The Bang Bang Club (2010)

An Apartheid-era film based on true events, part newsroom and part war-torn nation—how could Steven Silver’s “The Bang Bang Club” go wrong?

Somehow, and sadly, it does.

Allegedly, “The Bang Bang Club” is a story based on the memoir by photographer Greg Marinovich about four South African photojournalists who braved the violent township streets during Apartheid. The men became increasingly close-knit as civil war and governmental corruption unraveled before them and damaged their collective psyche. They also became increasingly famous when, much to the South African government’s chagrin, their photos hit front pages of publications around the globe. The South African publication Living gave them their name, referring to the sound of gunshots in the areas the men photographed.

These men’s lives were made for the silver screen, and deservedly so. Their experiences on the forefront of violence, capturing moments that changed history, made them instant stars with stories perfect for public consumption. A documentary entitled “The Life of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club,” based on the tragic suicide of one member, was even nominated for an Academy Award. The film focused on the real life of an honorable but troubled man and found success.

“The Bang Bang Club,” however, has received a heinous Hollywood makeover. The film opens with a radio interview of Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who seems like he will be the character in focus, as in the documentary. Those expectations are soon thwarted, though, when the film inexplicably and quickly shifts its perspective to that of the newcomer photographer Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe). He faces the hazing process essential to any form of male camaraderie as he bonds with his fellow photographers. And with time, he begins to show them up with his work.

Phillippe gives “The Bang Bang Club” instant and underwhelming starpower which it could easily do without. His shoddy South African accent lends nothing to the credibility of his character, and he holds a camera as awkwardly as if he has never seen one in his life. In scenes of utmost violence, like when he captures a Pulitzer Prizewinning shot of one man stabbing another in the head, Phillippe clutches his camera and shoots frenetically—the camera looks like a menace rather than a comfortable appendage of his. While “The Bang Bang Club” sets Phillippe up to be its hero, then, his lackluster presence fails to meet that goal.

Worse than Phillippe and even more unnecessary to the film is Malin Ackerman as Robin, Greg’s love interest. Robin follows Greg like a lost and doting puppy, completely devoid of an independent or interesting screen presence. While she meets Greg because she works as a photo editor at the newspaper he works for, her sole purpose in the film is adding sex appeal. She and Greg first consummate their “love” in a clichéd secret office sex scene that surprises the audience no more than it does the fellow Bang Bang Club members. That is to say—the climax is, in a nutshell, anticlimactic.

The same motif of casual, irrelevant, unmotivated sex continues throughout the film, and not just between Greg and Robin. Kevin is made out to be the rockstar of the group, binging on drugs and alcohol, unsatisfied by the adrenaline of photography. He kisses women in bars that approach him like fan girls, receives oral sex while smoking marijuana during a part-time job as a radio deejay, and has the wandering eye of any typical Hollywood bad boy. He simply lacks the depth that would make his character an anomaly.

One of the photographers, Ken (Frank Rautenbach) is married, so Silver evidently felt it necessary to include a scene of him and his wife half-naked in bed, too. While the scene seems like an attempt to create a tender moment between the two that sets the audience up to be sympathetic heartbroken when Ken later dies, it achieves little to that effect. Since the film focuses on Marinovich, I found Ken’s character too underdeveloped to have much of a stake in.

As the men of the Bang Bang Club spend almost as much time banging women and high-fiving each other in bars as they do in their fields of expertise, the film wanders to a place it should never have gone. It loses its integrity as a recreation of true events. It becomes an exploitation of the themes that are known to sell films: violence, sex, and male camaraderie.

Indeed, “The Bang Bang Club” could have been something great. It could have used Greg Marinovich’s memoir to its fullest benefit by focusing on the real and uninhibited version of the story that earned the Bang Bang Club its accolades in the first place. Instead, it let the big hand of Hollywood take its toll. It betrayed itself.

The Bang Bang Club (2010): Directed by Steven Silver; written by Steven Silver; produced by Foundry Films, The Harold Greenberg Fund, Instinctive Film, and Out of Africa Entertainment; director of photography, Miroslaw Baszak; edited by Ronald Sanders and Tad Seaborn; music by Phillip Miller; run time 120 minutes

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

No one seems to know exactly what to call “Exit through the Gift Shop.” The film, attributed to the trickster and graffiti artist Banksy, might be a documentary. It might be an elaborate hoax. It might be a strange and fanciful combination of the two.

But regardless of label, “Exit through the Gift Shop” plays with you—your perceptions, your opinions of the people in the film, and your expectations of what will come from them. The documentary begins as an endearing character study of a modest and quirky man, but as the man’s character morphs, so do the overall feel and the believability of the film.

Thierry Guetta, a mustachioed French émigré to Los Angeles, ran an upscale clothing boutique as a profession. Documentation, though, encompassed a greater deal of his time and attention, as he filmed everything around him. Tragedy in his childhood led him to realize that the most precious and ephemeral moments in life would not last unless he kept note of them in some way, so he filmed every moment he could.

When Guetta filmed his cousin one day, the French graffiti artist Space Invader, his inspiration and the focus of his lens traveled to new lengths. Guetta honed his obsession on the worldwide and highly secretive street art movement, and using his connection to Space Invader, found trust from the artists of the Los Angeles area. While Guetta simply enjoyed the thrill of following these artists, he told them he planned to make a documentary of his own in order to let his obsession come to full fruition. The group of artists included Shepard Fairey, of iconic Obama “Change” poster fame, who connected Guetta with the main figure of his obsession, Banksy.

Shot in large by Guetta with a digital handheld camera, the first half of “Exit through the Gift Shop” has an amateur aesthetic. Still, it is pleasing to watch, and in a way it adds some authenticity and a great deal of charm to Guetta’s accidental journey from behind to before the camera. Rhys Ifans’ narration also invigorates the story, as his deep-voiced British accent complements Guetta’s eccentric Franglish and Banksy’s muzzled disguise commentary.

The anonymous and enigmatic street artist known publicly as Banksy affects “Exit through the Gift Shop” with the greatest presence nonetheless. Banksy hails from Britain, but his works circle the globe. They often symbolize themes of political controversy and overconsumption, and whether ironic or absurd, they provoke thought. For these reasons, Guetta aimed highest in the street art industry; he would not consider his work satisfied unless it featured Banksy at work.

As a result of a few fortuitous events, Banksy and Guetta came in contact. Guetta follows Banksy from behind during the film, never revealing his face, but crosscutting the man of mystery behind the scenes with photo montages of his brilliant works. In one part of “Exit through the Gift Shop,” Guetta shows Banksy in his studio preparing a dead telephone booth—crushed and bleeding under a pickaxe—which he later reveals in a London street. Still, “Exit through the Gift Shop” revolves more around Guetta, especially when Banksy passes the torch to him.

Previously a shadow and eventually a sidekick, Guetta goes under Banksy’s tutelage in his final stage of the film. Banksy tells Guetta it’s his turn to become an artist, and he does to an unexpected extent. Seemingly an overnight sensation, Mr. Brainwash, the Thierry Guetta alter-ego, explodes. He hinges a massive PR campaign, hires a team of artists, and launches an expansive Los Angeles art show filled with hundreds of pieces his team has created using his pop-artistic ideas. The formerly shy and humble cameraman transforms before the audience into a cocky, dictatorial, cigarette-wielding artiste extraordinaire.

After it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, “Exit trough the Gift Shop” received a blend of praise and confused philosophizing from critics and audiences alike. The film begs such a variety of questions, and possesses a fascinating uniqueness of form. The professionalism of the second half, which focuses on the new Guetta, opposes its previous part so much that it seems it must be fabricated. Who is Mr. Brainwash, and how could he possibly have succeeded so quickly? How could he have changed so much? Is what he makes legitimate art, or has he fooled all the thousands of people who paid to see his work? Has he fooled us too?

Even Guetta’s Mr. Brainwash persona seems all too apropos. With Banksy behind the wheel of this film, whose cerebral works of art have provoked such excessive debate, it would come as no surprise to find him the true artist of the Guetta experiment too. The documentary as a whole could be a massive, ironic play on the audience’s gullibility for all we know.

As much as Banksy and his fellow street artists express regret in encouraging Guetta to pursue a form of art which they see as a pale imitation of their own, they appear as responsible for “Exit through the Gift Shop” as Guetta. Banksy remarks, “I guess the joke’s on us,” but we cannot tell what collective group Banksy refers to. As viewers of “Exit through the Gift Shop,” we might be the ones truly satirized and duped.

Edited by Tom Fulford and Chris King; starring Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Thierry Guetta and Invader; produced by Holly Cushing, Jaimie D’Cruz and James Gay-Rees; music by Geoff Barrow and Roni Size; released by Paranoid Pictures; running time 87 minutes

A Screaming Man (2010)

“A Screaming Man,” Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Cannes Jury Prize winner, does some things right, but the remainder of the film lags behind.

Set in Chad and made by a Chadian director, “A Screaming Man” is an accomplishment within itself. Films of the nation had never before found a spot in Cannes’ official competition, so a victory in the top three marked a historic moment for the history of Chadian cinema. Haroun brings understated dignity to the aesthetic of his homeland, juxtaposing grainy shots of barren desert locales and simple but carefully staged river scenes. He creates some artful and neorealistic moments in the film, and he makes it look less modest than the $2 million budget with which it was executed.

Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming champion, has spent most of his adulthood at a hotel as Chad’s first pool attendant, a profession to which he has also introduced his son Abdel (Diouc Koma). The film opens with a shot of the two alone in the pool, swimming and playing in careless euphoria. The sense of peace fades when the water does, though, to reveal tensions between the two that arise when news of job cuts within the hotel threatens Adam’s future. His desperation to save his fate in the only world he knows and the only world in which he finds solace lead him to take desperate measures that force his son out of his way. These measures, in turn, begin to destroy the structure of Adam’s family and his life as a corrupt and war-torn government simultaneously decays Chadian society.

The moments shared between Adam and his family outweigh other parts of the film in visual and thematic terms. A collection of close-ups in a scene of Adam and his wife feeding each other watermelon, messy but sensual, focuses on the deep-set love between husband and wife. Their fingers tear out the pulp of the melon, and Haroun closes in on those fingers leading to the couple’s mouths. Haroun injects some of his most thorough editing into this sequence of shots, whose duration runs shorter than the majority of those throughout the film. His choice of edits adds an artful flair to a simple moment.

In a scene of greater suspense, Abdel and Adam ride a motorcycle as a shot using a telephoto lens follows them into the distance of the dark and the slow-fading light of the motorcycle’s front. Haroun parallels this fade with the increasing dimness of the relationship between the two and the questionable fate of both in their respective involuntary life changes. Later, Abdel’s girlfriend Djeneba (Djénéba Koné), who has become Adam’s surrogate daughter in Abdel’s absence, sings a mellifluous dirge as she lies alone in bed. Her solitude and sorrow run through the screen, especially when the camera shows Adam listening in from the next room.

With the exception of those special moments, however, “A Screaming Man” is a movie that centers on water but runs far too dry. Haroun exploits silence to a degree so high that I found it hard not to nap rather than watch “A Screaming Man.” The film fills the silent void in some night scenes with the sound of crickets, but the insects seem induced by the bore and lack of emotional attachment that the film provokes in the audience. Perhaps that explains the power of Djeneba’s song; it diverges from the otherwise distanced tone of the film, but not in a way that redeems it.

The moments of dialogue between Adam and his family widen the gap between the artful and meaningless components of “A Screaming Man.” When the family sits at dinner and Adam and Abdel refuse to acknowledge one another after a fight at work, Adam’s wife becomes frustrated. Her words suggest that she can’t stand or comprehend the silence, but her monotonous tone does not. As a foil to Adam, his wife adds no emotion to the oversimplified equation of the family.

Adam, whom everyone around him calls Champion, possesses a nickname that ironically contrasts his pathetic persona. The film implies that Adam’s worry motivates a slew of irrational and betraying decisions, but Youssouf Djaoro does not convey this emotion with strength. He appears lost and distracted rather than guilt- and regret-ridden, and his tacit patience often comes off as lazy acting on Djaoro’s part. He rarely shows those promising flourishes that would have made for a well-rounded and interesting character.

Haroun’s directing emphasizes this conflict, too. A shot of Adam sitting quietly at his new job and struggling not to fall asleep zooms in at snail speed. The shot would have lasting power were it not for its frustrating and drawn out length, which instead left me feeling Adam’s pain in the sense that I also couldn’t stay awake. The shot, albeit slow, creates a sense of immediacy in generating the desire just to see it end. Occasions like this one permeate the film, emphasizing the least intriguing parts of Adam’s days instead of the value of what good remains in his life, although the latter, I feel, is what Haroun intended.

While “A Screaming Man” glorifies the Chadian landscape and proves an honorable accomplishment on Haroun’s behalf, it has little redeeming value otherwise. The prettiest scenes do not save the film, as the empty silence and mediocre performances that also consume it are too big of a distraction. “A Screaming Man,” simply put, isn’t loud enough.

Directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun; written by Mahamat Saleh Haroun; starring Youssouf Djaoro; director of photography, Laurent Brunet; edited by Marie-Hélène Dozo; produced by Florence Stern; released by Pili Films; running time 92 minutes