Bucho Watched Some Movies

[Bucho]

I figured I’ll make a thread for if I see non-mainstream films I think you guys could be interested in because each one probably won’t generate a bunch of comments like Inception or Transformers III. This way it stays all nice and tight and I don’t clutter up Fanboy Fodder with my nonsensical ramblings.

The International Film Festival has hit Auckland and me and the missus went to Exit Through The Gift Shop, which is a fun and entertaining look at street art through the eyes of a fun and entertaining French dude called Thierry Guetta with a compulsion to make videos of everything. He found out his cousin was Invader (a guy who makes little tile mosaics of Space Invaders and glues them in random places around the city) and began filming him, then through Invader made various other contacts in the street art world including Shepard Fairey, and eventually notorious and secretive Brit artist Banksy.

Banksy and Thierry became friends and for the first time Banksy allowed himself to be filmed making his art, with the proviso that to maintain his anonymity he only be filmed from behind, and only his hands. Eventually though, Banksy realised Thierry isn’t a documentary maker, just a fun and entertaining guy with a compulsion to film things, so Banksy took Thierry’s hundreds and hundreds of tapes and started to make a film himself, eventually deciding that Thierry was more interesting than himself, and so the film is eventually about Thierry.

Confusing? It’s not when you watch it. Our packed theatre was laughing our asses off.

The second festival film we got to was A Prophet, the much hyped and celebrated French prison film. It starts out tough. 19 year-old Malik finds himself locked up for 6 years and alone, with no contacts or protection inside. It’s not long before he finds himself in a no win situation – take out another inmate at the orders of a gang of Corsican prisoners or be killed himself. The murder scene itself is one of the most viscerally portrayed hits I’ve ever seen, given even more grunt by wince-inducing earlier, bloody scenes where he practises hiding a double edged razor blade IN HIS MOUTH! And when the killing is carried out it isn’t clean or easy, it’s clumsy and messy and feels horribly real.

But after this dark-as-all-hell start the film gradually shifts tone to become more of a birth-of-a-crime-kingpin Godfather type fable as we see Malik grow from what amounts to no more than a disrespected errand boy of the Corsican gang to a powerful gangster in his own right with multiple interests outside the walls of the prison. There’s a scene where, during one of his leave days for good behaviour, Malik kills again, taking out multiple bodyguards from a rival Italian gang in a shootout that takes place almost entirely in the interior of an armoured SUV. In contrast to the cold brutal realism of his first kill, this scene is played for pure cinematic poetry.

His effectiveness as a killer is offset by the tenderness with which he deals with his best friend’s young son, his Godson. Prison hardens his exterior, educates him in the ways of the criminal world and teaches him skills he uses to survive and thrive in it, but it doesn’t strip his humanity from him. If you don’t have a problem with subtitles I recommend this one big time. Many critics and fans are already hailing it as a classic of the crime genre. I don’t know about that yet, I just know it’s a really good film that I definitely want to see again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKxFbtLBuLg

- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.

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