Speaking of inept, I believe it was Ace who recently mentioned the documentary Kurt and Courtney, the Nick Broomfield piece purporting to shed new light on the 1994 suicide of Nirvana guitarist/songwriter Kurt Cobain.
This movie is one of the more ham-fisted attempts to make something out of nothing that I've ever seen. Broomfield basically goes up to Seattle, tracks down every lowlife "friend" Cobain and Love allowed to hang out with them, and attempts to patch a conspiracy theory together, that Love, faced with an impending divorce from Cobain, had him murdered. Each one of these hangers-on is more pathetic than the last, trying to cash in on whatever few seconds of fame this thing might give them.
What truly makes Kurt and Courtney worth watching is its accidental camp value. Broomfield, who looks a bit like a younger, slimmer Oliver Stone, intersperses his groupie clips with scenes of him coping with the problem of his financial backers pulling out from under him. Somehow Love has enough juice to cow MTV, who in turn have enough juice to cow the charitable donors. Of course. Never mind that MTV, with its non-stop fucking Road Rules/Real World marathons, is little more than a 24-hour soap opera channel. Were there a real story of Love bumping off Cobain, MTV would be on it like stink on shit.
Some real characters -- Aside from Love's father, former Grateful Dead manager Hank Harrison, and a sleaze-rock speed freak called "El Duce", there is a PI in LA whom Love had hired to track down Cobain when he left a rehab center to return to Seattle -- and ultimately blow his head off. Interview scenes with the PI, Tom Grant, are nothing short of hilarious, done in a Ramada Inn, and a McDonald's parking lot.
Broomfield's attempts to be a low-rent Michael Moore, "confronting" people, are also hilarious in their sheer ineptitude. At first you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that his fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants style is an homage to the grunge ethic Cobain lived and died by. But by the end, it's apparent that Broomfield had no fucking idea what he was doing, or even what he was looking for in the first place.
In the end, Broomfield discards Grant's murder theory, and reaches a much more likely conclusion: Cobain, between heavy drug use, lifelong emotional instability, imminent marriage break-up, and an inability to cope with the superficial nature of his massive success, was basically driven to suicide by a shrewish, calculating, starfucking wife. Both people were so massively dysfunctional, it's actually a surprise that one of them didn't just murder/suicide both of them.
The final scene of the movie is intended to show great irony -- Love, in accepting a freedom of speech award from the ACLU (mainly a photo-op for her work in People vs. Larry Flynt) has used her star power to intimidate journalists who focus on her seedy past, in an attempt to gloss it over. It's a very valid point, but by that time, it's just not enough. Remarkably bad editing and a chronic inability to decide what the fuck he's looking for doom Broomfield's little project.
However, I recommend this movie anyway, just for the scene in which Broomfield is driven out to the Riverside County haunt of El Duce -- by none other than Divine Brown's pimp. You simply could not make up the set of sorry-ass losers which populate this film. There's enough camp value here for several John Waters movies -- and it's largely unintentional.
Three planets out of five. Joe Bob says check it out.
