WHAT TO WATCH: What Are Your Favorite Documentaries? Plus "Mr. Organ!"

Have you ever been friends with a narcissistic blowhard? I have been, when I was much younger, naive and susceptible to their charms. Only later did I realize that these so-called friends leeched the energy from every room they entered, dominated conversations with half-truths and lies to prop themselves up, and ensnared anybody within reach in their largely petty dramas. These friends lived for attention, and if you dared to cross them, the backlash could be fierce, especially if they were in your friends circle, which enabled them to turn everyone against you. 

Take this basic personality and multiply it to the nnth degree and you have Michael Organ, the subject of "Mr. Organ," a new and genuinely hair-raising documentary by David Farrier, whom you may be familiar with from his previous documentary, "Tickled," or his documentary series, "Dark Tourist." Yet nothing Farrier has done before quite prepared me for "Mr. Organ," which begins innocently enough when Farrier, who also works as a newspaper reporter, files a story about Organ's latest grift at a New Zealand antiques shop parking lot, where he boots the wheels on cars that park there at night and extorts their owners for hundreds of dollars to remove them. 

But as innocent and whimsical as this seems at the onset, there's an underlying dread to the proceedings. It comes into full bloom once you meet Organ, who'd previously served time for attempting to steal a yacht, and who's best described as a narcissistic sadist. Organ's fabrications are countless and easily disproven - including his claim that he's born of royalty - but that's not where the real danger lies. After we learn that Organ has all but destroyed the lives of people he'd previously befriended and exploited - one of whom was driven to suicide - "Mr. Organ" is off and running like a catastrophic roar. 

I don't think I've ever seen a documentary like this before, and not only with respect to its subject matter. Organ, as the movie progresses, truly gets under the skin of Farrier himself, whom he attempts to destroy psychologically and through the legal system.  At one point, Organ eerily reveals that he's procured the key to Farrier's home - ominously insinuating that one of Farrier's friends slipped it to him. Not for nothing is Farrier now living in an undisclosed and unlisted locale since this movie's completion. Yes, Organ is that dangerous and that vicious, a human leech who, so far, has escaped serious legal consequence. 

"Mr. Organ" opens in L.A. and NYC today, and I hope you Cinefile Pecker Peeps™ will give it a chance and see it in the theatre. Only if it does well in L.A. and NYC will it be released in more theatres nationwide, and to be blunt, we really must support exceptional, uncatagorizable documentaries like this, since otherwise - and I'm deadly serious - the only documentaries we'll be seeing in theatres from now on will be from the likes of Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Would the documentary work of Albert and David Mayles, for example, stand a chance in this current theatrical climate? Are they even being made anymore? This is why "Mr. Organ," I think, is so important, and not only because it's a fine documentary, but because it's the canary in the coal mine. 

What are your favorite "must see" documentaries? High on my list are "Paris Is Burning" and "Harlan County, USA," but that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Photo Credits: Madman Entertainment