Parky at the Pictures (DVD 17/11/2016)

While trawling the Internet for a suitably quirky story, Auckland television personality David Farrier came across clips for what was branded Competitive Endurance Tickling. While researching the subject, however, he received threatening and homophobic emails from the American company promoting this niche sport. When his editor buddy Dylan Reeve does a little delving, he discovers that Jane O'Brien Media has reserved dozens of tickling-related domain names. But this snooping brings the threat of a law suit from high-powered New York attorney Romeo Salta, as well as a personal visit from three wise men from Jane O'Brien named Mirko, Adam and Kevin.

The latter cautions Farrier and Reeve to back off. But they do exactly the opposite and fly to the United States to interview TJ Gretzner, a promising American footballer who describes how he signed up to the Competitive Endurance Tickling to make some quick cash for his family. He filmed a few videos and thought no more of it. But, then, the clips began appearing all over the Internet and polite requests to have them taken down prompted a torrent of a threatening abuse from one Debbie J. Kuhn, who even wrote to TJ's coaches and prospective employers to denounce him as a gay child-molesting drug fiend.

Shocked by the testimony, Farrier and Reeve high-tailed to Orlando, Florida to watch Richard Ivey record some consensual content for his tickling website, My Friends' Feet. But, while he enthuses about the profits he makes, the Kiwis head to Los Angeles to hook up with Dave Starr, who used to recruit `athletes' for a tickling site run by Terri DiSisto (aka Terri Tickle). He reveals that Terri started sending abusive messages to himself and his mother Barbara after he ceased working for her and he provides Farrier with copies that convince him that Terri Tickle and Jane O'Brien are one and the same.

Having chatted with Alden, a former participant who claims that tickling videos pop up everywhere with the potential to ruin lives, Farrier and Reeve contact journalists Deborah Scoblionkov and Hal Karp, who reveal the lengths to which Terri/Jane were/are prepared to go in order to spam and shame those who had the temerity to disassociate themselves from the tickling demiworld. Karp also produces a zip file that puts the co-directors on the track of a disgraced high school principal whose Wall Street lawyer father had tried to use his influence when he was charged with computer fraud and abuse.

Rather than following their suspect to his luxury apartment in Garden City, Long Island, Farrier and Reeve meet tickling recruiter Jordan Schillaci in the recession-shattered city of Muskegon, Michigan. He explains that Jane O'Brien Media has instructed him to prey on Mixed Martial Arts cage fighters needing a little financial boost (although they preferred redheads and Asians) and admits that one of the kids he auditioned in a local hotel room was underage. But he is shocked when Farrier mentions the name of his paymaster and, realising they now have their man bang to rights, the pair ignore their nervous producer to stake him out until they manage to force him into speaking on camera during an excursion to a snowbound coffee shop.

Having found more incriminating evidence in private documents accidentally posted online, Farrier shows Salta how his good name has been co-opted in a concerted campaign of cyberbullying. He also speaks on the phone to the stepmother of his quarry, who reveals that he was cosseted by his mother and often bullied as a child. She is disappointed to learn that he has started his nonsense again and confirms that he has been using money inherited from his parents to fund his addiction for tickling videos.

As captions disclose that Competitive Endurance Tickling is still in full swing (with `tickle cells' being active in Britain, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Canada and Australia), one is left to ponder the staggering number of similar tales that are undoubtedly lurking in the darkest recesses of the worldwide web. Considering how close they come to getting out of their depth after realising the magnitude of the story, Farrier and Reeve deserve considerable credit for persisting and taking such enormous risks. But their claims have been contested by tickling film producer Kevin Clarke (one of the trio to fly to Auckland and who is also highly visible at an LA film studio) and by a man named Louis Peluso, who has informed the NBC Nightline programme that he is the real owner of Jane O'Brien Media.

With Schillaci also appearing to have recanted, it's feasible that the whole truth lies outside this film. The lawyers certainly don't seem to have finished with Farrier and Reeve and not even a supportive media groundswell will be much use to them if their opponents do decide to flex their monied muscles. As a consequence, it seems wisest to confine remarks to a recommendation to catch this fascinating, but inconclusive documentary if you possibly can and to an exhortation to somebody with clout in Hollywood to conduct a wider-ranging study of the subject of online anonymity and the kind of hate and harassment campaigns that the major communication conglommerates getting fat on social media sites should have addressed a long time ago.

There have been several documentaries about museums and art galleries over the past few years, but not even institutional maestro Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery (2014) could top Nicolas Philibert's observational masterpiece, La Ville Louvre (1990), when it came to capturing the behind the scenes atmosphere of a revered treasure house. Having lifted the lid on daily life at a major newspaper in Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011), Andrew Rossi obviously hoped he could repeat the trick in The First Monday in May. However, by dividing his attention between fashion curator Andrew Bolton's race to curate the 2015 exhibition, `China: Through the Looking Glass' and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's bid to snag celebrities for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's glitzy fund-raising gala, Rossi struggles to explore in sufficient depth the intriguing issues that each situation throws up. With its clashing cultural implications and ramifications, the subject is endlessly fascinating. But one suspects he would have needed a reality mini-series to do it justice.

Having made his mark at the Met with the record-breaking 2011 show, `Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty', the pressure is on Lancashire-born curator Andrew Bolton to repeat the trick with an exhibition charting the connection between China and Western fashion. Aware of the dangers of appearing patronisingly Orientalist, he asks Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-wai to serve as his artistic director. Bolton has his work cut out persuading Curator of Asian Art Maxwell K. Hearn that the enterprise has academic merit and will not be turning his galleries into a glorified catwalk for a bunch of haut couture enfant terribles. But he has the support of superior Harold Koda - who has become a familiar actuality figure, thanks to the likes of Lisa Immordino Vreeland's Diane Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011) and Albert Maysles's Iris (2014) - and the backing of such fashion mavens as Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier and the hugely controversial John Galliano.

While Bolton ponders ways of combining Ming and bling, Wintour (who also hails from the UK) sets about turning the Met's annual gala into gossip column gold while retaining the super-rich highbrow cachet that will ensure the museum's coffers remain full for another year. Forever hidden behind shades and clutching a coffee cup, Wintour drolly plays on the fearsome image that Meryl Streep honed in David Frankel's 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's bestseller, The Devil Wears Prada. However, Rossi rather clumsily equates Wintour with the `dragon lady' characters essayed by Anna May Wong in the silent era, although he is not alone in finding the avoidance of racial and cultural stereotype problematic.

Looking and sounding like a younger version of Alan Bennett (complete with half-mast trousers), Bolton is clearly a clever and ambitious man. He adopts an air of foppish diffidence that enables him to get his own way when the chips seem stacked against him and it's amusing to contrast his stealth with Wintour's more forceful methods, most notably when she stalks around the new Vogue offices with a face like thunder.

Yet, as preparations for both the exhibition and the jamboree continue, Wintour's assistant, Sylvana Ward Durrett, emerges as the most compelling character, as she juggles the seating plan to keep A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and Justin Bieber happy. She also has to negotiate over the phone with the representatives of Rihanna (who is performing at the bash), who seem to have no understanding of the concept of budget limitation. But, all the while that Rossi is lingering over such fripperies and minutiae, he is wasting time that could have been devoted to Wong Kar-wai and misgivings about the tonal balance of the show and gaffes like the desire to place one of Mao Zedong's tunic in a room full of Buddhist iconography.

Rossi also skates over an uncomfortable moment when a journalist quizzes Bolton and Wintour during a promotional trip to China about the aesthetic morality of the exhibition. But, when he sidelines Australian director Baz Luhrmann and affords John Galliano so much screen time without once addressing his infamous views on Hitler, one has to start wondering whether he or Condé Nast (the publishers of Vogue and producers of the documentary) are calling the shots that matter.

Ultimately, the two events come together relatively smoothly, thus, preventing Rossi from building up much suspense as the clock ticks down. He slips in a neat sequence of Bolton touring the galleries and making some superficial alterations, as the great and the good gather downstairs. But the stakes seemed higher as David Hoey puts the finishing touches to the Christmas windows in Matthew Miele's Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's (2013).

The chalk to this film's cheese is Paul Van Carter's The Guv'nor. As he is currently working on a dramatic feature entitled, My Name Is Lenny, this feels like something of a dress rehearsal, as Jamie McLean delves into the dark and disturbing past of his famous father, Lenny, who overcame a torrid childhood and the odd brush with the law to become a renowned bare-knuckle boxer, a feared bouncer, a bestselling author and a fondly remembered actor. In addition to serving as a handy research mission, this pugnacious profile also doubles as a therapeutic exercise for Jamie, who is keen to understand the temperament he has inherited from his two-fisted, tough as nails dad.

Born in Hoxton in 1949, Lenny McLean barely knew the father who had died when he was six years old. But he came to loathe stepfather Jim Irwin, a violent drunk who frequently broke bones during his savage assaults. However, when he lashed out at Lenny's younger brother, Raymond, he snitched on him to gangster great-uncle Jimmy Spinks, who taught Irwin such a severe lesson that he disappeared for two years. But siblings Boo and Kruger refuse to speak on camera and Jamie is left to speculate on the effect that this harsh upbringing might have had on his father.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lenny drifted into crime as a youth and spent time in borstal for carrying a knife. But he emerged with an enviable physique and soon began making a name for himself as an unlicensed boxer in the late 1970s after he got the better of the fabled Roy `Pretty Boy' Shaw in three bouts that have gone down in the folklore of the sport because Lenny knocked Shaw out of the ring in the first round of their second meeting. In all, Lenny reckoned to have triumphed in over 2000 bare-knuckle bouts and Van Carter makes solid use of the home-movie footage at his disposal to capture the raw ferocity of the action.

As nephew Martin Askew and old pal John Huntley recall, Lenny was devoted to his wife, Valerie, and his children, Jamie and Kelly. But they also acknowledge that he had a short fuse, especially when he was drunk. Touring the Hoxton pubs that Lenny used to frequent, Jamie stops at The Green Man and relates how Lenny got into an argument over a girl with buddy Jimmy Briggs and started biting into his throat when they took things outside. Luckily, surgeons revived Briggs on the operating table and he refused to press charges, but Lenny was suitably chastened to stay off the sauce for the rest of his life.

By this stage, he had become one of London's most respected bouncers and Huntley and Nick Theo reminisce about his unconventional, but highly effective methods. On one occasion, he was stabbed in the back on the leg and required emergency surgery. But, as Jamie and Askew keep pointing out, they bred them tough in the East End and that was how things were back in the day. In 1992, however, Lenny found himself on a murder charge after Gary Humphries died shortly after received a backhander at The Hippodrome on Leicester Square. Ultimately, he was cleared on manslaughter at the Old Bailey after a pathologist revealed that the fatal injuries had been sustained during a contretemps with the police after he had been ejected from the club. Yet, Lenny still did 18 months for breaking the dead man's jaw.

On being released, Lenny teamed with ghost writer Paul Gerrard on The Guv'nor, which topped the charts after becoming an unlikely publishing coup. Suddenly in demand on the chat show circuit, Lenny started acting and became an unlikely star after playing Barry the Baptist in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Director Guy Ritchie recalls how he cast Lenny, while Jason Flemyng does a passable impression while recollecting sharing a trailer during the shoot.

But Lenny was already dying of cancer and never got the chance to fulfil his acting potential. Following footage of the elaborate East End funeral, Jamie struggles with his emotions as he visits the spot where his parents are commemorated. He also reveals that Lenny had spent his life struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder and he wonders whether he is equally off his nut, as he has just been released from prison after an altercation. Indeed, towards the end of filming, Jamie has another run-in in a café and his bright blue eyes fix the lens, as he vows to get a grip.

These disclosures end the film on a poignant note, but this remains a fond memoir rather than a gritty analysis of Lenny McLean's life and times. Much time is wasted on Cockney clichés and platitudes, as both Jamie and Askew attempt to put a nostalgic gloss on a ruthless moral code and the grim social conditions that bequeathed it. Moreover, one is left with the distinct impression that much has been left unsaid about Lenny's criminous activities and his security tactics. But which self-respecting son is going to dish the dirt on his old dad, especially when he loved Christmas and his family, and when he comes across as such a loveable rogue in the archive footage?