FILIPINO ROYALE

Paper Dolls

Transvestite Filipinos sing and dance in Tel Aviv! Fifty years ago that would’ve fit the posters for low-level cheese from the Ed Wood school of crap. Now that we’ve moved past such unabashedly exploitative times (wink wink), it isn’t hard to see how Paper Dolls could garner a respectful following. Even today, however, it poses a tough task for marketers: Tomer Heymann’s documentary doesn’t feature worshipful character sketches (a la Spellbound) or political grandstanding (a la Michael Moore’s oeuvre), but it has a little bit of both. The result is sad, funny and often enraging—all those great things—but also frequently uneven.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...