '80s -- is a low-budget affair that lacks focus and drowns in cheap re-enactments. There is a great movie to be made about Ishmael Muslim Ali, but this one is not it.
Ali (born Ishmael LaBeet) was a self-styled anti-colonialist revolutionary who was convicted of leading a gang of gunmen that killed seven people at a country club in St. Croix, a place then dominated by Hess Oil. Twelve years later, while being flown from the mainland United States back to the islands for a habeas hearing, he emerged from the plane's bathroom with a gun and diverted the plane to Cuba, where he walked away a free man.
The best scenes involve interviews with the elderly Ali, who apparently is a family man who occasionally parties like a pimp. Filmmaker Jamie Kastner tracks down some interesting characters, including a local detective who has a few revelations to share decades later. The best quote comes from a waitress who survived the traumatic event; describing the Virgin Islands in the early '70s, she says, "It was nice. Until the massacre happened."
But endless re-enactments -- of the siege on the country club and the hijacking, in particular -- are awkwardly staged and distracting. (Kastner pulled similar antics in "The Secret Disco Revolution" a decade ago.) Either make a documentary or a drama. Pick a lane. This hybrid just doesn't come together in the end.
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