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The challenge Baz Luhrmann had in adapting The Great Gatsby to film was similar to what Walter Salles faced with On the Road: how to stay loyal to the era depicted, while still retaining the rawness of the original text. Salles did a great job of capturing the ambience of 1950s America, but it could be argued that his Dean and Sal didn’t have enough zeal – enough of that desire to live, live, live.

The old saying is that a good book makes a bad film, while a paperback potboiler like The Godfather makes a great film. But this wisdom is derived from the idea that a good book is made by the writing, and if it’s adapted into whatever, its magic is lost. As just about every (film) critique has already noted – and they’re right, if repetitive – most of what makes The Great Gatsby great is Fitzgerald’s prose. We allow the classics to get away with so much because we love the characters. But when older stories are revived for film, the issue of the past and present must be rectified. But that lack was not a function of anything missing in the actors or the general direction as much as it is a result of the passage of time, the encasing of a book in the precious container of "classic" status.

When adapting Gatsby to the big screen, the main questions Baz Luhrmann faced were: What will work? And, like Romeo and Juliet before, How do I make this older material live in a new medium for a modern audience? And somehow Luhrmann managed to be loyal to both the original text and to his contemporary audience. The jazz music of the 20s was raw and dangerous, but if Luhrmann had used that music today, it would have been a museum piece – irrelevant to mainstream and high culture alike, because they would’ve already known what’s coming. There have been objections to his use of 3D, but frankly it’s a nonissue. It works, and is neither distracting nor game changing. You just deal with it because you want to. It’s fun to watch. 

The critics who’ve ravaged the film for not being loyal to the book are hypocrites. These people make their living doing readings and critiques of texts in order to generate theories of varying levels of competency, or simply to make a living. Luhrmann’s film is his reading and adaptation of a text – his critique, if you will. Would anyone object to a production of Hamlet in outer space? Not as much as they object to the Gatsby adaptation, apparently. Maybe that’s because Gatsby is so much about a time and a place, while Shakespeare, in my mind, is more about universal ideas, ideals and feelings. Luhrmann needed to breathe life into the ephemera and aura of the 20s and that’s just what he succeeded at.

A film, of course, relies on an immediate tension in a fundamentally different way than a book. And barring the most cinematic of texts, films developed from literary sources must run along a tighter thread. Once Gatsby’s mission of wooing Daisy back is accomplished, some of the wind is taken out of the story. We don’t really care about their relationship as much as we care about Gatsby’s overblown efforts to rise in social and economic status to get her back. And this is a universal and rarely accomplished goal that is still relevant today, made even more so by the director’s use of modern window dressing. Gatsby’s desire is revealed to be that of a 16-year-old boy: not only does he want to win Daisy, he wants to control her affections. It reminds me of my high school relationships, where I tortured girlfriends for getting fingered by other boys when they were freshmen. Just move on, dude. We are obsessed by his obsession but aren’t significantly moved by his accomplishment of the goal.

Also, one downside of Nick's being so obsessed with Gatsby that he has to resort to therapeutic writing about their friendship is that it in essence makes their friendship that much greater. How long did they actually know each other? They weren’t that close were they? And what makes Gatsby’s greatness so appealing to Nick? That he did a lot of shady deals and made a lot of money? That he was in love with a woman? That he said “old sport” all the time and was generally charming? Was he in love with Gatsby? Fitzgerald had many reasons for being obsessed with Gatsby-like characters in his personal life (Monroe Stahr also merges business and romantic obsession in The Love of the Last Tycoon), particularly because Fitzgerald was unable to marry Zelda until he became a literary success. But Nick, outside of the action, doesn’t have personal stakes in the story, and while placing him in an institution raises his stakes, it makes his obsession with Gatsby even more convoluted. But maybe Luhrmann’s reasoning is that this sort of confusion is interesting, and who could fault him for that. Or maybe he just loved Gatsby and if they could have just gone on living side by side, just as Toby and Leo did in real life, all would have been fine. That actually sounds like a good movie, too. But I guess it’s been made – it’s a show called Entourage.

In the end, Luhrmann made it work, and that’s all that matters. The movie held together. We watched the story, we felt things, we were transported and we were engaged.

More James Franco from VICE:

Behind the Debauchery

Noisey gave some lucky fans the opportunity of a lifetime - to shoot Tyler, the Creator and his friends with a load of paintballs, when he came over to the UK with Jasper and Taco in tow. Here's how the battle went down.

Watch the video on Noisey

Earlier this week, a video called "Dirty Girls" went viral on YouTube – and not for the reasons you'd expect, given the title. The documentary video, originally shot in 1996 by filmmaker (and then high school senior) Michael Lucid, was released in 2000 and chronicles a group of outcasts, refered to by their tormentors as the "Dirty Girls," who pride themselves on riot grrrl ethos, being different, and just not giving a fuck. The video focuses on the two leaders of the Dirty Girls, sisters Amber and Harper, who speak clearly and eloquently (as eloquently as an eighth grader can be expected to) about their convictions, while girls in sunglasses and jean jackets talk smack about them behind their backs. Not only is the documentary a perfect time capsule for people who went to high school in the 90s, it also perfectly captures two strong, independent young people speaking their minds and doing their own thing. 

When I first watched "Dirty Girls," I loved it. I sent it around to everyone in the VICE offices, and they loved it, too. We all decided that we really needed to track down the original Dirty Girls and see what they were up to today. It proved to be not that difficult a task. Harper lives in New York City and was gracious enough to visit our offices, where I chatted with her and her sister, Amber, who joined us via Skype.

VICE: When is the first time that you guys saw the video?
Harper: Pretty much right after it was made when we were still in high school. Around 2000, he did a screening of it at a gay and lesbian film festival in LA. He had taken it down from an hour to 20 minutes, so that was the first time we saw this short, really well-put-together documentary. We haven’t seen it since then... so 12,13 years or so.

How did you find out that it was taking off online like it has?
Harper: A close friend of mine had it forwarded from somebody from high school. Someone forwarded it me and said, “I’m blown away. Oh my god, I love you girls. You’re such strong little ones. So confident. I’m so impressed.” And at that point, there were 2000 views. That was the first day. And then it just went from there, and more and more people contacted us.

Amber: I only really just watched it again fully yesterday. I felt like I remembered it really well 13 years ago. I had a certain amount of emotions about it at that time and was sure that I would feel the same now. But when I watched it yesterday, it was totally different. It’s amazing to me, because I think it’s a reflection on us and where we’re from. I’m the same person who watched it 12 years ago, and I’m also so different in how I’ve developed and what I think now. It was a completely different perspective. It was the miracle of life. I love it. It’s fascinating.

How do you feel when you watch the video now? Are you proud? Embarrassed?
Harper: I’m excited about it. I think it’s great. I remember in the moment feeling like we were given a voice that we didn’t have without that video being shown to the rest of the school. So I felt proud of the commentary then, and I do now too. I’m also just so blown away by the positive reactions from everybody. Just looking at the YouTube comments where everyone is so inspired, impressed by us. That just makes me feel so happy. I think back then we were dedicated to giving people voices that maybe didn’t have them. And I think both of us would agree that neither of us have any hard feelings toward any of those people, the older students making comments about it.

Amber: The first time it came out, I was like, “Whatever. We’re different from most of the other kids, so I can see why he’d have an interest.” But being in our 20s, watching 13 years ago, I was always sort of like, “This is awesome. We did something. Not just sitting around being kids, but making a statement.” So I’m proud of that, but I did have that little twinge of, Why didn’t I speak up more? Now watching it, I just think it’s the most perfect high school period piece of history. You couldn’t have written it better. Everyone had issues. The kids that were doing things, the opinions, the bullying, the fancy kids, the dirty kids. All of it is so perfect. It’s so high school. I just think it’s the most perfect high school period piece of history. When I look back right now on 17 or 18 year olds, I think that they’re so young, like, “God, what does anybody know?” That’s what genius about it, though. You’re at a time in your life where this is the first time where you are testing the boundaries, you’re trying to find your independence from the institutions around you. We’re really lucky we have this video, because it’s like we get to go back in time, and it’s a very rare experience. 

After that year, I left that high school because I wanted to go to an art high school, because I was like, “This is a lie. This is supposed to be a liberal arts high school, and here we are being liberal, and it’s not flying.” So I transferred to an arts high school and was there for a year. And there, I didn’t know anybody. I definitely wasn’t a Dirty Girl anymore. I didn’t have a label, I wasn’t a certain type of person. I think I started listening to slightly different music. Just the natural progression. I wasn’t into high school at all, so I got my GED and went to college early. So after 10th grade, I just went to community college. I just wanted to be around a more mature crowd.

Harper: I remember at a certain point going to the riot grrrl conventions and attaching myself to the basic beliefs behind women in society, and everything I mentioned in the video. I also felt I was surrounded by a lot of angry people. For me, that didn’t settle. When I started to feel that, I started to step away from it. I wanted more options in the world, and I wanted more positive energy.

^{The Dirty Girls today.}

What do people who know you say when they see the video? Like your friends or your parents?
Amber: They really see my personality in there. Almost everybody says, “Oh, that’s so you. That’s your personality!”

Harper: People are loving it. They say they are so impressed by us specifically that we were able to be so confident and not give a shit what people were saying about us, that we were dropping knowledge at 13 years old. From friends and family, people are proud of us. “We loved you now, we loved you then.”

Amber: You do go, “Wow, like, that’s sort of an intense piece of information to have blasted out there, especially if you’re  a professional, which we both are today. Some of the family assets are held with an investment firm, so I work very closely with the vice president of that firm. She’s from this sort of Las Vegas Mafia family—wears 80s Gucci pants, very professional and fancy and tough. I was like, “Oh, no, she saw it. What if she thinks I’m not a professional?” And she totally was like, “You guys rock!” 

Amber: I’ve done a lot of things. Today, I work with the family business. We manufacture a shatter-proof wine glass. It looks like crystal, but it bounces. Our family is very entrepreneurial. We do that, and we also have some real estate. I basically flipped one of Lucille Ball’s first homes in Palm Springs and turned it into an event space. That’s careerwise, but who we are lifewise is just a moving forward with a frontier, pioneer spirit, trying to figure out how to live life bigger and better.

Follow Christian on Twitter: @christianstorm

More stuff about online videos, Riot Grrrls, and High School:

Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame

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High School Confidential

We are proud to announce that our new documentary, Lil Bub & Friendz, the story of the world’s cutest internet cat, will premiere at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Starring Lil Bub and Bub’s owner, Mike Bridavsky, along with Grumpy Cat, Nyan Cat, Keyboard Cat and meme-manager supreme Ben Lashes, the movie follows the life and times of Bub and examines the internet cat phenomenon with an amazing soundtrack that features Spiritualized, Vernon Elliott, Mort Garson, Steve Reich and Integrity. The film is directed and produced by Andy Capper (Reincarnated) and Julilette Eisner.

Here are some posters we made for the movie. The official trailer for Lil Bub & Friendz will be available to watch here and on youtube.com/vice on March 18th. In the meantime, watch our teaser trailer below.

Details of screenings and the premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival to follow!

Until fairly recently, 19-year-old Inocente Izucar had pretty much the shittiest childhood imaginable. An illegal immigrant, Inocente ended up homeless at a young age after her father was deported back to Mexico. She spent the majority of her childhood living on the streets and in shelters with her mother and three younger brothers. At one point, things got so bad that Inocente's mother led her by the hand to a bridge where she planned to have them both jump off together, before being talked out of it by her daughter.

Her luck changed a few years ago when Academy Award-nominated producing couple Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine decided to make a documentary about her and her art (which you can watch the trailer for above). On Sunday, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject, and Inocente was there to collect the award. Her appearance was a refreshing change from the parade of the rich and famous men who make up the majority of the ceremony, so I got in touch with Inocente, Sean and Andrea to talk with them about the experience.

VICE: First I just wanna say congrats on the Oscar win.
Inocente Izucar: Thank you. 

How did you guys meet Inocente?
Andrea Nix Fine: We looked for her for months and months. She was our needle in a haystack. Basically, we really wanted to make a film about a homeless kid, because we came across the statistic that one in 45 kids in the US experiences homelessness. It's something we felt nobody really knew about and nobody was paying attention to, so we were very interested in doing a film where we found somebody going through that experience, and we were particularly interested in finding an artist because I felt that would be a wonderful way to meet somebody and experience her dreams. So we just started calling all over the country and eventually we ended up talking to a San Diego-based group called A Reason to Survive that helps kids who face adversity get into art, and they introduced us to Inocente. 

And, Inocente, what was your situation like when you met the Fines, for people who haven't seen the film?
Inocente: I was 15, and I'd been homeless for like, nine years. 

Would you mind describing the events that led up to your becoming homeless?
Inocente: Well, my dad basically kidnapped me and my three brothers and brought us up to the US from Mexico. He told my mum he would come get her later, but he never did, so my mum crossed the border by herself to come find us. When she got here, he was really abusive. And one day it was really bad, so we called the cops. Here in the US domestic violence isn't tolerated, so when the cops came, he was deported. The place we were living was his sister's house, and because it was his side of the family, we ended up in the shelter. 

Was it mostly shelters you were living in during this period? Did you always have a roof over your head, or did you sometimes have to sleep outside?
Inocente: There were times when we had to sleep outside, like, in the park. And I remember my mum would have to stay awake because, of course, it's scary when you have to sleep outside. You know, people are mean sometimes. So she would stay awake and watch, and wake us up in time to go to school. 

When you were filming the documentary, did you have any idea what kind of impact it would have on your life?
Inocente: I didn't. But I'm really happy how everything is turning out because it's been really good for me. I've connected with a lot of people, and messages have been coming to me from people with similar stories, which makes me realise how blessed I am.

Sean, Inocente and Andrea collecting their Oscar.

What was it like going to the Oscars?
Inocente: I was really nervous, but it was really cool. It was a really weird experience because you never expect yourself to be there. I'd never even watched the Oscars before. 

Who did you get to meet at the awards? Did you get to meet anyone you liked?
Inocente: I met everybody that I liked! I met Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter, he was so nice, and Daniel Day-Lewis kissed me. 

Nice. Did you guys get the Academy Award goodie bags?
Andrea: Ha, no, they don't do that for us types. 

Lame.
Andrea: But we did get a gold statue! So I can't complain. 

What are you guys gonna do with your awards? I heard that Adele used one of her awards as a toilet-paper roll. 
Sean Fine: Well firstly, our kid is taking it to show-and-tell. 

That's a pretty good show-and-tell. I feel sorry for the kid who has to follow that. 
Andrea: Then we need to put them up high in our house, because our kids are five and eight. And, last night, they were both holding one. And because they're boys, they wanted to make them do action-figure stuff. I had to be like, "DO NOT hit them together!"

Did you get to go to the parties after, as well?
Andrea: We went to the Vanity Fair party. It was insane and so much fun. Innocente was the belle of the ball, she walked around and just, like, walked up to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Taylor Lautner and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

Sean: It was a cool party. Because we also realised that the film had an impact on some people. And all these people were coming up to us and thanking us. Like, Peter Fonda came up and said, "Thank you for being artists, art is important, that's what this is about," which was really cool.

In your acceptance speech, you said, “We feel like we need to start supporting the arts. They’re dying in our communities. And all of us artists, we need to stand up and help girls like her be seen and heard.” What made you decide to talk about that in your speech?
Sean: The three of us talked about it, we asked Inocente what she felt was important to talk about, and she said the arts and homelessness.

Andrea: It's hard because they only give you 30 seconds, which is not a lot of time to get through this stuff, especially when you're totally overwhelmed at the same time.

Sean: And everyone kept giving us these warnings, like, if you win you'll see this big clock and you'll get nervous, but I looked down at all the actors in front of us, and they were so close, and there were so many great artists there, people who I look up to and admire. And when I said, "A year ago this girl was homeless," I saw people's mouths open. And I was like, Wow, she just had an impact. And that was so cool. Arts education is an important issue, and something we need to start paying attention to because it's been decimated.

Inocente, can you tell me a little about what your life has been like since the movie came out?
Inocente: My life is pretty good right now. My art has exposure, I have an exhibition coming up in New York in the summer, I've been able to sell some pieces, I have an apartment now, and I adopted two bunny rabbits. And now the documentary has been at the Oscars and a lot of people saw it, hopefully a lot of people will be interested in helping. Not just me, but everybody who the film represents, all the kids out there who are homeless and artists and immigrants.  

If it's not too personal, can I ask how your relationship is with your mum? In the documentary, things were rocky between you. 
Inocente: It's a lot better. We don't live together right now, which has been good for our relationship. And the film gave her the opportunity to open up and tell her side of the story, which I think helped her a lot.

Do you still keep in touch with people from the streets?
Inocente: I've kept in touch with some of my friends and people I've met at shelters. It's really sad because I wish I could help. I wish I could let them live with me. It's really frustrating for me to see my friends struggling. 

Earlier you said one in 45 children in the US is homeless at some point, right? Why do you think more isn't being done about that?
Andrea: I think one of the primary issues is that this is an invisible population.

Yeah, actually, I had no idea that child homelessness was even an issue in this country until I saw an episode of Sesame Street about it a couple of years ago. 
Andrea: Yeah, it's crazy! In a normal school classroom in the US, there are 22 kids. So if you take two classrooms, one kid is going to be homeless. And if you think about all the classrooms in the US, that's a lot of kids. It's redefining the idea of what it is to be in a home, because a lot of the times, people lose the ability to hold down an apartment, so they're just shifting around all the time, and families break up because it's really difficult to keep everyone together and move them into one place. Kids end up sleeping on friends' couches, so there's this unravelling of the family unit. And there's no advocacy, this is a population with no power.  

Sean: Nobody stops to ask these kids what's going on. Nobody says, What are your dreams? What are your aspirations? And many of them have potential, like Inocente. They could be great, and I think we don't stop enough to ask those questions, we let them stay invisible. 

To see some of Inocente's art, go here.

To watch the movie through iTunes, go here.

To read more about the arts program that Inocente was a part of, go here.

@JLCT

For an unreleased, unseen film with a tiny budget,The Canyons has attracted an enormous amount of publicity. It’s reportedly a sex-filled noirish melodrama set in LA, but that’s about all we know, since it hasn’t come out yet – in fact, it hasn’t even been shown at any festivals. Sundance rejected it, and South by Southwest not only rejected it, but a “festival insider” told the Hollywood Reporter that the film had “an ugliness and a deadness to it.” Ouch. I haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen it. So why has so much been written about it? 

Well for one thing, The Canyons was directed by the legendary Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, co-wrote Raging Bull, and directed movies like American Gigolo and Affliciton, both of which he also wrote. The film also garnered headlines for being written by iconic American Psycho and Less than Zero author Bret Easton Ellis, known more recently as one of the most cantankerous bastards on Twitter. And Ellis took great pains to make sure the film featured pornographic movie star James Deen in his first “mainstream” (for lack of a better word) role.

Sick of dealing with Hollywood bullshit and wanting to make art without some ponytailed Blackberry addict dictating over their shoulders, Schrader and company scraped together a tiny $250,000 budget with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, and convinced the cast and crew to work for a paltry $100 a day. Additionally, they committed to transparent communication with fans through social media during all phases of production in order to generate interest in the film without resorting to a traditional (and expensive) advertising campaign.

In the end though, the reason the public has continued to care about The Canyons despite being totally ignorant of its actual content is its female lead: twenty-six year old redheaded lightning rod Lindsay Lohan. Lohan most recently starred in the controversial New York Times article about The Canyons, “This is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie” – possibly her most interesting performance since her teenage years. Immediately, every critic and writer fixated on her involvement in the movie to the exclusion of all the other aspects of the story.

The sanest seeming character in this whole saga has been former Lionsgate producer Braxton Pope, who brought this eclectic team together, convinced everyone to take the path less travelled, and championed Lohan for the film. Pope has produced everything from the Kevin Spacey movie Shrink to author Jonathan Ames’s pre-Bored to Death Showtime pilot to a recent Passion Pit music video. He cares a great deal about cinema as art – a ridiculous ideal for a modern-day Hollywood producer.

In two separate phone interviews, I talked to Pope and Ellis about the Times article, as well as self-funding in Hollywood, the paparazzi, Kickstarter backers who opened themselves up to Ellis’s criticism, and the recent deal they made with IFC to distribute the film.

VICE: Before working on The Canyons, you two had another project on deck, a shark thriller. I am a sucker for shark movies – even shitty ones – so a Bret Easton Ellis-penned shark flick sounds like a dream.
Braxton Pope: It was called Bait, and it was a revenge movie about a disaffected kid, a sociopath who endures a kind of humiliation on the beach and through a series of events, and in a very cunning way, he ends up on this charter boat with the kids who humiliated him. They’re in the open water, and he pulls up the ladder and prevents them from coming back on the boat, and he chums the water. It was a Lionsgate movie and there was a Spanish financier. We were very close to shooting it, then the finances imploded at the last minute. It was an exercise in total frustration and wasted time. That’s what sparked the idea to create something that we could self-finance.

Bret Easton Ellis: Part of the reason we made The Canyons was the frustration of working for a studio like Lionsgate and trying to get the shark movie made and having that fall through. Everyone from Ed Burns to the Polish brothers are rethinking the model these days.

Is that what Paul Schrader meant when he said, in the Times article, “The American market is just tapped out”?
Pope: The types of movie Schrader was known for in the 70s and 80s wouldn’t get financed by the studios. Dramas or character pieces – those movies are nearly extinct at the studio level today. There’s been a transition toward spectacle movies with budgets of $100 million-plus, Michael Bay and superhero movies, heavy CG movies. Lionsgate is looking for big franchise properties that will generate huge revenue, mass-market films. And typically the movies I put together tend to be smaller, with filmmakers like Schrader or Gaspar Noé.

So how are your snobby Hollywood peers reacting to your crowd funding and self-funding a movie?
Pope: Hollywood’s not necessarily the most supportive community. There is a lot of schadenfreude and a lot of snark. So there was some trepidation because we didn’t want to be perceived as not being able to get our project made so we had to go beg for donations. But among the writers and directors and artists and musicians I hang out with there has been no contempt whatsoever; they all get it. Ultimately Kickstarter as “production 2.0” has been incredibly important to independent filmmakers. There is no stigma when you see Kickstarter-funded films going to Sundance. Kickstarter also creates a community of people interested in what you’re doing, and the community that’s created is important.

One of the rewards you promised to Kickstarter backers was to tweet reviews of movies by unknown filmmakers. Without knowing you personally, Bret, I would be hesitant to have you publicly critique my work.
Ellis: In our Kickstarter doctrine, under that prize, we made it very clear that you would be running a risk [laughs]. It says: “Braxton and Bret are particularly honest about what they like and and what they dislike, so beware.” We watched two of the films submitted, and there really wasn’t anything good about either of them. It’s just a fact, I’m sorry. And we debated about what to do. How do we approach this? So Braxton, being incredibly diplomatic, did reach out to both those filmmakers, and told them, “If we post our reviews they’re going to be negative.” He gave them the choice: I can just tweet about the availability of your film online, about where to find it, who’s in it. Or we will post those reviews. Both of the filmmakers said they’d rather have me tweet about the availability and give them some exposure. Same with the novels [I agreed to review for some backers]: If I am going to post reviews, it’s understood they might very well be negative. It was never going to be just jacking off whoever chipped in to the Kickstarter fund.

Is doing stuff like that a sacrifice for you?
Ellis: It’s easier than having to deal with the stress and ineptitude of executives who want to shape the movie themselves. It’s a breeze compared to development hell. I think we sold six of those [novel critique rewards]. It did provide a big bulk of the budget, so we are thankful to those people.

Let’s talk about that New York Times article. Whether you agree with everything in it or not, I thought it was a great, entertaining piece of writing.
Ellis: It was. If you were in it, though, you would feel differently. I didn’t think it was going to be about the personalities on the set. I didn’t think that would be something the New York Times would be interested in and that’s not how the author, Steve Roderick – who hung out with us for a year – presented himself. So when we all saw the piece it was, "Oh my God. This is what they were interested in?" So it was a rude awakening. But Paul Schrader loved the piece. I thought he was going to be mortified but he thought it was good publicity for the movie. So I kind of realigned my feelings about it.

Pope: I am Zen about the article. We knew that our commitment to transparency and to not doing things by the rules was going to be clunky at times, and so you aren’t always going to be cast in the best light, and you’re going to submit yourself to someone else’s interpretation and agenda. I think a lot of journalists are fabulists and storytellers, and he was telling a story. I would have preferred that he focused on the process and the new-media way in which we made the movie, and not on the Lindsay antics. But having the cover of the New York Times magazine and them covering your movie in that kind of depth and detail is still advantageous.

Bret, when South by Southwest gave that quote about the movie’s “ugliness and deadness,” I just figured that meant the film must have captured your words particularly well. The ugliness and deadness of your characters is sort of the point, isn’t it?
Ellis: Obviously the person who said that didn’t get the movie and wanted another experience. It was bad timing since we were looking for backing. I don’t think it hurt the movie, though Braxton and Paul took it a little personally. But these characters in The Canyons are not nice people. It’s a classic noir scenario updated with some modern touches, so there is a fatalism to it. If you consider the movie “dead” and “cold,” well, I think some of the best noirs feel that way, and I think it’s built into the material. I think these characters are in a lot of ways alive, it’s just what they’re alive to that bothers some people.

So was it then challenging to find a distributor after the South by Southwest debacle?
Pope: It certainly didn’t help. But we had William Morris Endeavor sell the movie, and a number of distributors made offers, so it all worked out. We’re extremely happy with Independent Film Channel. I was driving to the set of my recent Passion Pit music video, and I was listening to KROQ’s Kevin and Bean morning show and they were talking about The Canyons and spending a lot of time discussing the South by Southwest comment. This very popular radio show is talking about this little indie movie that hasn’t been released; it just isn’t the type of thing that should be on their radar, really. They might talk about a little indie movie once it’s released and done really well, but the fact that I had to spend 20 minutes listening to them recite this criticism from South by Southwest… It circulated so widely that it did make us concerned for the impact of this rogue comment.

How is IFC distributing the film?
Pope: We are working out the details so I can’t speak to specifics, but I think the idea is to make it simultaneously available in theaters and rent and buy it on movies on demand. It’s the emerging model for lower-budget independent films. IFC has the kind of taste and sensibility to market and distribute The Canyons in an effective way.

Braxton, according to the Times article you were the one who first wanted Lindsay Lohan to be involved. Were you worried about working with her or dealing with all of the publicity and baggage that follows her around?
Pope: Well, lots of things go through my mind when people ask me questions about Lindsay. But I am friends with her. I’d met her prior to the movie and she was someone that I had wanted to work with for years. Maybe part of that makes me kind of come across as considered or diplomatic, but part of it is simply wanting to be respectful to her first and foremost as a human. When you are with Lindsay you get a window into the hurricane of sensationalism and bad reporting and modern celebrity experience of her life, which is very distorting. It gives you an appreciation for some of the things she goes through on a personal basis. I think she is a terrifically gifted actress. 

But didn’t you worry that, because of her participation, no one would be able to see the movie for what it really is? And isn’t that sort of coming true now?
Pope: Yeah, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that coming, that [her participation would make it] like a fun-house mirror, warping the perception of the movie. We thought Lindsay was really talented, but can she apply herself and focus? Will she get through the shoot? That was really the question.

With no money in the budget for trailers even, it seems you’d also have a hard time keeping away the paparazzi, no?
Pope: That was a legit concern. But a lot of our locations were interior. And we were moving locations quite a bit so they had a hard time homing in on us. They did figure out when we were shooting at Café Med on Sunset Boulevard – we were kind of out in the open, and they did find us quite quickly there. They were disruptive during one outdoor mall sequence but we knew that guerrilla filmmaking in a public place with someone as big as Lindsay would be a roll of the dice. But even when we filmed at my house, we had paparazzi jumping up the high cinderblock wall in my yard; you would see their heads pop up. And when Lindsay left in her Porsche after she wrapped for the day, they were literally making these wild U-turns on a busy street and forcing cars to slam on their brakes or careen off into driveways. Right in front of my house there were almost three different accidents because they just have no regard.

Lastly, why do you think there’s been so much bad publicity surrounding this film? 
Ellis: Some people have an… aversion, let’s say, to a lot of people involved in this movie. Lindsay can’t be anything but honest. Even in her evasions [laughs] there’s an honesty, an attitude that is very, very troubled, but it’s authentic. James Deen is completely transparent, does exactly what he wants, and has built this “empire” without bowing down to anybody, and if you’re offended he shrugs and says “tough shit.” Schrader doesn’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit. Lindsay doesn’t give a shit, nor does James. No one in that group is going to kowtow to what people want them to be. It’s not gonna happen. And I think that’s off-putting to some people. Which is why it's great we have Braxton on board, [laughs] because Braxton can keep it all together. He can be the one who goes out and makes sure not too many feathers are ruffled.

For updates on when/where you’ll be able to see The Canyons, follow their Facebook page.

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, and many other publications.

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All White in Barking

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Spring Breakers Will Have Lots of Babes and Guns

In the documentary Marc spends time with Iqbal from Kashmir who works as a hotel concierge; 95-year-old Peggy who fled Hitler's Vienna; Billy, an Irish ex-construction worker losing himself to alcohol; and retired air-hostess Brigiite who runs a hotel for foreign students. I phoned Marc to discuss his film, and why Cricklewood Bingo Hall might be the loneliest place in London.

VICE: What compelled you to make The Road?
Marc Isaacs: Initially I had this very vague idea around the Olympics – all these different nationalities were coming over here, yet there were all these people that live here already, people from those countries who are part of our lives every day. That led to looking near where I live. I wanted to make a film in London about people who had come from outside, and the A5 is full of people from everywhere.

What is it about London's immigrants that interests you?
There are themes in the film about events repeating themselves, like the Eastern European workers today waiting on the road where the Irish used to wait before. I wanted a broad perspective on that sense of transiency in people's minds about not being able to go home, yet not always fitting in over here. That felt quite interesting as a psychological and cinematic space.

And Edgware Road is like a geographical embodiment of that weirdness, especially the Middle Eastern part?
Yeah, it's quite a closed world. It's transient too because people come over from the Middle East when it's really hot out there, or for medical treatment, and they're just here for a few weeks and then they disappear. I met one of the guys who owns a lot of the Lebanese restaurants, but he just wasn't open enough as a character for me to work with. We did spend quite a lot of time down there though.

Where there any other great characters who refused to be filmed?
There was a Cameroonian taxi driver who was actually a sort of king back in Cameroon and lives as a polygamist over here. It wasn't possible to go further with him.

Why?
His wives wanted to keep it all private. There was no way they'd have us involved, they didn't want to be exposed on television and in the cinema. Wasn't gonna happen.

Fair enough. Some of the footage you've got is pretty disturbing, Billy's alcoholism, for example.
I thought it was really important to show his life and how he is, not to shy away from that. Filming that was really difficult, and of course it's personal, but it's also a situation that, to an extent, has risen though him not working any more and being isolated from his family. He's not an educated man, he's depended on his work for everything, too much really. It was his social life too, and it's disappeared.

Iqbal

Another of the characters, Iqbal, is credited as a writer on the film, how did you meet him?
He wrote a really lovely book about London called Sorrows Of The Moon where he goes around on his bike talking to other immigrants. It's a really lovely piece of work. I read it and thought he could be really interesting to talk to, because I wanted some narration and I'm not naturally a writer. He's very thoughtful and articulate, and he's aware of his own situation in a way that the other characters aren't so much.

A lot of what he says is very poignant.
Absolutely, it really struck me what he said about losing your home twice, once when you've burnt bridges and have to leave your country, then again when you realise this new place is not what you hoped it would be. I found that really profound, and it relates to everybody.

What is it about your characters' struggles that you wanted to capture?
I tried to universalise them in a way, their relationships or separation, and also the sense that they're in this in-between state, they haven't really found their sense of home. And what I was trying to do was relate that to all of us, because we all strive to have this oneness with the world which we're never gonna get. All of our lives are transient to a certain extent. And looking at that idea through these immigrant lives was quite interesting because I think their struggles and the things they're dealing with are relevant to all of us.

Finally, why did you film at the Cricklewood Bingo Hall?
It's a place where a lot of lonely people go and feel like they're part of a community, but it does have this air of desperation about it. It's a striking place anyway because of the size, it's huge. There's the promise of winning, but I don't think that's really why people go. People definitely go there to find some sense of company, to escape, to forget things in their lives. It feels like a sort of religious cathedral for people who don't have anything else.

Thanks Marc.

Marc's film The Road: A Story of Life and Death is released on February 22nd, visit the website and Facebook page for more information.

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Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose has spent the past four years following and documenting the lives of the founders of The Pirate Bay: Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. And they've been an eventful four years, because, as the very public faces of one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites, Peter, Gottfrid and Fredrik have spent them getting sued, banned, raided, prosecuted, jailed and generally hounded by the authorities across the face of the Earth. The trial against TPB ended with a $4.7million fine, and is one of the cases that will define how copyright holders and people who use the internet – i.e. everyone else, i.e. you – figure out how to get along with each other.

With the help of crowdfunding, Simon hired a film crew to cut and edit The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard (or TPB AFK) which is licensed under Creative Commons. On Friday, the film premieres at the Berlin International Film Festival and will be released for free online at the same time, which is apparently a first. I caught up with Simon and talked about his life "away from keyboard" since meeting the Pirate Bay boys back in 2008.

VICE: Hey Simon, what's up?
Simon Klose: I'm a bit jet lagged, sleepy, baffled, high on caffeine. But yeah, all good.

What have you been doing?
I've been busy. It's been crazy. I've been in Vietnam one month and San Francisco the next. And now I have all this stuff in Berlin. I haven't slept for a long time, but it's been great, exciting and weird.

What's happening now?
I'm currently working on a platform that is going to be released in conjunction with the film. You know when you watch a film at home and you google stuff about it at the same time?

Yeah, I always do that.
My new platform will make it possible for filmmakers to add links in their films so that you can find out stuff you want to know about the film while you watch it.

Have you always been tech savvy?
No, I used to hate it. I was pretty much suffering from technophobia. But I've become, you know... I guess I've realised that you don't have to be the person you think you are. It's cool to change, it's nice. Making the film taught me a lot.



How did you get close to the guys behind TPB? They seem to be the kind of guys who hang out on their own.
Since it was just me filming, I didn't have a big crew around. I started off by going with Piatbyrån – a Swedish organisation set up to support people like the Pirate Bay guys against anti-piracy lobbyists – and Peter Sunde to an art exhibition in Italy. It was the summer of 2008 and we spent it driving a red hippie van across Europe. That was when this "digital community", or whatever you wanna call it, met AFK for the first time.

Why does TPB not use "IRL" instead of "AFK" when they hang out online? (What did I even just say?)
I don't know. AFK and IRL is not the same thing... For me, what was important to show in the film, and why I used AFK in the title, was because of the contrast between the legal system and these dudes. They were from two completely different worlds, talking two completely different languages.

Do you think that the Pirate Bay guys lost in court because of this contrast you're talking about?
I don't know. Maybe it had something to do with it. Maybe it didn't. That's really difficult to say. But something that was very obvious was this massive generation gap. I mean on one side these three dudes were sitting in their t-shirts and hoodies. They even had laptops with them in court, hacking a net so that they got access to WiFi inside the courtroom, chatting with each other and working with The Pirate Bay right there and then. And on the other side were three lawyers with their three assistants, maybe nine of them in total. Most of them were men dressed in grey or black suits. This was in 2009! And no one of the prosecutors had laptops with them. I thought that was pretty fascinating how they were sitting there with their pens and papers whilst the guys were online. And that picture is what is stuck in my head in a way... and then it all ended with a five million dollar fine for the guys. I think it's something very tragic about that in way.

On the website of the film you talk about TPB AFK being an alternative business model.
It's not about doing something that works for everyone. I did this film in this way and it worked out for me. I'm privileged to have got the opportunity to hang out with the guys behind the world's largest website [for torrents] that has changed the entire Internet. And I'm privileged to have got access to their massive community. There is an incredible amount of supporters of this movement. So it feels like I want to share what I've been through and share my film with everyone and at the same time use as many new tools as possible so that I can fund the film and survive as a filmmaker.

Is this film going to reveal who these guys really are?
I guess people are very curious about who they are because it's been so much about them in the news during a long period of time. We don't know that much about them really, even though we've heard and read plenty about The Pirate Bay. It's exciting to present these guys to the world. They're really fascinating and I've learned a lot from hanging out with them.

Sounds cool. Thanks for your time and good luck, Simon!

TPB AFK, The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and online at 4PM UK time/5PM Swedish time on Friday, February the 8th. Find out more about the film here.

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RIVER PHOENIX'S FINAL FILM TO BE RELEASED

Twenty years after the young actor's tragic death, River Phoenix's last project has finally been completed. Dark Blood, directed by George Sluizer, was only 80% complete when Phoenix fatally overdosed in 1993, missing the interior shots that had been planned for an L.A. soundstage. While the initial judgement of the studios deemed the film impossible to complete as the missing scenes were deemed simply too vital, Sluizer held onto the film footage and has now made the decision to release the film, supported by his own narration to cover the missing scenes. However, it's worth noting this film does not seem to have any support from the Phoenix family, and his brother Joaquin has denied speculation he would be dubbing River's voice.

READ FULL STORY
 

TOP 10: WORST FILMS TO WATCH WITH YOUR PARENTS

All of us, young and old, have perhaps suffered that seemingly universal door creak, as one (or more) parent decides to walk in at the precise moment when both film stars decide to forgo plot and get down to some dirty. That moment, always embarrassing no matter how much you try to cover it up, is what this list is based on. So we’ve saved you a speedy dash to the toilet, with our top ten worst films to see with your parents. From cinematic marital breakdowns to Marxist pornos, there are some things you just don’t want to sit down to on a rainy day in with the rents.

READ FULL STORY
 

WIN THE DJANGO UNCHAINED SOUNDTRACK AND A LIMITED EDITION POSTER

To celebrate the release of Quentin Tarantino's brilliant Django Unchained, out in UK cinemas this Friday, we're offering one lucky reader the chance to win a limited edition poster accompanied by a certificate and the film's original soundtrack.

ENTER COMPETITION

TOP 10: CRY FACES

I've yet to see Les Miserables, but I've been told it contains a lot of scenes of sad people. Specifically sad people crying. One of those people is Anne Hathaway, who is so talented at crying with her face that she's already won a Golden Globe for it (with an Oscar likely on its way). Therefore, in celebration of the film's release and Hathaway's awards circuit victories, here's 10 other people whose cry-faces are simply spectacular to behold.

READ FULL STORY

Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.

Amour
Two old married people face the fact that even true love won’t save them from death. I think they both die in the end; one from a blood clot, the other from loneliness. I didn’t see this movie because I’ve seen it before. In REAL LIFE. My maternal grandma died before my grandpa. He was with her in the hospital, holding her hand and saying, “Oh, my little Libby. My sweet Libby.” Jesus Christ, it was so miserable. I can’t believe I’m writing this on the internet. Later on, when my grandpa was living in a home, he spent his days flirting with nurses and re-reading the first few pages of the same three James Patterson novels that were in his room. I guess Cher was right: There is life after love.

Argo
Alan Arkin has a supporting role in Argo. He may seem like a decent guy, but I’ve heard he’s a shithead in real life. Here’s a true story: A long time ago, when my friend’s uncle was a little kid, he walked up to Alan Arkin to say hi. The kid had a broken arm at the time and he asked Arkin to sign his cast. Arkin said, “Sorry kid, I don’t sign casts.” Dick move, Arkin! My friend’s family has always hated Arkin because of this, and I’m pretty sure no one is allowed to watch M*A*S*H at their house.

Oh wait. That story is about Alan Alda, not Alan Arkin. Alan Alda is a dick, Alan Arkin is cool with me, and Argo looks OK.

Beasts of the Southern Wild
I forgot this movie came out this year. What a long, miserable year it was. Everyone I know seems to be beaten down – by jobs, relationships, the city. Once youthful spirits, we are now crawling into the grey husk of old age. Maybe we should visit the real-life equivalent of the Bathtub, wherever that is, get drunk with swamp people and make stuff with our hands. That would save us.

And THAT is exactly the sort of bullshit attitude this movie preys on. Cities are so much better than swamps, and actual swamp people are not nice. If you’re looking to get away, and you live in New York, take the A train to the Aqueduct Race Track and Resorts World Casino and frolic with the aurochs (the old drunks) and packs of Chinese people. It’s a great time!

This movie reminded me of The Rescuers. Do you remember Evinrude, the dragonfly in The Rescuers who motors around the swamp using his wings as a propeller? Did anyone else want to be Evinrude? I definitely did.

Zero Dark Thirty
I didn’t see this one and don’t have much to say about it.

Lincoln
I didn’t see this one and don’t have much to say about it.

Django Unchained
Quentin Tarantino said that while filming this movie there was a bizarre dynamic between the actresses who played the cotton-picking slaves and the ones who played the call girl slaves. The call girl actresses were traditionally attractive, just like they were in real life, while the field slave actresses were plain. On set, the call girls looked down upon the cotton pickers and the cotton pickers were naturally upset about this. Thing is, they were all extras without lines getting paid the same rate. People divide themselves for no reason, maaaan. It’s like a Dr. Seuss story – only with men being hanged and ripped apart by dogs in the background.

Also: hearing nigger x ∞ was weird.

Silver Linings Playbook
I didn’t see this one and don’t have much to say about it.

Les Misérables
I don’t care what anyone says, Anne Hathaway singing “I Dreamed a Dream” is worth the price of admission. Try to think of a better prostitute in a movie. Julia Roberts? Jodie Foster? Elisabeth Shue? No thank you to all three of those skanks.

Anne Hathaway... even the spittle that stretches between her lips when she opens her mouth to sing, “I dreamed that love would never die / I dreamed that God would be forgiving” is lovely. I would take that spittle out for ice cream and marry it.

Is Les Mis a good movie? Who knows. During the first half, a woman in the row behind me was softly crying. During the second half, I heard her snoring.

Life of Pi
A girl who dated my friend in high school read Life of Pi and wouldn’t stop talking about how good it was. The week after they broke up, I had a party at my house and a few guys got with her at the same time in my parents’ bed. She felt terrible and told my friend, who was pretty mad at us. Thing is, we were all in the same band, and the band needed to stay together, so he got over it and wrote a few songs about women being shitty. After that, the girl lost a few friends and didn’t go out much. She starting sucking at school and never tried to get a real boyfriend. We didn’t realise it at the time, but she was most likely depressed. Judging from Facebook, she’s married now and seems to be doing well. There’s no way she didn’t see Life of Pi, and there’s a chance it reminded her of having regrettable group sex when she was a teenager. 

This is the worst movie on the list, right?

thisisgrim.com

Nimrod recently subscribed to a website called ForesightNews, which gives him unlimited invites to the world's cheesiest PR events. He also bought himself 19,000 bot Twitter followers and created a fake TED talk lecture, all to spruce up his CV. He pledges to spend the rest of his life living off PR gift bags and journalist treats, all while boasting about it.

We went to Medellin for Colombia Fashion Week – a city that's trying to shake off the gak residue that's been lingering on the brim of its nostrils since the 1980s by hosting a glamorous fashion week, something that doesn't make you think of cocaine whatsoever. We went to two different fashion week shows – one for the monied elite and one showing "real" Colombian fashion, full of huge asses and beautiful Latino women. Then presenter Charlet Duboc did some awkward modelling, learned how to pole dance and met Pablo Escobar's brother, which didn't do much towards forgetting about the blow thing again, but was a whole lot of fun. 

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We Went to a Foam Party in Magaluf

A couple of years ago we spent some time in Liberia to see how fucked the country was following its civil war, and the answer was: an overflowing sewer of fucked. As in abject poverty, child soldiers, teenage prostitutes and ex-murderous, cannibal warlords now leading communities fucked. 

We met General Bin Laden, who gave us a tour of his compound, watched a 12-year-old smoke heroin and talk about raping a woman and visited a brothel where the walls were stained with a mixture of bodily fluids that I don't really want to know too much more about. Then we hung out with Joshua Blahyi – who used to be called General Butt Naked – who told us how he used to eat the hearts of innocent boys before battle and a load of other horrifyingly distressing stuff that's better watched than read.  

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Babes of the BNP

Unless you have selective amnesia targeting good films, you probably remember the film we made with Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko, and Jan Kwiecinski earlier this year. It's called The Fourth Dimension, and today we've thrown the whole thing up on YouTube for you to watch, free of charge, whenever you want and as often as you like. Because we love you.

If you need a refresher, we teamed up with Grolsch Film Works and got three directors to make three short films about that most elusive and confusing of dimensions, the fourth. Then, we took their work and smooshed it into one feature-length film, which we think is about as close as one can get to the fourth dimension without getting sucked into a supermassive black hole. And now you can watch the whole thing at your leisure on YouTube.

You're welcome!

Melancholia is playing at the Milan cinema on La Rampa, Cuba. I considered recommending it to P., having thought about this film for months, but it’s already obvious that she is the debutante type so common in the art world, familiar with proper names and the prices of various objects, but completely uninterested in anything more demanding than a thumbnail reproduction and a press release. That’s as true of many high-end dealers as it is of fringe figures like P., who hosts receptions and arranges this and that for visiting artists. They all have the mentality of pork butchers who keep both thumbs on the scale. It’s doubtful that she would go to a movie house on La Rampa, anyway.

Something was a little off with the projection, or the print, or both. It looked, in fact, as if the movie I saw in New York had been dipped briefly in a bucket of Clorox, but it was still very powerful. I felt curious to see how a Cuban audience would react. People leaving the theatre looked stunned. That might have been the Clorox effect, but they all dispersed quickly. I had no chance to eavesdrop on their conversations. When I first saw Melancholia, I was crawling out of my own living death and the film pulled me right back into it.

At the same time, the fact that someone had pictured this state of depressive alienation was, on some level, soothing. It confirmed something true about the melancholiac’s view of the world, his/her indifference to its empty rituals and false emotions. Certainly by the time Justine tells Claire that “life on Earth is evil” the film has proven it in spades. “What kind of God”, my father used to ask, “would have invented the food chain?”

I wondered if Lars von Trier experienced any benefit from the large number of people concerned about him. Probably not, I decided. When you go behind the moon, no one can follow you there to bring you back, and the quality of darkness is so overwhelming it can’t be described. The words that could describe it, like most words, have been rendered meaningless by the hyperbole of vernacular speech. When everything is awesome and amazing, anything that’s really out of the ordinary is practically inexpressible.

I also wondered if he deliberately piled on the operatic melancholia of Tristan and Isolde and Caspar David Friedrich in hopes that pushing it all beyond the pale would humour him back into a reasonable frame of mind. One is desperate for something to laugh about, even if it’s the end of all existence in the universe. It is usual for people in depression to try anything, anything at all, to make it go away. But people in depression are also, usually, incapable of taking the smallest steps. Justine can’t lift her foot to get into the bathtub. Meat loaf, the one thing she might be counted on to enjoy eating, tastes like ashes in her mouth and she can’t swallow it.

People aren’t expected to be happy, as an ongoing condition, anywhere on Earth, except in propaganda, advertising and sitcoms. Life is pessimistic because we die, how could it be otherwise? But when people spill into the abyss, they discover that they aren’t allowed to be extremely unhappy as a chronic thing, either, and become the object of impatience, dread and fear – fear that their hopelessness is contagious, as in the case of the bus driver who ran over the soccer star. Not here, though, but in Germany, where people have other reasons to be unhappy. He went into a depression, jumped off the roof, his wife then became depressed, took an overdose of pills and the shrink who hadn’t been able to help her hung himself in his office.

*

New York. It used to take at least a month for the paralysing ugliness of this city to work its negative alchemy, now it’s roughly 12 hours. I’ve already gone online to look at air fares to Beirut, Malta, even Bucharest. And now, I think, I am going to unplug the TV cable and the internet connection. In Havana, I never try to get news of the outside world and usually feel glad not to have any, but then, here, the glut of instant information becomes as irresistible as the sudden ability to find something besides chicken to eat in a restaurant.    

Most of the information is redundant, or repulsive, unless, I suppose, one goes to really straining sorts of dinner parties: Salman Rushdie on the Bill Maher show, for example, flogging his memoir in a manner that suggests that the true price of liberty is listening to this cocktail bore settle scores with his ex-wives and flatter himself to the point of nausea and beyond. Its very title, his nom de fatwa, suggests the limitless vanity on sale: “Joseph Anton”, meaning Conrad and Chekhov, don’t you know. Rushdie the writer is more like a cloying fusion of Disney and Beidermeier; his mind is like a crowd-pandering bromide dispenser cloaked in bullying humility. But he’s not wrong about free expression.

People should write what they please and say what they want, regardless of whether a lunatic faction of Muslims or Mormons or Scientologists frappés itself into a rage about it. Good for Charlie Hebdo and all of us. And, in that spirit, let me say that the Innocence of Muslims video and The Satanic Verses are not so very far apart aesthetically, in the sense that Innocence of Muslims is roughly the same distance from Birth of a Nation as The Satanic Verses is from anything by Anton Chekhov or Joseph Conrad.

Naomi Wolf, whose addiction to publicity seems exactly on a par with Monica Lewinsky’s, has chewed up most of a solid week’s Guardian. It is no longer necessary to even believe what you write in a book if you can claim some specious connection to gender or race issues; a corporate mass media indifferent to serious questions of any kind will flog your book ad nauseam by pretending to attack it, if its title happens to be Vagina. I, on the other hand, really am attacking it: It is meretricious. It is mindless. It is pornographic in entirely the wrong way and represents something pathological not only about its author’s narcissism, but also about the publishing industry’s bottomless cynicism.

Briefly: after enduring the Calvary of diminished orgasms due to lower back pain, the author discovers the miracle of vaginal stimulation by some Mayfair faith healer and, consequently, something revelatory about the “neurobiological connection” between the brain and the genitals. She expounds this depressingly obvious connection at length, drawing many idiotic conclusions from it. Substitute “healing crystals” for “neurobiology” and you more or less have it. This is the same pataphysical twaddle Malcolm Gladwell, intellectual heir to Charles Reich and Jonathan Schell at The New Yorker, specialises in, though I would guess that he is an even bigger cunt than she is.

Of course, if Ms. Wolf had happened to get caught “plagiarising” herself, or falsely ascribing some unintelligible remarks to a notoriously incoherent pop star, her publishers would have instantly yanked her book out of circulation and issued a public mea culpa to rival Jacques Chirac’s apology for the Dreyfus affair. When you have no raison d’etre except the profit motive, the delusion that you are doing something noble can often be asserted by upholding, to great fanfare, some trivial principle that no one in his right mind could possibly care about.

Since the election is imminent, that too. I’m not sure if articles that advise “what to look for in the debates” or that measure the fractional blips of poll numbers are simply written to fill space, since space has to be far more elastic on the internet than in hard copy print, or written for a paycheck, but really one should skip them, vote for Obama happily or not and get the whole charade of public empowerment over with. You can be dead sure if anything equivalent to Melancholia’s collision with the Earth – anything human beings could actually prevent, that is – were about to happen, absolutely nothing helpful would be done about it by a criminal enterprise Congress, an impudent ideological majority on the Court or a president committed to drone warfare, illegal detention and the suspension of habeas corpus.

I like the president as much as I like other people’s cats – well, maybe not quite as much. They’re warm and cute and pleasant to watch, and I don’t for a moment expect them to close Guantanamo, solve the economic crisis or do anything real about global warming. “Life is only on Earth. And not for long.” If a cat were running for President, I would vote for it. I will vote for Obama, unless I decide to spend November in Beirut, or Malta. Mitt Romney, unfortunately for dogs, is a dog person.

More Gary:

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The Wonderful Asshole

On the 19th of June, Hollywood bloviator Alec Baldwin was the latest in the long line of celebrity dicks to punch a paparazzo when he socked a New York Daily News photographer in front of City Hall after getting his marriage license (getting married makes Baldwin angry, I guess). Anyway, point is that socking a pap isn’t that hard. You too can be immortalised for punching some guy trying to take a photo of you, just like Sean Penn, Kanye West, Quentin Tarantino and Chris Martin, by following these five easy steps:

Get Famous
First, you need photographers to follow you around. Sure, you could go out there and get an acting or music career, or start wearing silly getups like Lady Gaga, but that will take years! The easier option is to become infamous by committing a few awful crimes. Think about the swarms around Charles Manson or Bernie Madoff. But it’s hard to punch when your hands are cuffed, so this method only works for those who can run very fast and hide very well.  

Yell a Lot
Now that you’re famous, you’re like the one girl in a bukkake video, and the photographers are a bunch of dicks competing to spray the money shot on your face. If you’re gonna punch one out, make sure they all know it’s coming by screaming and cussing. Gather a crowd. It doesn’t count if no one takes a picture.  

Punch 
Do we really have to teach you how to do this, you fucking pansy? You know all about making a nice, tight fist, don’t you? Just send it in the general vicinity of someone’s face at a relatively high speed, and you’re set. Also, throw your body weight into it if you want to break a nose. 

Don’t Hurt the Camera
You’re supposed to be pissed at the paparazzi, not the AV equipment! Go ahead and break some guy’s ocular cavity, but don’t wreck a pricey Nikon. That’s just wasteful. If anything, steal it and pawn it for drugs because famous people usually take a lot of them. Also, he could sue you for lost wages if you take away his moneymaker, which is bad news on many levels. 

Can the Indignation
Here is where the celebs get into trouble, by railing against the indignity and injustice of the photo-clicking borg who follows them around. Guess what? The general public loves paparazzi pictures. If they didn’t they wouldn’t buy gossip rags and click on “articles” that are just photos of Angelina taking out the trash. Would you say you’re so sick of Christmas that you KO’d Santa? No. Don’t try to make your punch into some great statement about media and privacy, just say, “Yeah, he pissed me off and I punched him because he’s a fuckface.” Not only is it true, it’s pretty badass. Baldwin isn’t quite as badass, and denied he punched the photographer. Dude, it’s OK. You like hitting guys. Own it. 

MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC



As Kevin MacDonald’s exhaustive profile of enigmatic reggae legend Bob Marley hits screens internationally, it seems as good a time as any to cast an eye over the ever-intriguing genre of the music documentary. Whether you’re after genuine musical talent, pomp, circumstance, sex, drugs or even murder, our five picks have got them all.

READ FULL STORY

RAD SAD GRADS



It starts with that question. “So what you up to?” For the lucky few popped from the womb brimful of self-belief, it shouldn’t raise a heartbeat. For those whose university years already resemble a cess-pool of memory decay, groin rot and fractured hopes, there really is nothing worse that you could ask, apart from maybe “Why do you exist?” With Lena Dunham’s recent tale of a film grad’s “post-graduation malaise” in Tiny Furniture, I propose a trip through cinema’s top five sad grads. And if you’re still looking for an answer, you could do worse than Michele (Lisa Kudrow)’s in Romi and Michelle’s High School Reunion: “Um, I invented Post-its.”

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SAN FRAN PREMIERE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION

The Fourth Dimension premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival where Val Kilmer and Harmony Korine talk us through their segment, while Russia's Alexsei Fedorchenko and Poland's Jan Kwiecinski speak about their experiences making the film.

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Keep you’re peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.

The Minuteman Project is an activist group in the US that, generally speaking, doesn't like immigrants. "Minutemen", so named after a militia from the Civil War, live in the desert running along the United States-Mexico border tracking footprints, waving guns about and performing what they see as their duty: protecting the U-S-of-A from pesky foreign interlopers. One of these men was "Mad Max" Kennedy.

Such was Kennedy's appeal that filmmaker Vikram Zutshi – an Indian immigrant living in Los Angeles – decided to make a film about him. Vikram went out into the desert with a camera, followed Max around for a year and made Max Kennedy and the American Dream. However, not all the Minutemen were as nice to Vikram as Max was, and by the end of the film Max had renounced his Minuteman ways (although not necessarily all of his views). Here's the trailer:

Vikram spoke to us, offering to fill us in on the enigmatic Max Kennedy and why, deep down, he's a pile of soft cuddles who just wishes the world could understand him.

The Chinese have just sent the first 3D porn film out into the world. How do you respond to that? You go out and you watch it. Having done so, I can tell you one thing now: No matter what the press is telling you, 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is not a porn film. It's more of a slasher comedy made to resonate with a psychopathic child's SOH, albeit with the odd flying donkey dick and aggressively-gripped Asian boob thrown in to make sure no one sues for false advertising. Whether the film is any good or not, I have yet to decide, but the graphics are impressive, and if history teaches us anything, it's that porn films will always find an audience because they come from a very functional place. People will always need something to masturbate to.

I called up the movie's director, Christopher Sun, for a chat.

VICE: Hey Christopher, how’s it going?
Christopher Sun: Oh, hi! It’s Friday night in Hong Kong and everybody’s getting ready to go out and have drinks. It’s been a gooood week…

I'm glad to hear it. So, about your movie: How long did you plan it? Was making 3D porn a lifelong dream?
Well, I saw the first Sex And Zen something like 20 years ago when I was barely 18, and it certainly made an impression. I mean, it was quite an original film for its time, even though the story isn’t great. Then, three years ago, I was at the house of Stephen Shiu, the director whose father had produced the original. We were going through this stack of old scripts when we came across it. We thought it’d be a fun film to re-make, but couldn’t think of a modern way of retelling the story until we heard James Cameron was doing Avatar . That gave us the idea to start researching 3D technology.

Well, you beat Avatar at the Hong Kong box office, so I guess it all worked out fine. A good half of the film is dedicated to rape, dismemberment, and torture devices. What’s that about?
Well, Hong Kong has a long history of movie making and most of them are comedies, which include loads of martial arts, and strong storylines. But the subject of our story is pretty obvious: it’s about the ways a couple can mend their relationship when it goes wrong. It’s a universal theme, which means it can get quite boring. So, we had to spice it up.

Christopher Sun [centre], with other cast and crew members from 3D Sex & Zen

That’s a funny way of spicing things up. How’s the censorship business been treating you?
Oh, every single country the film is shown in has censored it, but they’ve all done it in different ways. Thailand, Hong Kong, and South Korea have mostly cut out the orgy stuff. When it comes to the European versions, we were asked to take out a particular scene in which the prince accidentally chokes his concubine. They have rough sex and then he kills her. I don’t blame them for taking it out, though, I think erotic asphyxiation can make certain people uncomfortable.

Still, it must be annoying to have your film ripped apart like this.
I can’t say I’m happy about it, but if I want to show my film in as many countries as possible I will have to respect their authorities and their wishes. Thirty years ago, A Clockwork Orange was censored, even in England. So, for the time being I just feel blessed to be able to show my film. Maybe in 30 years, as the level of tolerance is evolving, we will have a chance to show the original version.

Hopefully you won’t have to wait that long. Any fun anecdotes from filming?
Loads! Filming the surgery scene was pretty funny. You know how Wei Yangsheng, the main character, needs a penis transplant because his willy is so small?

Yes.
And do you remember the part where the doctor cuts it, drops it on the floor, and then the dog eats it?

Yes.
Well, we used a piece of sausage for that, but the dog, who we trained for three months, kept refusing to eat it! So, you can imagine how much this made us laugh.

Yes, lulz all around. Speaking of penises, I do have a bone to pick with you: The film is full of depictions of penises – there are penis-shaped sculptures, fences, and clouds – but no real ones, except from that one shot of Wei Yangsheng’s tiny, tiny organ. Where's the meat? I was a little disappointed.
Everybody is expecting to see huge, elongated penises in these types of movies, so the important thing is to play with their psychology. It’s often better to allude to things than actually show them. Also, most guys freak out about the size of their package. So, we tried to play with that anxiety, mock it, show just this tiny organ so we could have everybody feeling comfortable. We wanted to tell them to stop stressing about it, in a way. No matter how pathetic your tool, there’s always going to be someone smaller than you.

That’s nice of you. The film also has a moral ending: True love doesn’t need sex. As much as I love the whole literary convention thing you’ve got going on there, I really don’t believe that. Do you?
I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t make it the core of my narrative. No matter how society works, I always like to think true love will prevail. Love without sex is actually something everybody should look at more seriously.

Are you serious?
Yes. Think about it: Let’s say you have a one-night stand. The morning after, you wake up and there’s someone sleeping next to you. Your flesh might be satisfied, but there’s still a hollowness inside you. That hollowness is the lack of love. But modern society is obsessed with lust, not love, and that’s why long-term couples often turn to adultery. These issues are universal and have been stressing people since ancient times. That’s what we wanted to discuss with the film.

Wow, 3D porn goes much deeper than I thought these days. Well, thank you Christopher, have fun tonight!
Thank you, Elektra, I hope your weekend’s fun too.

ELEKTRA KOTSONI

No, that's not fly tipping or a flash mob. That's hundreds of Harry Potter fans waiting in Trafalgar Square in the hopes of getting to see the cast of the movie as they arrive at the premiere tomorrow.

Hahaha, look at these fucking losers, right? Well I don't know about that; what the fuck did you do last night, Captain Cool? Get stoned and watch South Park online? Thought so. Fuck you. These guys were willing to sleep on the floor without tents in the rain for up to a week because they were so excited about a movie. A MOVIE! You're never going to be that excited about anything in your life. I went to meet them.

Claire (centre)

Vice: So, this weather's pretty awful.
Claire: Yeah, it's horrible! And the security banned tents. Which would've been fine, but they didn't tell us beforehand, so we came with all this stuff, and now we're soaking. I feel really unsafe without a tent too, there's all these people everywhere. I saw police with guns earlier.

Can't you guys buy some umbrellas or something?
I'm not rich! Umbrellas cost like, a fiver. We're going to buy some bin bags to sleep in. We're gonna look like homeless people.

I don't think even homeless people sleep in bin bags. What do your family think of you guys coming here?
My mum funded me! She thinks it's crazy, but she knows she wouldn't be able to stop me so I guess she just has to support it. She paid for my Harry Potter tattoos too.

Scott.

VICE: How long have you been here?
Scott: Six nights, seven days. I flew over from Vancouver for it.

What do you friends back home think about that?
Most of my friends I've met through Harry Potter. So they're all stoked for me. I'm with some of them now. We were the first to arrive and we wanted to make sure people knew that, so we started a line and made sure everyone was behind us. Which eventually turned into hundreds of people in organised lines. Then the guys from Warner Brothers came and saw what we were doing and were like: "You're doing a good job, just keep doing what you're doing," and then they left. So now I'm in charge here. I've been directing the security people and the crowds.

I've read the first couple of the books but I don't remember them all that well and that last movie was a piece of shit... What is it about Harry Potter that made you wanna stay here for a week?
It's just this great sense of community. There are people here from all around the world and I feel like I've known them my whole life. I'm hoping I can get JK Rowling to sign me so I can get it tattooed over.

Nadja

VICE: Hello Nadja, where have you come from today?
Nadja: Germany. I flew over just for this with my group Harry Potter X-Perts . We're the biggest German Harry Potter fan group, we have almost 50 members.

What do you hope will happen on the day of the premiere?
I'm hoping to see Sean Biggerstaff!

Who's Sean Biggerstaff?
Oliver Wood in the movie! He's very sexy. Wait no, Oliver Wood is not sexy, Sean Biggerstaff is sexy. I like his eyes. His smile. He's in a band and I like his singing. It's very good new music. I really hope I get to see him, I've been waiting for him for ten years.

Paul (Right)

VICE: Hey, you having a good time?
Paul: Are you recording? Cause I've got some things I want to say. Basically, I want to be here, it's making me so happy that I can be here for the red carpet and everything, but I wanna say that the people organising this and the council, should be ashamed of themselves. We haven't been allowed to set up tents, so we're all getting soaked. We're being kept in what they're describing as "pens", like animals. And they're just not treating us like human people anymore. It's just not fair. We're cold, we're wet and we're being treated like animals. Did you get all of that?

Yeah. Good luck.

Tara

Vice: You're sensibly dressed, where have you come from for this?
Tara: Toledo, Ohio. I've planned a two week trip around this. I just felt like, it's the last movie, I have to be here. I was just sitting with my husband and I suddenly said: "I really think I need to go to London for the last movie."

Was he cool with that?
Yeah, he's fine with me going. Just so long as he doesn't have to come along. He's not a Harry Potter fan. He'll watch the movies or whatever, but he's not a fan. I've been trying to convert him for many years and it hasn't happened. So that's just something I have to accept.

What else are you doing with your two weeks here?
I'm actually driving around to all the different filming locations from the movie. I came in 2009 to see all of the London locations, but this will be my first time visiting the rest of them.

There's no doubting it, you like Harry Potter loads. Enjoy.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE

Montreal filmmaker Rodrigue Jean was planning to make a documentary about gay prostitutes in London when he was working here in the 90s, but hit a wall. A few years ago, back home in Montreal, he picked it up again - after getting help from a community organisation called Action Séro Zéro. He spent a year with 11 hustlers, filming them against a window that overlooked their city while they told their stories.

Men For Sale, which was recently released here on DVD, is a grimy, touching and utterly compelling documentary - while he speaks to an eclectic variety of young men, most of them are drug addicts, almost all of them working in the sex trade to fund their habits, and they speak with brutal honesty. I phoned Rodrigue in Montreal to talk about his film.

VICE: Hey man, I really enjoyed your film. Why did you decide to make it?
Rodrigue: I spent the 90s in London, I wanted to make the film there. And commissioning editors at TV channels wanted it, but they wanted too much editorial control. In the UK, youth prostitution is much harsher than in Canada. Because of the class structure in the UK, kids are less educated than in Canada, so their lives are much more miserable. And people in the press and media, they buy sex from those young people, so I guess they are afraid that their own kind would be exposed. At the time, there was someone devising new policies for youth, under Thatcher, and he was buying kids, buying sex. Well not children, but young people.

Wow, that's pretty conspiratorial. Was this in the papers at all?
No, no, no, no, no. This is what we hear from the young people. It's the same thing in Canada, lots of people on television, and politicians are involved.

So what were you doing in London in the 90s, were you working with these kids?
Yes I was, there was a project in Earl's Court called Streetwise Youth, I don't think it exists any more, there are different projects now. It was one of the first projects in the world I think, for young sex workers. I started working as a volunteer with the idea of making a film, and I ended up getting trained and being a worker as well. And I recorded stories on video there for this documentary that never got made. It was all ready to go, so when I started in Canada the research had been done, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

And what was that?
To let young people speak for themselves. I saw as many films I could over the years about prostitution, and a lot of them are the same, people come with these ideologies and they meet these sex workers just to prove a point, that prostitution is miserable. And I wanted to let the sex workers speak for themselves. When you work with them, their lives are very rich. Because they encounter so many people and have such difficulty, they have a view of the world that's quite acute. So that I found terribly interesting. People could see this film and it could be their son or their brother or their friend. And it really worked out in Canada, that's what touched people, they felt like we were all part of the same community.

Why does this all appeal to you so much?
Well like lots of people I came to the city from the country. When you come to the city as a young person, you're like interior immigrants in Canada and don't know anybody. So you become friends with people who do all sorts of things, and lots of people I became friends with were surviving as sex workers, I got to know many of them, so I've been close to it by accident all my life.

And you got help from Action Séro Zéro.
Yeah, Action Séro Zéro is like Streetwise Youth, it's a big organisation and they have different projects, and they've had one with sex workers for many years. It took a long time because they get requests from journalists almost every week. But they soon recognised that I knew what I was talking about. But it took about a year and a half of negotiations before I got accepted.

And did it take a long time with the kids to earn their trust?
No. It doesn't take long for them to know who you are. Imagine, they go in a car or in someone's house, they've got to be very aware, very quick at sussing people out. Their survival depends on it. So they suss you out very quickly. I teach cinema at university and I say as a joke I'd much rather work with sex workers than young students, they're much more interesting.

They're certainly very compelling in the film. The first guy, who you come back to a lot, talks about getting businessmen addicted to crack and ruining their relationships, and he says "That's what we do, we destroy lives - all we care about is getting crack."
I still see him now, and I think that was him wanting him to show that he had control over his life. Obviously, if he's addicted to crack, he doesn't have control. 20 years ago, the older sex workers say there was a decent trade when there was no crack around. Now though, with crack everywhere on the street, they have absolutely no control over their lives. And they know it.

The discussions about sex are fascinating too. At one point in the film you suggest that prostitution might be a way of figuring out sexual identity, and you get conflicting responses. One guy says he's not gay at all, it's just work, and the next one says you have to question why you're still doing it with no aversion after a certain amount of time.
We all know who we are, what we like, or at least we think we do. But these people I work with don't have the luxury of a gay identity like you might. So it seems that sexual identity is a luxury. They have sex with men, and they have girlfriends. Their circumstances don't allow them to be so defined.

How is this all viewed in Montreal?
Well it's not very well known. People always make a big fuss about female prostitution, but for most people, my film was the first time they heard of the male issues. And the film was also about that, that it's not seen as important as female prostitution, most people are unaware of it. And I was presenting them as people.

One of the guys in the film says "The guys who vote for laws against us are the ones who come looking for us at night." Do you think that's why it's not a bigger issue, because people are keeping their distance?
Not really. It's with female prostitutes, they'll have sex for free and then arrest them. The police, the judges, there's a whole economy around it. It goes all the way up the chain.

ALEX GODFREY

London-based illustrator Tom Hodge was just a regular guy until the internet discovered the poster he had made for Justin Eisener's new film Hobo with a Shotgun. Before that, Hodge had spent ten years bouncing from one banal graphic design job to another. All of the companies he once worked for have now gone bust, and Hodge has decided to return to doing what he loved. Luckily Eisener and the rest of the people behind Hobo with a Shotgun loved his work, too – he's a bigshot now, but he still found a window in his busy day of drawing tits and guns to talk to us.

VICE: I read that when you were a kid you had sketch books that your mum hated, full of Rambo dismembering soldiers in the jungle.
Tom Hodge: Me and my cousin went through a punk phase when we were seven and we drew all these mohawk biker dudes flipping you the finger with a speech bubble saying "Fuck off". My mum just crossed out the fuck bit and kept them. I do remember my dad being a bit narked at one point, as any good dad would be, I guess, if their son was just sitting round drawing these trashy video covers for himself, going nowhere. There wasn't a great deal of respect for graphic design where I grew up.

Maybe it would have been different if someone had picked up on my dyslexia before I went to university. It was pretty much the same story there, you had to fit into their framework of what they thought design was, so I stopped drawing for a bit. Now I've ended up back where I started, drawing video covers again. I still show mum all the new stuff when I go home, and she still says "I don't know why it all has to be horror." My mum's 70 this year.

Your Hobo poster has really put you on the map. Has Rutger Hauer seen it?
Yeah, he had to give the final approval. I had to tone down the wrinkles a bit for the official release as he thought he looked about 100 years old (I did go to town on them a bit). Older people's faces are the best to draw, you can get so much more character out of the expressions, which is why guys in my posters tend to look a little bit rough or craggy. With the type of films I work on it's more about mood and style than making someone pretty. When someone's unhappy with how they've come out, my standard line is 'it's all about personality rather than pixel perfection'. It's also why I struggle with drawing girls sometimes, but I've found the trick with the ladies is less is more. My illustrator mate Ben Willsher who draws Judge Dredd taught me that one.

Tells us about some of your favourite film posters from the 1970s and 80s.
I love the UK video cover for Return Of The Living Dead, by Graham Humphries. The colours, these thick brush strokes and the zombie jumping right out at you, it captures the tone of the film perfectly. The Burt Reynolds posters were awesome, they really captured a great 70s screen icon, followed closely by the Charles Bronson ones – I'm sort of obsessed with Death Wish 3. I'd love to get my hands on the Italian version, they don't come much more in your face than that. Nobody did it better than the Italians in the 70s, real in-your-face poster art.

What is it about these posters that you tune into?
Action, balls, guns, explosions, breasts, more guns and maybe some blood.

Talking of breasts, your Linda Blair Savage Streets poster has been popular. You've said you were going for a tacky porn vibe. Anything in particular?
Well her Playboy shoots for a start. A lot of the 80s video cover art was a complete blend of titillation and violence, so it was a reflection of that era. I wanted to really overemphasise it, though the film itself is totally ridiculous. From the first shot of a bra-less Linda Blair bouncing down the street, to the girls in gym class, it's just one blatant jiggly boob shot after the next. The film plays out as one big build up to the money shot of Linda Blair naked in the bath. So I wanted to draw out that side of the film. I felt it was important.

I assume you spent much of your teens watching porn.
Who didn't man! I was part of the satellite TV generation, so all our porn was filtered through the German channels, big women being chased by men in lederhosen through barns, or regular guys inexplicably meeting DTF women on the street. It could explain my taste in 70s porn decor. Porn is great for interior decorating.

You've also drawn porn star Mary Carey for Pervert, the Russ Meyer homage film. Obviously you enjoy drawing curvy women.
Yes, yes I do. Mary Carey was a total redraw actually, I made her too chubby to begin with and her boobs where like fucking zeppelins. (Also she did look like a bit of a hound.) But in my defence, she is a chunky monkey in the film – all Russ Meyer girls where shapely, though, so I guess they were keeping true to that vibe. Plus I blame the German porn. It's totally warped my sensibilities.

ALEX GODFREY

Go to Tom's site: thedudedesigns.blogspot.com Hobo with a Shotgun is out July 15th.

For the next ten days, thousands of people with their eyes glued to their cameras will descend upon Edinburgh like a terrifying cyborg army. They will do this because they are or want to be filmmakers, and they will be en route to this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The festival – now into its 65th year, and still looking so dapper – started on Wednesday, and runs until the 26th of June. There'll be plenty of great stuff happening, such as the world premiere of Page Eight, the first film David Hare's directed in 20 years, and that lass Felicity Jones in a "coming of age" comedy drama called Albatross.

But, being the mirror-kissing egotists that we are, we're most excited about our involvement in this year's EIFF. Shorts!

Yeah, shorts. You know: as in short films. From Thursday 'til Saturday next week, there'll be a load of short film stuff happening at the festival. There will be screenings of short films that have already been made, and there will be loads of conferences, discussions and workshops to teach you how to make short films of your own.

We're also throwing the festival's official closing party and awards showcase. It'll take place at the Teviot next Saturday, the 25th of June, from 8pm 'til 1.30am. Sons & Daughters and Summer Camp will be performing live, and Errors are among the Djs who'll be making noise while you sensibly sip the complimentary drinks.

The final eight films from the Nokia Shorts 2011 competition will also be premiering on the night, but you can only get in if you're on the guestlist – to do that, email nokia@edfilmfest.org.uk.

Find out more about the Nokia Shorts Weekender here, while full details of the festival can be got at here.

Jeffrey Harrison arrived in LA in the 80s as an aspiring actor, and soon got into regular sperm donating for $25 a pop at California Cyrobank. Now 52, estranged from his own divorced parents, he exists somewhere between Iggy Pop and Ace Ventura, a bong-smoking conspiracy theorist living with a load of animals in a broken-down RV on Venice Beach with many, many children.

JoEllen grew up with two lesbian mothers who split when she was six; when she was 12, one of them told her about a website that allows children of sperm donors to find their donor siblings and parents.

In his new documentary Donor Unknown, British director Jerry Rothwell follows JoEllen Marsh – now 20 – as she sets off to California to meet the anonymous sperm donor who created her (guess who that is). I spoke to Rothwell, who was previously responsible for Heavy Load, the documentary about the Brighton punk band with learning disabilities. He's a good man and this is a great film.

VICE: I read that this film came about after Jeffrey contacted your producer about another sperm donation documentary she'd worked on.
Jerry: Well my producer was doing a drama for the BBC and as part of the research she put an inquiry out online to find out people's experiences, and Jeffery called her up in the middle of the night. He had a sperm donor Google Alert which he'd look at in his local internet café. I think he was just interested in those issues. And they talked for a year, and she told me "I keep getting phoned by this guy in the middle of the night by this guy with 14 kids."

So obviously it's something that had been playing on his mind for a few years.
Well at that point he had come forward to the kids, and had met some, not the ones in the film. In the States, if you're an unknown donor, what you consent to is that when the child is 18 they can write you a letter, and it's up to you whether you respond to that or not. And he said, 18 years after donating, he was beginning to think "Where are my letters?" So it was obviously something he had thought about.

So clearly it ended up meaning more to him than just a bit of easy cash.
Yeah. Absolutely. If it didn't mean any more to him than that he wouldn't have come forward.

What were your thoughts after you met him?
My take was that you could see these parallel journeys, with the kids looking for Jeffrey, and Jeffrey seeing the kids. And it seemed to me that Jeffrey was in a situation where he'd kind of run as far away from family as you can possibly go, while this completely different family was coming and claiming him. That was one of the things that interested me. I think if he'd been the classic donor, a medical student who was now comfortably off with two kids, it would have been a different film.

Had you had any prior interest in sperm donation?
Well about 10 years before I'd had radiotherapy treatment and they offer you sperm banking as part of that, in case you become infertile, so there was that sense that "There's a bit of me sitting in a room in Hammersmith somewhere, what does that mean?" That interested me in the issue.

Did working on the film lead you to explore that further?
Yeah it's lead me to want to destroy the sample! I mean they can't use it for anyone else, it's for your own kids, but it made me want to draw a line under it, because who knows what the possibilities are.

I told a friend about the film and her immediate reaction was that if she was in that situation she wouldn't want to know who her donor was as it's just someone wanking for cash and it's meaningless. Whereas I imagine I'd be fascinated to know who was responsible for 50% of my DNA.
Well I think what drove JoEllen to find Jeffrey was that mixture of fascination and curiosity. I think what stops people looking in a lot of cases are the potential stresses it might introduce into the family that they currently have. I think JoEllen was in a situation where her mum was really supportive; there were no issues about it. But I met others for whom it was too difficult to engage with.

Jeffrey was just doing it for cash, but then in the film he also dresses it up as these divine miracles in which he was being asked to be a 'soul-caller.' It's hard to tell if he actually thought that at the time.
Yeah. It is hard to tell. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought that at the time because that's very much Jeffrey's way of thinking. But I guess in the film I play with bouncing that notion of being, as he says 'a soul-caller', against seat covers and diagrams of how to wash your hands afterwards, the clinical environment in which that happens.

Yes, your film introduced me to the word 'masturbatorium'.
Yeah, I think that word is unique to the California Cyrobank.

An interesting moment in the film is where Jeffrey looks at his old donor form, and he explains that while he wrote that he was a dancer, he was actually a Chippendales-type male revue performer. It says something interesting about vanity that even in that anonymous, detached situation you'd still want to make yourself seem more attractive, an idealised version of a father.
I think sperm donation almost uses the language of dating agencies, now even more than then - they ask you what your favourite food is, what you like doing in the evenings, things that are probably irrelevant to genetics. Those forms are reliant on what people say about themselves, just as dating sites are.

Does Jeffery like the film?
Yeah, he does. He feels that it sums up that bit of his life.

ALEX GODFREY

Donor Unknown is in UK cinemas June 3. It's showing on More4 on June 28, and is out on DVD July 4.

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Apocalypse is coming in a mere five days according to the Biblical calculations of Evangelical math guy Harold Camping and his Family Radio Worldwide media group. With the clock ticking, there’s no better time than the present for us to take a little look at the countless films and television programs generated to feed the evangelical and born again appetite for all things rapture. To help you make sense of the tribulations to come next Saturday, we met up with Christian VHS enthusiasts Harry Merritt and Reid Bingham of Cinebeasts to get the lowdown on the apocalypse as foretold by the Evangelical film and television industry.

VICE: There's a huge audience of people out there for evangelical films and TV. With no advertising or broadcasting through mainstream media outlets, evangelical media still grosses millions every year. Was this segment of the entertainment industry created to sell Hollywood to people who claim to reject "Hollywood values"?

Harry: Yes and no. Basically, there’s a whole magical world of evangelical Christian programming that exists now, but until the 1990s that group was an untapped market. The parents did not let their children participate in pop culture at all. They weren’t buying CDs, they weren’t buying tapes, they weren’t watching TV. Then someone realized that they could appeal to this market. If you go on extended cable today, it’s kind of ridiculous. There are two MTV clones, one called JCTV and the other called iLifeTV, and they alternate between music videos and extreme sports with a Christian twist. So somebody will be surfing and later, back on the shore, they’ll say that they did it for the Lord and cite some Psalm. It’s got a very interesting appeal. There’s also a Christian children’s channel called Smile The Child, which I find to be incredible and brilliant. And then there’s Bibleman, this sort of Batman who fights for the Lord—that show is designed to appeal to young boys. There are Christian film studios that tap into all kinds of different genres, including these adult action movies that tend to focus on the apocalypse and rapture, which is coming in but a few weeks.

Reid: I’m very excited about it.

Harry: People really did a lot of work before arriving at their May 21st prediction. It makes sense if you can embrace a logic where the world only dates back to 5600 B.C.

Reid: This guy, Harold Camping, is 89 years old. He has predicted the apocalypse twice before and was wrong. He’s going to die really soon, and this is his last chance to get it right.

Harry: Another important detail to remember is that after May 21st we will have to deal with three whole months of tribulations, which is a popular backdrop for many Christian action movies. After the rapture, all the really good Christians will be gone, so the people who are left behind have to figure it out and deal with the bad guys. In the movies, they wind up killing each other in a huge bloodbath. This theme has been beaten to death by one studio, Cloud Ten Entertainment, producers of the Left Behind series starring Kirk Cameron. The Left Behind films are among the best known, but there are many other films that work the same themes starring other washed-up Hollywood actors.

The one I’m most familiar with is Judgment, starring Mr. T, which I came across solely because it’s got Mr. T.

Harry: Yep, Judgment is a classic example. It’s from the director of Tribulation, starring Gary Busey, Howie Mandel, Nick Mancuso, and Margot Kidder. If you ever wondered what happened to Lois Lane after the Superman movies, there she is.

Harry: Stephen and Daniel Baldwin also pop up a lot. Another interesting factoid is that Bibleman is played by Willie Aimes, who was the youngest kid on Charles In Charge. There’s an episode of Bibleman where Willie makes an explicit reference to Charles In Charge, which is a small service to the fans who followed him all the way to Bibleman. The character of Bibleman is all about good morals and lightsaber battles—there’s a lightsaber duel in every episode. It should also be pointed out that Bibleman’s villains are almost always effeminate Jews.

Reid: One is called The Wacky Protester, and his weapon is an acronym which spells “A.R.T.” which means that Bibleman has to destroy “art” in order to save the youth from being disillusioned by The Wacky Protester. It’s not subtle.

Harry: Not only are the villains wacky, effeminate, and Jewish, but they are always focused on corrupting just one child from the local church’s youth group. They’ll say something like “I will take this child and make him prideful!” And for that, Bibleman will kill him.

But making a kid act prideful is super easy.

Reid: Not good Christian children.

Harry: Pride is actually one of the deadly sins.

Reid: What you should know about Bibleman is that he’s an amalgamation of everything a Christian kid can’t get because his parents won’t let him watch TV. He is Batman, Superman, Star Wars, and every other forbidden superhero put together in one perfect package designed to brainwash kids into being good Christians.

Harry: Also, Bibleman is not like a traditional superhero in that he doesn’t live in an approximation of New York City. What works for Batman and Spiderman does not work for Bibleman. He lives in a small, middling city that looks like the mid-Carolinas or Western Ohio or something. It’s this really down-home place, and all the action takes place at the local high school or the local church. It’s a very kid-centric world where the community's main project will be getting ready for a church talent show or something. It’s an attempt to take the pop culture stuff kids want and to transfer it to a safer, more identifiably Christian environment.

It’s like there’s an active back alley between Real Hollywood and Christian Hollywood where ideas and talent are constantly passing back and forth.

Harry: There’s also a resentment of Hollywood for failing to embrace or acknowledge right-wing Christian culture. So they’ll hit these touchstones in the villains, like The Wacky Protester, for example. There are all these archetypes and straw men pitted against regular folks from the South and the Midwestern Christian world. In Left Behind there’s an angsty teen daughter who stopped believing, and therefore can't be raptured with her mother, so she must learn to deal with that. The point of her character is to scold teenagers. One reason Left Behind exists is so parents can show it to children and say “and that’s why you’re going to church this week!”

For a brief window of time, let’s say between the success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ and the financial disappointment of the Narnia sequels, it seemed like Hollywood was trying to apply the blockbuster formula to Christian cinema. The idea was to produce big, expensive films with Christian themes and get the churches to commit their people to attending on opening weekend. Those movies seemed like a sure thing, what happened?

Harry: Right, but a Narnia film still costs one hundred million dollars to produce, and may not make its money back, whereas something like Left Behind is comparatively inexpensive and generates a huge amount of money no matter what, because the producers don't need to court an audience outside their built-in market. It’s guaranteed that the church youth groups will take people to see these films. The same formula applies to a lot of right-wing political books and films. They will always be vaguely successful and reach the threshold of profitability. Setting out to make a big-budget film with global appeal is a lot riskier.

Let’s get back to talking about Hollywood actors who slum in Christian cinema when their stock is down. I want to discuss Gary Busey in particular, because he's universally identified as a debauched clown, and yet he’s a fixture in the world of Christian action movies.

Reid: That’s where a company like Cloud Ten Entertainment comes in. Could Ten Entertainment is the net into which washed up Hollywood actors fall and become trapped.

Harry: That said, there’s a huge difference between someone like Kirk Cameron, who is doing this in earnest as a vocation for his faith, and someone like Gary Busey, who is just earning a paycheck by doing whatever. Several years after appearing in Tribulation, he appeared in Valley Of The Wolves: Iraq which is a Turkish action movie about this gang of evil American soldiers who are terrorizing part of Northern Iraq. Gary Busey plays a sadistic doctor who harvests Arab children’s organs and sells them to Israel. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who would agree to play that role, but Gary Busey took it because he will do absolutely anything.

Reid: I think only Gary Busey has the power to go from Christian films to something like that. Billy Zane was also in Valley Of The Wolves: Iraq and it basically ended his career. Gary Busey is just very special.

Harry: Anyway, my point is that there’s a circuit that exists for Hollywood actors looking for work, and Christian media is one of the places they can turn to and make a buck. It’s a form of failed actor welfare, really. Reality TV is playing that role for a lot of actors right now, but when it falls out of vogue they’ll be back.

Only if they're still here next Saturday.

Harry: We’ll see.

MATTHEW CARON

Between 1992 and 1999, John Bunting killed 11 people in Adelaide, Australia, which is probably why everyone still thinks of it as the murder capital of the country (it’s actually Alice Springs). Bunting’s M.O. was to target those who wouldn’t be missed – people like drug addicts, homosexuals, and child abusers. Before they died, his victims were tortured and forced to record messages to their families saying they were leaving and didn’t want to be contacted. The remains of eight of his victims were found inside barrels of acid stored in a disused bank vault.

Director Justin Kurzel’s new film, Snowtown, is a chilling psycho-drama based on the events in Adelaide, and it totally gave us the creeps. It comes out next week in Australia, so we thought we’d talk to him about it.

Vice: Are there any unique challenges in making a film based on true events? Especially when your subject matter has become modern folklore in Australia?
Justin Kurzel: I think that there is a responsibility to make sure you tell the story with integrity, but a film is always going to be an interpretation. Shaun Grant (Snowtown’s screenwriter) and myself, right from the very start, wanted to make sure that the victims were treated on screen with dignity, and that the violence in the film was always connected with the point of view of the lead character and the emotional truth of the scene.

Jamie Vlassakis, played by Lucas Pittaway

When you say the lead, are you refering to John Bunting or the younger character, Jamie?
To me, the story is told through Jamie Vlassakis, the 17/18-year-old in the film. So when I say the lead character, I guess I mean the point of view the story is told from, which is his.

Jamie is an interesting character. Even though you sympathize with him, you definitely begin to lament his actions, or lack thereof.
I didn’t ever want to sit there and judge him. I mean, obviously he was involved in some pretty horrific crimes, and the film doesn’t shy away from his involvement in those crimes. I guess to Sean and I, the most important thing was that the film posed the question: What would you have done if you were in similar circumstances, had a similar upbringing, and came across a figure like John Bunting? Would you have made different choices than Jamie?

Jamie’s situation is particularly bleak – he’s from a broken home in a community where there aren’t many opportunities. He is often ignored, and we get a strong sense of anger and mistrust from him. Do you feel this contributed to the way his story played out?
I think the fascinating thing about Snowtown is that it was a very vulnerable group of people who were struggling to be heard. And they were quite angry. What makes the story interesting is that a figure like John Bunting came into their lives and exploited that fear, vulnerability, and anger for his own use. I guess with Jamie, at that point in his life, he might have easily come across a positive figure who could have steered him in a different direction. Unfortunately, the figure of Bunting came along instead, and his life took a very, very different path.

Continued on page two.

John Bunting, played by Dan Henchell

Could you describe John Bunting?
The film is based on transcripts and also a couple of books. Particularly, a book called Killing for Pleasure, by Debi Marshall, who did a lot of research around the area with people who knew John Bunting. And while we were casting and doing auditions, we met a lot of people who had known or known of him. Bunting himself rarely spoke during the trial, so there is little known about him. There were a few outside sources who we spoke to that I guess gave a picture of a guy who was pretty charismatic… a bit of an everyman. We heard that he was incredibly generous and that he would look out for kids. For example, when he came into the Vlassakis family he went to parent-teacher interviews and always cooked. So at face value, there was something quite trustworthy about him, and I guess that was kind of important to us and our understanding of how someone like him was able to so quickly galvanize the community and work his way into a family and have them trust him. He’s a guy who brought a kind of order to the place, and that’s definitely something we wanted to show in the film.

Bunting’s mixture of menace and charm must have been difficult to find in an actor. Dan Henchell was a great find.
There’s something very likeable about Daniel. He loves being around people and talking with people – he’s very social. People gravitate toward him very easily, and there’s something trustworthy about him. As the camera gets in close to his eyes, you feel there’s something else there and you find yourself kind of leaning forward to discover what it is, but you’re not too sure about it. I guess we saw that kind of tension, that dynamic, in John Bunting and we definitely wanted to see it in the actor who was playing him.

The realness of the performances in Snowtown is astounding. It’s so understated.
Well, Dan and Richard Green were the only actors who had any kind of experience. The rest of the cast were first timers who we found at shopping malls and street castings, and who lived around where the murders occurred. They all had quite an intimate knowledge of the story we were telling and, I guess, the gravity of it. The first time actors were extremely conscious about doing a good job, and it was very important to all of us that we didn’t make them look like idiots – that their performances came off in a natural, believable, and chilling way. Which I think they do. They should be very proud of what they achieved.

Describe the impact of being a kid in Adelaide at the time these events occurred.
I lived ten minutes away from where the events took place, and I have great affection for the area. I have really wonderful memories of the place, so part of me wants to get a better understanding of how this happened so close to where I was born and grew up.

Continued on page three.

Did that affect your approach?
It definitely meant I had a much more intimate relationship with the film. For me it was about finding a kind of beauty, not only in the people but also the place. A lot of that came from my appreciation of being in the area when I was younger. To me, an abandoned set of suburban blocks used to be my playground, so I looked at them quite fondly, whereas some people might look at them as quite barren. I guess I went into the film with a lot of affection, making sure that we were looking at this story in a very intimate way, rather than the generic, clichéd representation.

The bank where Bunting stored his victims’ remains.

That sense of respect definitely comes across in the film. There’s a pronounced lack of exploitation, which will be a surprise to anyone expecting a “slasher” type movie. How was it received by people who grew up around the story when you premiered it at the Adelaide Film Festival?
It went really well. We were extremely nervous about it, since I had just finished the film maybe two or three weeks before. So the Festival was our first real audience, and at the same time it’s the place where the events occurred. Also, for many of actors, it was the first time they had seen themselves on screen, so we were all extremely nervous.

On the other hand, we were also quite relieved to have it finally playing, because I think there was a lot of discussion about it being a horror or slasher film. It was great to have the film out there and have people respond to it, rather than speculating. It won the audience award, which was an incredible honour for us. I kind of felt like we were connecting to an audience, revealing something new about a story that had been reported in a pretty one dimensional way. I think the fact that there were a lot of other characters involved in the story surprised a lot of people. It was probably a bit different than what they had imagined or heard.

ROYCE AKERS

"Gorno" is a subgenre of cinema that fuses together gore and porn (geddit?) in a manner that's appalling, overblown and often hilarious. Last week, we ran a beginners' guide to the gorno films made in the 70s and 80s, and for the second part of the feature, we spoke to the guy whose job it is to watch this stuff and decide which parts are too horrible for public consumption.

Murray Perkins is the BBFC’s senior examiner of 18 and R18 films, the man subjected to a daily avalanche of pornographic and ultra-violent content. Surprisingly, he isn’t a dribbling, zombified wreck. He possesses a Kiwi accent, a dry sense of humour and a hard demeanour, things you desperately need if you’re going to watch people getting raped and killed all day. I chatted to him about his job, and whether he thinks horror cinema is getting more extreme, or if today's directors are just regurgitating old shit.

VICE: Hi Murray, thanks for talking to Vice. How long have you worked at the BBFC?
Murray Perkins: I started working as an examiner at the BBFC in 2000, and became one of the senior examiners in 2005.

Everyone must say this, but is it a bit like being Alex in A Clockwork Orange, being forced to stare at screens full of atrocious material all day?
Actually, no one has ever said that before. I can assure you we've never clamped an examiner's eyes open and forced them to watch old war footage. That was just a rumour! It can of course be a little challenging on occasion when the job requires us to watch some horrible material. To be honest, though, the most difficult aspect of examining films and DVDs is the tedium of watching hours of low budget, straight-to-video efforts and kids' TV.

I guess the blowjob castration scene from I Spit On Your Grave must be even more jarring coming off the back of a Rastamouse marathon. Do you find yourself cutting more or less than you used to?
There has been relatively little change in the numbers of cuts to non-pornographic material over the last ten years. It's unusual for us to force cuts on anything aimed at the 18 category. There have been a couple of notable exceptions in recent months – specifically A Serbian Film and the remake of I Spit On Your Grave – and in both these cases the cuts were generally for sexual violence rather than violence or horror.

Other than sexy violence, what else do you generally find yourself cutting from horror movies?
In some older horror films, cuts have been made for real animal cruelty.

Gross. I guess you can't get away with that any more, but do you feel mainstream horror cinema has become more extreme recently, as a whole?
In some ways, films made a few decades ago are still more problematic from a censorship point of view than contemporary releases. A large part of that's because of the strong sexual violence which is less evident in contemporary horror films. What there has been over the last five years or so is an increase in torture themed horror works getting mainstream releases.

However, as I said earlier, this is a trend which is already showing some signs of decline. We're told we've seen the last of the Saw series, for example, though it's worth bearing in mind that none of the Saw films have ever been cut. We have recently cut re-releases of old horror films from the 70s and early 80s though, such as the original I Spit On Your Grave and The New York Ripper.

Trailer: A Serbian Film

Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film stirred a lot of controversy last year. Why do you think that was, and do you think it was a significant assault on the boundaries of mainstream horror?
A Serbian Film contains scenes which, on paper, sound particularly strong.

The part where the newborn baby gets raped, and the other bit where the woman has all her teeth knocked out before being suffocated to death with a cock? That sort of stuff?
Yeah. It's difficult to avoid controversy when even a bland description makes a film seem like one of the strongest that has ever been made. However, we took the view that A Serbian Film had some serious intentions. We also took the view that it was not simply a horror film, so it would be wrong for me to suggest that it was testing the boundaries of mainstream horror when it doesn't comfortably fit that label.

Do you think that's indicative of horror losing its power to shock now that the internet's around?
Straight-up horror still has the power to shock. Especially if you show something to someone who doesn't enjoy horror or violence. So long as people have an imaginative approach, and someone else is prepared to fund them – and some people do have more money than sense – there's always some new way to depict something unpleasant.

In all your years at the BBFC, what’s the single most disturbing thing you’ve witnessed?
I've long been disturbed at the quality of some straight-to-video films and can't always believe what I'm watching. It's great that technology has made filmmaking easier and more accessible, but not everyone should be let loose with a budget, however small. I suppose more along the lines of what you are thinking... the misuse of vacuum pumps can certainly have a curious effect on some parts of the human body for which the pumps were not originally designed.

Gotcha. What do you do to recover after a day of wallowing in the grimy depths of cinematic filth?
It's fortunate that most of my time is not spent wallowing in the grimy depths of cinematic filth. I'm as likely to have watched a nearly complete version of the latest blockbuster as Crabs Vs. Cocks III, or whatever. But outside the office I do still enjoy watching good films, of my own choosing, without having to take notes. A glass of a nice New Zealand sauvignon doesn't go amiss either.

Thanks Murray. You're a man who deserves his wine.

TOM KILLINGBECK

In 2011, horror cinema finds itself in a tricky position. More accurately, it finds itself stuck between a rock and a rock hard erection loitering with intent at the edge of a girl's mouth as eels fly out of her anus and faeces dribbles down her chin. How do you scare or gross out kids when anything you can find in the darkest corners of your own imagination has already been dredged up by someone else with an internet connection?

In recent times, directors have certainly had a crack at tackling the problem of a desensitised public. There's been the advent, of course, of the much discussed 'torture porn' era, a horror sub-genre that retched through Lars Von Trier's Antichrist and Steven R. Monroe's I Spit On Your Grave before reaching an ugly climax with 2009's The Human Centipede. Somehow, though, even this happy tale of shit-swallowing and having a corpse's arse for a field of vision was boring enough to prompt a clumsily-titled hardcore spin-off called The Human Sexipede

[caption id="attachment_26643" align="aligncenter" width="635" caption="I Spit On Your Grave"][/caption]

While that was easy enough for filth-hardened Western audiences to laugh off, Srdjan Spasojevic's charming A Serbian Film didn't exactly have people rolling in the aisles. Its portrayal of the rape of a newborn baby, a scene in which the film's star, Srdjan Todorovic, decapitates a woman and fucks her headless torso, and another where a victim has her teeth pulled out before being suffocated to death with a cock proved enough to summon the spectre of Mary Whitehouse back to the land of the living.

All the old art/trash arguments played themselves out as they have done a million times before following the detonation of such devastating cultural nukes as Elvis' swinging hips and Anna Friel kissing another lass on TV. For some reason, though – perhaps a willingness to tally A Serbian Film's gross out sensibilities with an internet-corroded (anti-)social hivemind – no one seemed to want to trace Spasojevic's rank vine back to root.

Continued on page two.

[caption id="attachment_26641" align="aligncenter" width="635" caption="Le Frisson des Vampires"][/caption]

In truth, this brand of sexual horror is nothing new, nor is it nearly as extreme as what preceded it in the 70s and 80s. If you head to your local video store and file through the stacks of well-thumbed VHSs long enough, you might just find something more repellent than A Serbian Film, but put to tape four decades ago. Forget blaxploitation, sexploitation, nunsploitation and even nazisploitation. If these filmmakers are really going to keep up with the levels of fucked up found online, they’ve got to go all the way to Gorno for inspiration. The original cross-pollination of hardcore porn and extreme violence, Gorno, like heavy metal, was unleashed at the death knell of the hippie era.

Horror and softcore had co-existed throughout the 60s, even in accepted stables like Hammer Horror, but X-rated sex and gratuitous bloodletting hadn’t really coalesced outside of the artistic avant-garde. The first instance of true Gorno was perhaps 1970’s Sex Psycho, directed by Walt Davis. Deemed unreleasable, it was shown neither on video nor in theatres. It’s easy to see why. Among its litany of misdeeds: a woman giving head to her recently deceased husband, a dude getting a meat cleaver to the head while bumming his brother and a girl biting off a dick and choking to death on it. This is all played out to an unlistenable organ score that repeats The French Connection theme and "Night on Bald Mountain" ad nauseam.

[caption id="attachment_26646" align="aligncenter" width="358" caption="Erotikill"][/caption]

A couple of years later, and over the ocean the eurotrash industry of the mid-70s was beginning to explode, with directors like Jess Franco, Jean Rollin and Joe D’Amato becoming the established auteurs of sinema. Franco’s Erotikill merged Hammer Horror lesbo-vampirism with psychedelia and hardcore shots, while Rollin’s Phantasmes inserted XXX clips into standard castle/count/virgin fare.

In America, the grindhouses were showing the most outré stuff from across the globe, films like Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a Swedish revenge flick that was rumoured to feature a genuine cadaver having its eye stabbed out. But the US was easily keeping up in the new world market with its own sexual horror, with predictably plotted films like Forced Entry, Sex Wish and Unwilling Lovers being especially transgressive.

Continued on page three.

[caption id="attachment_26642" align="aligncenter" width="635" caption="Hard Gore"][/caption]

1974’s Hardgore is one of the genre’s lost classics, with its title neatly summarizing its exact nature. While Sex Psycho is unwatchable for anyone who isn’t Patrick Bateman, Hardgore is a campy fuck-fest of titanic proportions, perfect with pizza and beer. Riding on the entrails of the era’s occult and supernatural obsessions, it’s set in a Garth Marenghi-style hospital and it’s an epochal slice of demented smut. There are flying dildo rockets, a talking severed penis, a coven of Satanic doctors, electrocuted vaginas, and in-shot boom mics. Its defining scene, which succinctly makes visual the exact point between gore and porn, features a cult henchman fucking a girl from behind on a guillotine, only for the blade to come down and slice off her head upon the point of orgasm.

1976 saw the release of Through the Looking Glass, which connoisseurs still consider to be the benchmark for the genre. It’s the sort of thing that could only be conceived in the mid-70s – a psychedelic epic that etches links between the Marquis de Sade, The Story of O and Alice in Wonderland way before Alan Moore did. Its production values and artistic pretensions secured its place in screenings at the World Theater, NY, where Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat premiered. Beginning with enigmatic Scream Queen and sometime Vogue model Catherine Burgess – who Times Square historian Bill Landis called "a $1.98 Catherine Deneuve" – masturbating in front of a mirror, she’s soon being transported through a Jodorowsky-esque portal into a demonic netherworld where she explores the realms of sexuality with the ghost of her dead dad.

[caption id="attachment_26639" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Through the Looking Glass"][/caption]

As the plot thickens, we’re subjected to a POV shot of the protagonist’s father’s finger entering her vagina (essentially an inversion of that moment in Noé’s Enter The Void), a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that disintegrates into an orgy, multiple hallucinogenic sex sequences and a Dantean vision of Hell that sees a woman bathing in urine and faeces. It’s basically Jaromil Jires’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders re-imagined by Sasha Grey; not a film that’s easy to forget.

The 80s saw sleaze-maestro Joe D’Amato complete lurid sexploitation adventures such as Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust, but, despite the appearance of non-hardcore horror films like Nekromantik and Aftermath exploring thanatophilia (ie slutting your way through the corpse demographic) to degrees of fame, well-made Gorno seems to have slowly faded from our screens with time. There have been plenty of porno horror spoofs in the last few years – from a quick Google I found Re-Penetrator, Night of the Giving Head and A Cockwork Orange. But true Gorno seems to lay dormant in a dusty crypt, while watered down imitators are hailed as the outer limits of acceptability. Fortunately, with the online world at your fingertips, it’s now easier than ever to delve headlong into this wondrous backlog of brain-frying gonzo-terror.

Check back Friday for an interview with Murray Perkins, the man whose job it is to plough through an avalanche of porn and gore as the British Board of Film Classification's Senior Examiner of 18 and R18 movies.

TOM KILLINGBECK

Our good friend and occasional contributor Gabriel Pryce has just released his new short film, Ginger. It was written and directed by Gabriel, and stars Camilla Deterre and Leo Fitzpatrick – yes, the guy from Kids and The Wire, with an original soundtrack by Max Barbaria. You can watch the trailer above, or the whole film here. Well done Gabe.

This week's most era-defining new films, defined by this era's weakest film writers.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED
Paramount Pictures - In cinemas now

I thought romantic-comedies were supposed to have romance and comedy. This has neither. The only light entertainment to be gained from watching this is the couple of WTF?! WHY moments, such as Ashton Kutcher making Natalie 'definitely gonna dress her baby in Crocs' Portman a PERIOD MIXTAPE featuring songs like "Life on a String" and "Sunday, Bloody, Sunday". Note to writers: You can't recycle shitty in-jokes you had with your friends and call it a screenplay. There is also no justification possible for a scene where two of the most dislikeable actors on the planet play-fight to "Bleeding Love". I hate you.
0
ED HARDY

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2
Paramount Pictures - Out now on DVD

There were so many scary things about Paranormal Activity 1: The rude girl with impetigo who kept hurling pic n' mix at me at the Holloway Odeon, the $193,000,000 it made at the box office, and the idea that anyone might fall for the same 'found footage' gimmick that horror directors have been peddling since Cannibal Holocaust dropped in 1980. Maybe most spine-tingling of all was the fact that the director's previous credits consisted of literally nothing but a bit of programming on Mortal Kombat 3. The PC version.

Anyway, Paranormal Activity 2 repeats the same handy cam/poltergeist shtick of the first movie, and throws a dog, a baby, a teenage daughter, a swimming pool, a basement and a superstitious Hispanic nanny into the mix. All of which genuinely improve things. Despite most of the scares playing out like the "It's behind you!" segments of a seaside panto, it succeeds in creating an atmosphere at least as disturbing as Leslie Grantham in a soiled Captain Hook costume. Completely watchable stuff, but unless you're one of the four friends who told me the first one was "fucking scary man!", opt for Rec or Rec 2 instead. That's fifteen less letters you'll have to type into The Pirate Bay.
7
MICHAEL PARAMORE

BABIES
Optimum Home Entertainment - Out now on DVD

OK, I know that this movie is called Babies, but I just assumed that, with this being a whole movie and everything, it might have something more than that going for it. You know, like how Scream isn't just 90 minutes of Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox standing there screaming? But nope. It's just a billion hours of babies doing things. And not even interesting Baby's Day Out-ish things either. Just totally bog-standard baby stuff like eating and crawling and crying and shitting.

This is the world's most expensive home movie. And you know what the only thing worse than watching a home movie is? Watching the home movies of a person you don't even know. I guess this might be interesting to you if you really like babies, but only if you don't have one of your own and you don't know anyone who has one either and you don't wanna freak people out by going to the park and looking at strangers' babies and you've never heard of YouTube. If you don't fall into this category: Avoid.
1
ROY CHUBBY BROWN JR

STONEHENGE APOCALYPSE
SyFy – Out now on DVD

Such is the film industry's desire to constantly dress rehearse The End Of The World that most elements of this made-for-TV doomsday flick are entirely predictable. Like every sci-fi apocadoc, it stars a guy who loiters around the margins of society because he can't go into the centre of town without people laughing at him and telling him he's crazy. It has another guy who starts off as a cynic, but who is eventually won over by the margin-dweller's madcap theory on how to rescue existence. It has A Woman. What most other sci-fi apocadocs don't have is the line "General, I have to be honest. Nuking Stonehenge... there's a chance it may backfire on us."

So this is the plot: A cheap CGI approximation of Stonehenge has gone mad and thrown out a cheap CGI approximation of an electromagnetic pulse that has made some tourists burst into purple fire (see above). Our central character in this film about saving the world is Jacob Glaser, a conspiracy theorist DJ on American late night talk radio, (this is akin to making the male lead in a film about saving rock n' roll a music journalist). Glaser's in the studio when a caller tells him about the shit that's gone down at Stonehenge, so he jumps in a plane and shows up in Wiltshire a couple of scenes later in a black London cab. A complicated plot involving exploding pyramids and a post-human repopulation cult ensues, sped along by a man from America who arrives and decides to bomb Stonehenge to fuck. The enemy is, after all, a stone. How else do you fight a stone?
3
NIALL IHZM

IN CINEMAS: HOWL
It’s all very well James Franco staying true to his roots and doing loads of indie films alongside all the worthy Oscar bait and broad Japatow comedies, but that’s no excuse for starring in this painfully shit biopic from documentary directors (and it shows) Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. It’s an ‘experimental’ biopic, which gives them license to stick all manner of crap where it doesn’t belong: there’s a black and white poetry reading, a good vs. evil legal drama, a homoerotic love story and – at the film’s lowest ebb – half an hour of animation that wouldn’t make the front page of Vimeo.

IN CINEMAS: DRIVE ANGRY 3D
We all know Nic Cage has made some bad movies in the last decade; it was just a fact of life until Drive Angry (or Drive Angry 3D depending on which poster you believe) came along and wrecked the grade boundary. Directly targeting your average Aint It Cool devotee, who would probably happily classify it as “a genre homage” or “a retrograde experiment” or whatever other phrases Tarantino used to excuse being rubbish, Drive Angry is so fucking dreadful that you yearn for the simple, sincere awfulness of something like National Treasure.

KATE HUDSON HAS MADE A FILM ABOUT A WEDDING, IN OTHER NEWS: WEDNESDAY STILL FOLLOWS TUESDAY
Starring Kate Hudson alongside a toddler’s head with a woman’s body (Ginnifer Goodwin), Something Borrowed continues the recent romcom formula of two female leads fighting over one completely characterless auxiliary male (here played by the mighty Colin Egglesfield) while a popular comedy actor (John Krasinski) desperately attempts to bring the LOLs in the margins. Looks like we’re in for another 27 Dresses, huzzah.

$65 MILLION SPIDER-MAN MUSICAL STILL CRAP
The most expensive Broadway production of all time, Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark, is now being re-written less than a month before its scheduled premiere after reviews declared it to be several times worse than 9/11. The U2 score is also being improved (if such a thing is possible) by producer Steve Lillywhite. Meanwhile, tickets continue to sell for upwards of $200, presumably to people who figure they might as well have the worst night of their life sooner rather than later.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR. CAST IN INHERENT VICE, IRONY SPOTTED BY EVERYONE
Billionaire heiress Megan Ellison all but saved auteur-de-jour Paul Thomas Anderson’s career last week when she agreed to fund both his perilous Scientology movie The Master (did I say Scientology? I meant an unrelated, fictional cult) and his upcoming Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice. Now Robert Downey Jr. is said to be considering a leading role in the latter, as detective Doc Sportello. That’s if he can find the time between the next half dozen shit Marvel movies.

Softcore porn is usually a pretty straight up equation: get girls, get them to get it on, and then tie it all together with a vaguely coherent story. The rules are pretty obvious. That’s why you never see people fucking animals, slapstick castrations, dudes “accidentally” getting busy with other dudes, or other serious boner-kills. If you're from the West and that’s the sort of shit you’re looking for, there are special sections of the internet dedicated to siphoning you off from people who like stuff a little more vanilla. For some reason, the back-alley bootleggers of Hong Kong and China don't see it that way.

Notoriously heavy-handed with their censorship laws, China’s response to internet contraband took a page from its ancestry: they built a massive firewall to keep all kinds of kink outside their borders. But for decades, China's black marketeers have been smuggling in porn the old fashion way, in the form of bootleg, Category III Hong Kong sexploitation flicks. Category III doesn’t mean anything specific to the Chinese other than “sex and/or violence". It’s like they were going to make an R-rating and an X-rating, but got lazy and figured one was good enough to cover all the shit out there that’s “unsuitable for children”. This means that movies like Ang Lee’s histrionic epic Lust, Caution and Johnnie To’s critically acclaimed Election get put on the same shelf in Hong Kong as shit like A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapist’s Union.

As epic dramas with just a touch too much blood or naked grinding get slung in with the comedy torture-porn, the surreal fuck-fests are given bigger budgets and wider distribution that we'd ever imagine here in the West. They're still technically "illegal", but if you go to any major city in China you’re more than likely going to find entire bazaars littered with boutiques selling bootlegs in open sight.

Here are some of our favourites (and everything here is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, in case there were any small brains out there who hadn't figured that already).

VIVA EROTICA

This scene probably looks familiar. It's a rip-off of that sped-up fucking scene in Funeral Procession of Roses. The same scene that Kubrick admittedly ripped off in A Clockwork Orange.

Starring Leslie Cheung, Viva Erotica was actually nominated for Best Picture and Best Director (along with a dozen other categories) at the Hong Kong Film Awards back in `97. The film is basically like a mashup of 8 1/2 and Boogie Nights but with more sex and less Mark Wahlberg. It’s one of the more tame examples of Cat-III erotica, but the fact they got Leslie Cheung and a young Shu Qi – both highly acclaimed actors in HK – gives you a good idea of the different standards these films are held to in the region. Hell, even Jackie Chan was up for smut in the 70s.

SEX AND ZEN

I’m becoming sadly desensitized to this movie the more times I watch it. Who would’ve thought you could get bored of watching a guy catch a severed horse dick in his mouth, chicks scribbling calligraphy with their snatch, or the occasional theatrical horse rape? Sex and Zen isn’t very Zen at all, to be honest, but at least they don’t make a joke of having your tool amputated and then eaten by a dog (oh wait, they do).

THE FORBIDDEN LEGEND: SEX AND CHOPSTICKS

This was the first Cat-III film I stumbled upon in Chinatown last summer, so it definitely deserves mention. When I asked the guy at the store what it was, he shrugged and said he didn’t know in a way that told me he definitely did. It turns out it’s based on a famous 17th century erotic Chinese novel called The Plum in the Gold Vase, which makes this porno the closest I’ve come to reading literature in the last five years. The story details the life of a master of the Taoist erotic arts, who essentially goes around China sinking the pink of whoever he wants because that’s what he’s famous for.

A CHINESE TORTURE CHAMBER STORY

Despite its cheerful title, this movie isn’t quite as funny as Sex and Zen or Sex and Chopsticks. It’s not that I don’t get a kick out of exploding penises, nympho-nannies getting passed over by rapists, or ejaculatory eruptions of blood – the latter of which was shot with a surprising artfulness, now that I think about it. I’m just still trying to work out how ghost-on-man mouth rape got past the brainstorming phase of production. Despite all that, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is by far the most infamous Cat-III period piece, and if you don’t get off on people being stabbed under their fingernails then at least you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not the only person who likes to think their dick makes sounds like a laser gun.

MICHAEL BLOOM

By 1.30pm UK time, we'll know who's gonna be 'in it to win it' at this year's biggest people-who-pretend-to-be-other-people awards ceremony ON EARTH. What does that mean? It means that this blog post will only be relevant for a few hours, so you should probably read it now.

BEST PICTURE
A gay movie (not about AIDS).
A gay movie (about AIDS).
Whatever the Coen Brothers have made this year.
A film about a wealthy, successful, happily married man who has everything (or does he?).
A Pixar movie with a couple of sad scenes.
Black Swan.
An indie film no one has ever heard of or seen, but was named "film of the year" by Time Out.
"This year's Precious."
"This years The Blind Side."
A gritty lad movie that has a complex emotional story at its heart ("I know we're only one year into it, but I don't think it's too soon to say 'Film of the Decade'" - GQ).

BEST DIRECTOR
Not Martin Scorsese.
A woman ("proving Hollywood is no longer a boys club".)
Someone who just made a movie led by a smug, George Clooney voice-over.
A young director who made a quirky, cliched indie movie about a sharp-tongued American teenager having an existential crisis in the suburbs which seemed fresh and new to Academy voters who refuse to lower themselves to episodes of Scrubs.
If Roman Polanski has made a movie this year, then him. He won't be able to collect it. People will whinge.
Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan).

BEST ACTOR
A musician playing against type in a serious role.
A comedian playing against type in a serious role.
Something that required major weight loss (50 Cent will Tweet angrily if this man wins, before going back to creating memes for black people).
Someone really old who is seriously running out of chances to win an Oscar.
An ex-star who lost his looks to drugs but made a glorious comeback this year by battling his demons on screen.
A handsome actor playing an abusive husband.
William H. Seymour Hoffman Buscemi.
A crappy MOR actor who has been churning out crappy MOR comedies since the early 80s. "Criminally overlooked" by the Academy in the past.

BEST ACTRESS
Natalie Portman (Black Swan).
"Manic Pixie Dream Girl".
Meryl Streep/Helen Mirren (depending on whose turn it is to win it this year because they are not dead yet).
A teenager who just made her screen debut playing a character who is wise beyond her years that goes on a life altering journey. Will never be seen in another movie ever again.
A usually beautiful actress who was willing to humiliate herself by playing an ugly person.
A famous actress playing a sassy, 'real-life' southern woman. Went to live with her before playing her. "She's quite a character. If she doesn't like you, she'll tell you about it. Believe me."
An older black woman. In case of a win, cut to Oprah, Halle Berry and Sidney Poitier as they wipe tears from their eyes.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
A film about a boring foreign issue that no one cares about. Director will use winner's speech to talk about said boring foreign issue and accuse the gathered celebrities of colluding in some kind of grand hypocrisy.
A film showing war with the US from the "enemy's" point of view.
An Eastern European movie where the scenes appear in random order. Only here because Academy voters were afraid people would think they didn't get it.
A serious animation from a country that you didn't even realise was a country.
Something with incest (the sexy French kind. Not the gross Take a Break kind.)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
A film about a hot human rights issue (narrated by George Clooney/Brad Pitt).
A film about a hot environmental topic or a species of animal (narrated by Whoopi Goldberg/Morgan Freeman).
Something about The Sudan.
A political documentary made by a man who will use winner's speech to make awkward comments about US politics.
Something about gay, teen suicide.
Film that uses anecdotal evidence to show that America is not the heartless, brainless superpower that everyone thinks it is.

BEST SOUND EDITING, BEST SOUND MIXING, BEST ORIGINAL SCORE, BEST FILM EDITING, BEST COSTUME DESIGN, BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY, BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Whatever is nominated for best picture.
Black Swan.
A disappointing second movie from last year's breakout director.
A terrible, structureless vanity project made by a generally adored actor/screenwriter.
Inception.
A quirky indie movie that plays with the conventions and limits of whichever genre it is set within. ("Shot for under $1000 and edited entirely on iMovie, will (x movie) redefine the way we make cinema?" The answer to this question has never been "Yes".)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Something that features a lot of shots of things rusting in the desert.
A serious movie set in space.
Black Swan.
A film poking fun at the Hollywood studio system.
A political thriller shot in Budapest.

BEST ART DIRECTION
A best picture nominee set in the past.
A best picture nominee set in the future.
A best picture nominee set after the apocalypse.
Black Swan.
Movie set in the 50s starring an Oceans 12 cast member.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Whoever played the biggest female role in The Social Network.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Whoever played the biggest male role in Black Swan.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Something by Enya.
A song from a movie about a tortured blues/jazz/soul/country singer.
An African/Indian song from a quirky ethnic dramedy.
Something by Randy Newman.
The end credit music from whatever cartoon Disney yawned out this year.
Whatever she dances to at the end of Black Swan.
The second most catchy song from the most serious musical to come out in the last year.
The indie song that served as the soundtrack to an unconventional relationship between a "Dharma" and a "Greg".

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Whatever Pixar has made this year.
Whatever movie Dreamworks copied from Pixar this year.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE

This Sunday, VBS presents a showcase Richard Kern's films about photographing ridiculously attractive women at the eighth London Short Film Festival.

We're long-time admirers of Richard's work, but if you're somehow still in the dark his career kicked off in the early 1980s, when he produced a load of experimental and erotic films with people like Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz and Sonic Youth on New York's Lower East Side.

Kern's showcase for the LSFF will feature that earlier work, alongside all the artfully arousing footage we've been stockpiling at VBS for the last few years. It starts at 8pm at the Roxy Bar & Screen on Borough High Street.

There are 200 other films showing at the Festival, which starts today and lasts a week. Obviously I can't go into detail here and it's Friday afternoon so I'm feeling pretty lazy anyway – CLICK HERE for more information.

Racism's a very grey area in Marc Isaacs' documentary All White In Barking. Dave, a middle-aged man born in East London's Bow, is a BNP campaigner who talks a lot about "indigenous white people" and "the natives of this borough", but loves his mixed-race grandson. One woman has an instinctive aversion to Africans because of their cooking smells and loud music. The result of Isaacs' encounters with these people is a fascinating and often very funny exploration of disparate attitudes in a melting pot town. It's just been released on DVD with another of Isaac's films, Men Of The City, which is great too. I spoke to him.

VICE: Are you a native Eastender?
Marc Isaacs: Well I grew up in Redbridge, which is ten minutes away, the last London postcode before you get out into Essex. I went to the University of East London in Barking too, so the area was familiar to me.

When did you have the idea for the film?
In 2006, the BNP had just won 12 seats on the local council, and I thought it could be an interesting starting point.

How did you feel about what was happening with the BNP?
I was never worried that support would suddenly grow, so I didn't want to make it sound like more of a problem than it was. As soon as I started talking to people, I realised it would probably be a passing fad [it was - the BNP lost all 12 seats this year], but what was interesting was how much the town had changed in just a few years. In other parts of London it had happened very slowly, and in inner London it's just part of the fabric, but out in Barking it was a little bit different. A new wave of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Africa and Eastern Europe entered the area quite quickly, and for those people it felt very intense, given that they were people who, on the whole, wouldn't spend their time in Africa. In the beginning I thought it would be interesting to make almost a comedy of multiculturalism, because on a day-to-day basis some of these contacts can be quite humorous.

Yeah, one of the funniest bits in the film is when you tell Dave, the BNP campaigner, that the kid he's just been canvassing is mixed-race, and he had no idea.
With Dave it was more about someone's inability to deal with change, and what happens when you close yourself off. That's a much more universal theme that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with racism. A lot of people tend to close up when they get older, and that's what interested me. And that other element of Dave having a mixed-race grandson was fascinating, that's why I decided to go with him as a character.

[caption id="attachment_15032" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Dave on the beach"][/caption]

What did you tell people about what you were setting out to do?
One method we used to find white English people who'd been in the town for years was just to knock on doors, like a canvassing politician. We said we were making a film for the BBC, and people would open up very quickly about what was happening in their town. Dave voiced all his uneven feelings. He was quite tricky to deal with, he didn't want to be filmed at first, he said he'd never even been photographed. He was very anti-BBC, he came out with the usual line about Liberal credentials, a bit of bravado and machismo, but he was also sincere, and it just took a bit of time for me to gain his trust. Once he understood that I wasn't out to stitch him up, he felt comfortable with it.

Were you surprised about how open he was about his views?
I think he's totally beyond caring, which was a feeling I got from a lot of people in the town. They've stopped worrying about what other people think of them. It was quite refreshing to hear people talking so honestly, even if they were expressing views that were kind of hard to listen to. Nobody was politically correct. It's just how they feel, and people should be able to talk freely.

Do you think they're aware of how provocative some of the things they say are?
There's probably some element of truth that they're a little bit cut off - they're not living in Islington and reading The Guardian, there's the feeling that they're slightly from another time. I was quite drawn to the more elderly people, because they were more revealing, a more accurate barometer of the changes that had happened. I think their language and they way they speak was all tied in with that – my mum and dad are Jewish, my dad's a black cab driver, and if, for example, he picks up a black guy who runs off without paying, he comes out with views that... if you really read between the lines it's not racism, it's a kind of uneducated ignorance at worst.

I'm from a Jewish family as well, and Jews are traditionally tribal. My grandmother was certainly a lot more comfortable with other Jewish people than anyone else.
I think the tribal thing is crucial. We were going to call the film Tribes Of Barking at one point, because what became very interesting to me was this sense of people's need to gravitate towards their tribe, it's so deep-rooted. And when you get older you want to feel rooted, and part of that is trying to find imagined connections that make you feel secure, and I think that's why there are these obsessions with people tracing their family trees.

When you hear those tribal sentiments that are expressed in the film from minorities it seems completely understandable. But when you hear someone like Dave talking about indigenous white people...
Yeah, they get crucified. It is really complicated, and I did meet people out there who were clearly ideologically racist. Dave did some work for the BNP, but was never a signed-up member, although a lot of the characters he was hanging around with were. I think Dave was a more instinctive character on the whole. I think our generation adapts a lot easier to a fluid identity, but people of Dave's generation have lived completely different lives to us.

There's that absurd bit where Dave warns his daughter that her mixed-race son will, later in life, encounter bigots, although he doesn't seem to be talking about himself.
Exactly. He knows these people because he is one, in a way, and yet he doesn't express it in that sense. It's always fascinating, the subtext of what people are saying. Reading between the lines.

ALEX GODFREY

Being English, I've never understood the concept of American college fraternities. Well, being English, and being the type of person who has no interest in drinking pints of piss and puke. We don't even have jocks in the UK, let alone fraternities, which as far as I can tell are a sort of homoerotic jock heaven where rape counts as a practical joke.

Todd Phillips, director of alpha-male comedies The Hangover, Old School and Road Trip, made the documentary Frat House in 1998. It was his second documentary, following 1993's Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies - men behaving badly is his forte. Frat House is an ugly look at tribalism, abuse of power, machismo and other deplorable male traits. Phillips and co-director Andrew Gurland (who recently directed The Virginity Hit) spent a year infiltrating fraternities to make the film. Initially we get to see some predictable jock partying (bong-smoking, naked ladies sitting on boys' faces) before the directors get to know members of New York's Beta Chi fraternity, which is lorded over by an unfathomable prick called Blossom.

The self-proclaimed "King of this school", Blossom boasts of biting heads off rats and gives Phillips and Gurland access to the hazing – a mix of Full Metal Jacket violence and Freemasonry insanity. Blossom later threatens to kill the directors, and smacks Gurland in the face, so they move to the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity in Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, finally getting the inside footage they want by volunteering to become pledges and signing up for the ten week hazing process. Phillips ends up being shoved in a dog cage and covered in beer, ashes and tobacco spit, while Gurland is hospitalised with stomach problems.

Frat House was commissioned by HBO, but never aired. After it was screened at the Sundance Festival students involved in the film accused the directors of staging scenes and misleading them. Phillips and Gurland denied the allegations, claiming the kids were trying to get themselves off the hook, although Phillips did later admit - unapologetically – that some of the kids were drunk or stoned when they signed their release forms.

Frat House isn't readily available, but after being reminded of the film the other day, I poked around and found it on Google Video and you can watch it beneath. If you can handle the shoddy quality, take an hour out, because whatever happened, it's stupidly entertaining.

Ten years ago, I interviewed Todd Phillips about another film for another magazine, and we spent some time talking about Frat House. That part of our conversation was never published, but I've resurrected it. Here.

Vice: I’ve been reading a lot about Frat House.
Todd Phillips: Frat House is fucking cool.

I was particularly interested in how involved you got, getting locked in a dog cage with beer and ash being thrown at you.
That's all there, yeah. That's sacrificing for your craft. The movie is about hazing and rituals and the things men go through to belong. Everybody's so afraid of standing out in this world that they will even get beat up and peed on and thrown up on just to be part of a group, which is pathetic. It's an American phenomenon, I don't think you have it in England, but it happens in every college in America. The first school we were at, the kids ended up turning on us and throwing us out of the school, saying we couldn't film there any more. So Andrew and I went to the next school, and to gain permission, to sort of alleviate their fears, we said, "We'll go through it, whatever you do to the pledges you can do to us, so then it will look like we totally condoned it." So we took some of the heat, and they accepted that deal and... cut to me in a dog cage, and me getting thrown up on.

What was going through your mind when that was happening?
It's funny because you feel excited because you're getting exactly the footage you wanted. That's why I was there. I wasn't upset in any way because this is why I came, and the fact that it was happening meant it would only be over sooner, which was a good thing. Better than waiting around for it to happen.

Can you talk about the release controversy?
The controversy stems from one thing. When you turn your cameras on the sons and daughters of rich white Americans, you're going to get heat for it. HBO has made many award winning documentaries and they've all been about pimps and whores and strippers and crack and taxi-cab confessions and blah blah blah. They've been easy targets. They've made movies about skinheads and anti-abortion maniacs. Important movies, but movies about the fringe of society. The fringe, I feel, are easy targets, but Frat House is about upper-class white Americans whose parents are lawyers and doctors and politicians. It sounds like I'm spewing crazy paranoid controversy theory, but it's true. And when you do that movie, these people, who have many resources, will threaten to sue. You're either fight that battle or not, and HBO has chosen not to fight that battle. That's the controversy. It's a shame – they own the copyright, they funded the entire movie, so I've no option.

What did the kids accuse you of exactly?
These kids said they redid things five times. Not once. Never did I even say, "Oh wait, walk through the door again." Which will happen in documentaries all the time. But we didn’t even do that. That's not the way I do a movie. What people don't understand about good documentary filmmaking is, it's screenwriting. You write the movie before you show up. And you manipulate everybody in the room to say exactly what you want them to say. That, I'm guilty of. That is how I make documentaries. 'Cause you know what? Fly on the wall filmmaking has gone out the window, because people are too aware of the power of the camera. To me, documentaries are now about manipulation. It's sad but true. You go in knowing exactly what you want and you come out with exactly what you want. That's just manipulation, and that I'm guilty of.

ALEX GODFREY

By now, if you watch VBS.TV (and ordinary lame TV) you should have come across Ben Anderson. He's guided us through his  trips to Afghanistan, and told us about Obama's War on VBS. Tonight his new film, Bravo's Deadly Mission, a Dispatches Special, airs on Channel 4. The film follows a platoon of US Marines as they are dropped into the middle of Taliban stronghold,  Marjah as part of Operation Mushtaraq. We called up Ben to obsequiously fawn at his feet.

Vice: Hello Ben. I just watched your film, it's great.
Ben: Thanks!

One of the first things to hit you as you watch the film is the terrible relations between the Afghan National Army and the American soldiers.
Yeah, it was no surprise, I have seen exactly the same with the Brits before. A major with the British Army in 2007 described them as untrainable. The most ridiculous thing here was that it was called operation Mushtaraq, which means "togetherness" and the General was claiming that the operation was Afghan led, I mean, that’s ridiculous. The problem is that those guys have to be able to stand up alone and do the job so we can leave. No one is willing to say the truth publicly, but the soldiers I talked to on the ground say that those Afghan soldiers are ten years away from being able to do the job – but we cant say that, because we aren’t going to stay there for ten more years.

There is one moment when US marines pretty much shove the afghans through a door first so that they can say the operation was in part afghan led.
The same with the flag-raising ceremony too, it's all a bit forced. Unfortunately I didn’t capture it on film, but two Afghan soldiers had heroin overdoses in camp where we were sleeping, they were saved by the US medics.

Do the US soldiers feel that these ANA troops are a risk to them?
It doesn’t have that much affect on them really. Each platoon has only two ANA soldiers with them, if it was equal numbers then yeah it would be very different. When I went out with the Brits they said it was like "herding cats, cats with guns".

The soldiers you were with didn’t seem too constrained by the rules of engagement.
Apart from the superior officers, most troops would say they they’d rather have much looser rules of engagement so they can just go in and kill people and the battle would be won. But they come to accept that the rules of engagement are the way they are because civilian casualties are what have turned the local population against the troops.

Towards the end of the film you touched on the fact that NATO and the Afghan government are really trying to instill this sense of nationalism and unity amongst the Afghans.
Yeah, but it’s completely split and a lot of people think that all they're really doing is training one side for a civil war which is going to happen when we pull out. The ANA is massively dominated by the Tajiks and the northern groups while the Taliban are overwhelmingly Pashtun and those divisions are absolutely rife.

There's a major part of the film where C Company accidentally fire a rocket into a compound housing civilians. They all seem traumatised by this, especially McClane.
Yeah he’s a Rhodes scholar who spent six years at Oxford studying Arabic and is now in a country where no-one speaks Arabic. They read all the neo-con stuff and really believe they’re out there fighting the war on terror. He said to me that the people of Afghanistan shouldn’t fall under the heel of Islamic fascism again, he really has thought it through and thinks he’s out there doing a good thing. So the rocket accident hit him really hard.

It’s amazing how calm the troops seem, even with the constant threat of attack and betrayal.
By the end of it a lot of them invite danger. Some soldiers openly want a fight, they believe that if they do get into a fight that they'll come out as winners. The problem is if they do the military job perfectly and clear-out the Taliban, at some point they have to hand it over to the Afghan National Government. Two years ago Marja used to be controlled by the government and the police there had the reputation of being thieves and rapists. The local people prefer the Taliban, where there isn’t any corruption, or rape, or robbery. That’s where the battle for hearts and minds will be won or lost, getting the people to trust the government and not the Taliban.

BRUNO BAYLEY

The best movie of all time has been released in Japan and might have just been released here, we can't tell from the trailer. It's called Kyonyu Dragon , or Big Tits Zombie 3D , and it blows everything Tarantino or Romero have ever done out of the water.

The tagline is "The Boobs to Die For The Big Tits Dragons," which we're guessing was sort of lost in translation, but it still gets the main thrust across, which is something about boobs and dragons.

We can also gather from the trailer that the zombies in the film are decidedly more Asian than our traditional, Western zombies. For example, there will be sushi zombies, geisha zombies, samurai zombies, ping-pong playing zombies, "and more." There will also be a midget fanning a stripper with a handful of cash at some point.

At about two minutes in the sound inexplicably goes out, but it doesn't really matter. When you've created a tour de force like this you don't need to rely on cheap filmmaking tricks like audio to carry your trailer.

Via Dangerous Minds

You might have seen the trailer for the new documentary, Shooting Robert King. We told you to watch it, so if you haven't it's your own fault. Robert is a war photographer and an intense guy. We had a pretty amazing conversation with him.
VICE: So, Grozny was your first experience of war photography. Did you just up sticks and head for a war zone?
ROBERT KING: You know, it was always hard. This industry is extremely hard. There was no wider recognition of my colleagues' commitment to the profession. We got a couple of pages, some coin, a bit of money; that was it.

Do you think that has changed at all these days? Do the public have a better idea of the risks and sacrifices involved in that sort of reporting.
Do the people understand the sacrifices that we make every day for the freedoms of information? The effort required to record some image of the present in the hope of documenting the past? I don’t know, but a lot of us die for that.

What led you into this profession?
It was being so desperate to get out of the place I called home as a child. The tool to get out was a camera. But that camera also offered courage, honour, and integrity. I grew up in Mississippi and Tennessee, shit, you know. It’s just a hard place, a hard place to dream. Dreams here cost you your life. We are putting up a plaque recognizing a French AP photographer that was murdered for photographing the riots in Mississippi in 1962, he is just now getting a plaque, 46 years later. That’s where I grew up, that killer is the age of my parents.

How did you end up working in Chechnya?
It started in 96. I was still getting banged around in Sarajevo a bit, but I was making good images. It’s a hard business to get into, I was green. It was pretty bleak, but when I got to Chechnya I had already made inroads with AP in Sarajevo, they agreed to let me string for them in Chechnya. That really helped keep me going. I kept knocking on their door every time I was in Sarajevo, offering pictures. They would let me develop their film, there was a lot of trust, so then I went to Chechnya and I scored big. But honestly it was my colleagues who recognised the work.
This documentary is not so much a testament to me, but to the sacrifices that our colleagues make – it is dedicated to seven members of the Frontline Club who have sacrificed everything for that dream.

As you said, you were green when you were there first. Were you accepted?
No. They were the worst man. Whether they are jumping your ASA  three stops or whatever, it’s a hard knock profession, it's all in good fun, but no one can afford to become emotionally attached, it is so hard to bury friends and colleagues. It is a hard life, but they don’t go home to another life, it is their life, it's our life. So no, they weren’t accepting early on.

Did you ever expect the business to affect you anywhere near as much as it did?
No, oh my God. No. I mean, I'm fine. I think people are too emotional about things, how they are affected by war, fucking blah blah blah fucking war. Life is fucking war. There is no difference. It’s all about securing your name, building your generation, naming streets after you, naming streets after conquering forces. Life is war, that’s what it’s all about. We have acts of kindness so we don’t kill each other, there are acts of forgiveness that keep our global society going, but it’s all about war, that’s how I see it. So yeah, sure it has affected me, but not in a bad way. I think it just made me more honest and capable of seeing the realities, that were being blinded by the mass media and all this feelgood shit that leaves us weak and allows people to conquer us.

How did the film come into being then? I mean, you shoot stills, so where did the footage come from?
The footage is all from other film makers. It was a very organic process with no intentions. They didn’t say: "Robert, you have got so many great fucking awards in this industry, you are top of your game, we want to do a story on you." No, it was more like" "You are a complete fuck up and you are interesting". The film doesn’t promote my photography, it is about the sacrifices people make to produce these images in these environments.

Aside from films like this, and your aims of having your own photo agency, do you think mainstream media should make a concerted effort to inform people better about these sacrifices?
No, I don’t give a shit about that, I just wish they would dress down, get rid of their armed fucking bodyguards, and stop turning it into entertainment. At least in America, where all I have is Fox News, it's all entertainment journalism. It all has an agenda, half of it is lies, half of it is incorrect. I am not making a political point, it’s about moving forward and sticking to the principals, many people before us have died to inform the public.

BRUNO BAYLEY

Carson Mell is a writer and filmmaker whose stuff mainly falls into the deserts, drugs, and music genre. His characters, at first glance, are the type of men who would eat a few peyote buttons and chug a handle of whiskey before fucking your girlfriend. If you look closely however, you realize that while they would indeed plow your woman, they would at least regret it and probably give you some of their drugs or whatever the next day.

When I spoke to Carson about his work a few months ago he told me he had just finished his second novel, The Blue Bourbon Orchestra. His first, Saguaro, The Life and Adventures of Bobby Allen Bird, is about a washed up musician and recurring character in Carson's films who stumbles through middle age with a bottle fucking whatever stray groupies he's got left. Eventually he befriends a monkey named Chonto before finally getting his life back together. It's hilarious and great and obviously there's a lot more ins and outs, but thems is the cliffnotes.

Carson has just released a teaser trailer for The Blue Bourbon Orchestra, which I've watched a few times now and has left me feeling a little scared and a lot confused. Here's what Carson has to say about it:

"Spanning the late eighties to the present, The Blue Bourbon Orchestra is an epic novel narrated by an alcoholic guitarist named Charles Leslie deBeau. With great candor, humor and regret, he tells the story of the greatest force he ever encountered, so powerful that it completely changed the direction of his life and many others: the fading alt. country band The Blue Bourbon Orchestra, and its silver-tongued lead singer, Guy Fisher.

Guy Fisher appears in the trailer in the animated chef mask, playing his character 'The Warlock' in one of the many homemade music videos that he and Charles make out behind his house."

Here's the trailer:

And here's Carson's short, Chonto, a supplement for Saguaro.

JONATHAN SMITH

You can read an excerpt and buy Saguaro now on Carson's website. The Blue Bourbon Orchestra will be available soon.

If you've ever been to a march attempting to legalise drugs you'll have seen Howard Marks preaching in his funny stoned manner. If you haven't ever been on a legalise cannabis march, then you'll have seen Mr Marks' face in every book shop you've ever been to on the cover of Mr Nice , his autobiography. It's the very same autobiography they've just made a film of, which is out on the 8th Oct. Click here to find out more.

You saw the photos on the Photo Blog from Peroni Nastro Azzurro’s Accademia Del Film’s Wrap party a couple of weeks ago, and you quite possibly attended the party and enjoyed the free entertainment on offer without any idea what all the celebrations were actually in aid of. Well, the clue is in the name. Peroni Nastro Azzurro were celebrating the start of their new ‘Accademia Del Film’, dummy!

The Peroni Nastro Azzurro Accademia Del Film is basically an institution set up to promote the uniqueness of Italian cinema. As part of this, the Accademia selected a small group of young filmmakers and encouraged them to get involved in projects embracing the values of Italian cinema. Gabriela Muccino (he of Will Smith and general Hollywood fame) directed the first short film and it is now up on their website for all the world to see.

If you study film a lot, you will probably notice the neo-realism that was once a reaction against the fascism of Mussolini, but now has come to typify Italian filmmaking; the honesty and gritty lack of heroism of the characters, and signs of humanity’s perpetual struggle that characters tend to endure in the Italian depiction of life. If not, you can enjoy film with a fresh palate and take from it what you will.

You can watch the finished film here:

http://peroniitaly.com/gb/

And also watch some of the films they made around the stylistics of Italian cinema below.

On Heritage:

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On Imagination:

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On Realism:

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On Aesthetics:

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The general consensus is that the film will be tasteless and exploitative. Critics don't like Uwe Boll. I've never seen any of this films but wanted to know what he was doing with Auschwitz , so last night I got in touch on Facebook, called him up, and we talked for half an hour. Or, I should say, he talked. He was angry.

Vice: Hi Uwe, it's Alex.
Uwe: Hi.

So I saw the trailer yesterday, which went viral pretty quickly.
What's pissing me off is if anybody else made a movie like this it would be in the running for an Oscar. I do it and I get bashed by everybody. Especially people who totally ignored the last six, seven movies I did. Rampage or Stoic or Tunnel Rats are really realistic, political, fact-based movies. So is my new Max Schmeling movie. But when people write about me, they still centre on House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark , and they completely ignore the 15 movies I made after them. They would never do that with any other filmmaker. You cannot judge a guy based on two movies shot six, seven years ago. Ron Howard said my film Darfur was a masterpiece. Amnesty International said it's the best film made about Africa. I just don't get it any more. If people have eyes in their head and saw these movies, they could not say "Uwe Boll is a trashy filmmaker, the worst filmmaker on Earth," whatever, it is completely absurd. Rampage and Darfur went to 30 film festivals and were sold to 100 countries. WHAT THE FUCK! Why do I get counted as an idiot, I'm a Doctor of Literature! I studied economy! I'm not Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino in a fucking coffee shop and only have knowledge about film journalists. The public opinion about me is completely on the wrong track. Sorry that you're getting all my frustration, because you're the only guy I've had a conversation with about this.

It's OK.
Everything I make gets completely ignored. 50% of people don't even think the Holocaust happened, and I make a movie about it and I get criticised for it. Half of my crew for 22 movies have been Jewish! My best friend where I live in Vancouver, Jonathan Shaw, is Jewish. It's completely absurd! They put me in a corner, saying it's an insult to the Jewish community, it's totally bullshit! It's the opposite! I could be celebrating how much attention the movie's getting, but really it's pissing me off, people are just not getting what I'm doing, they just don't watch the movies, and they're not aware what my agenda is. Look, I'm not a subsidised filmmaker. I did a movie, Heart Of America , about school violence, and it made no money, and again Ron Howard said it was a great movie, everybody should see it. The next movie I did, in 2003, was House Of The Dead , the worst movie I've done. But it made over $30m and it cost $7m. So is it a big surprise that after that I made more video game-based movies? No! It's absurd that the worst movie I ever did made the most profit. That's when the Boll-bashing started, and I became known as the worst filmmaker of my generation. But then I started writing my own movies again, Postal , Seed , Tunnel Rats , AND THESE ARE ALL GOOD MOVIES! But the Boll-haters slam every film I do, and normal journalists close their eyes and follow in their footsteps. I'm a film enthusiast, I know what a good movie is, and my movies like Rampage and Stoic and Darfur are not good movies, they're great movies! Darfur is better than The Hurt Locker ! People watching it at film festivals were crying!

Right.
Every single movie about the Holocaust concentrates on one character, stories of survivors, heroes, whatever. And I wanted to show the Holocaust for what it was. In Auschwitz, more than 50% of people who went there were dead in two hours. 4,000 babies got shot in the head in front of the gas chambers. So for me, it was time - when not only the Iraqi President but a lot of people are going sloppy on genocide issues, I think it's important to make the movie. And much of the movie is documentary - I did a lot of interviews with school kids about the Holocaust, and that's the start of the movie. It starts with that, and then we go on a normal day in Auschwitz, where you see what I showed in the teaser, you see the killings, and it's super shocking, but this is how it was, in reality. We see the selection process, when the train comes in, and so on. And then I go back to the interviews. In German schools, I interviewed people who had no fucking clue what Auschwitz was! In German schools! So you can imagine in other countries it's already forgotten. And that's also part of the movie. The trailer is shocking, but I wanted to show what the purpose of the movie is. And I only played the guard because in Croatia, where we filmed, we couldn't find German speaking actors for the smaller parts, so I said I would do it. And the sequence ended up in the teaser not because I wanted to feature me, but because it's a heavy shot.

Stanley Kubrick abandoned the Holocaust film he was making because he said to make an accurate film about the Holocaust it had to be unwatchable.
I agree. And I think my movie will be almost unwatchable for most people. But personally I think it's necessary to show this stuff. An Auschwitz movie like this would never get any financing, I made it because I was shooting Bloodrayne: The Third Reich in Croatia, and put a few hundred thousand on top of that budget to make this because we already had all the set-ups, the concentration camp, the train station. It was an opportunity to make something that nobody would ever finance, but is necessary to make. To make people ask how people can do something like this, planned, organised, calm killings. The really scary part of the movie is that it all went down like a normal day in the office. Only 15 or 20 minutes of the movie are the killings, 60 minutes are organising things, who picks people up off the train, what's the selection process, and it's all done calmly because there was no way out. It was like a meat factory, it's the same procedure. There were no big revolutionary fights, no big goodbyes, it just happened. You come in and then you're ashes. The main reason I made the movie was to show the craziness of what humans are capable of. I saw a British documentary with interviews with SS people who worked in the concentration camps, people in their 90s, and they weren't regretful, they slipped through the net so didn't get put in jail, and when the BBC asked why they killed Jews, they had no clue. They didn't know why Jews were supposed to be bad, they just thought it was a fact. They didn't question orders.

Is the film an idea you've had for a long time?
Yeah. I've had it for years. But I never had the opportunity to do it, especially as a German. And I'm not loved in Germany either. But to be honest, what is Germany doing? If you make a Sophie Scholl movie or an Anne Frank movie, you get subsidies, you get into the Berlin Film Festival because everybody's happy that you're showing that there were Germans in the resistance. But that is bullshit! The reality is that everybody went with it. Only 40% voted for Hitler, but then 90% went with it and didn't question why Jews were getting deported. And after the war they said they thought the Jews were in working camps or being sent to the front line. Everybody had an excuse. And if you make a movie now you only get support if you show Germany in a positive light. The real hate I'll get will come from Germany, because I don't show any Germans in the movie who have any doubt, who think they shouldn't be doing this. You see how it was. I wanted to show a totally normal day in Auschwitz, which was completely unemotional, like a butcher basically, who has no bad feelings about cows or pigs getting killed. This makes it scary, but that's the point of the movie, to show what humans can do.

But inevitably people will call it torture porn and say it's exploitative.
But it's not true. If you see the finished movie, you'll see there's only 20% where you have that violence in your face. 80% is the daily routine in the camp, and the documentary and the interviews. So it will not satisfy Hostel fans.

Well that's where the trailer is possibly misleading then, because it only projects that part of it.
Yeah, you're right, it is a little misleading, but it was important for me to make a point with the trailer. This is the strategy of the movie, there are no heroes, it's not one person's story, it's really like a documentary. And it needs to show what happened for real. There has never been a movie with a camera inside a gas chamber. In Schindler's List there is for two seconds maybe. But this is how it was. I have for example a very good scene with a father and his six-year-old son. And the moment they get separated, there's no screaming, no big music, no saying goodbye, it just happens in one second in the crowd during the selection process, and then it's over, and the son gets gassed and burnt. I think it's the opposite of torture porn, it will make a lot of people cry because it's so unemotional. I'm sad that people don't give my movies a shot, they're worth it, I put my money and heart into them, and I hope I'll get the same chance as other filmmakers.

What sort of reactions did you get from people in Germany when you started talking about making the film?
I never talked about it. Nobody had a clue until I put the teaser up. And people are flipping out in Germany. The distributor working on the release of my Max Schmeling boxing movie, which is coming out in October, said the Auschwitz trailer is a disaster for them. They said, "This has ruined your reputation, we had such good press for Max Schmeling , and now you've released this Auschwitz trailer." But Auschwitz is a way more important movie than Max Schmeling . And it's way better. And people on websites have complained that I'm doing this to make money - if I wanted to make money I would have kept my money and not spent it on this. It's totally absurd to think a movie like this is for box office. It's the opposite, we all know that it will be really tough to get any cinemas playing it.

Are you concerned about upsetting Holocaust survivors and their families?
No. Because we talked to Holocaust survivors, and we talked to [Israeli Holocaust memorial centre] Yad Vashem to get stock footage for the documentary material. They know that it's good to make sure that nobody forgets what happened. So even if it's disturbing and shocking, it's better that it exists than it doesn't exist. So I think they will hopefully step up and support the movie when it's done.

When will it be done?
I think November, and I will try to get it into the Berlin Film Festival. But I don't think they'll take it.

ALEX GODFREY

[caption id="attachment_19562" align="aligncenter" width="572" caption="Murray Lerner (left), with Ken Russell"] [/caption]

VICE: Hi Murray. How did you get on board with the promoters to make the Message To Love ?
Murray Lerner: They had come to America to try and get a star for the previous festival. And they got Dylan, by a fluke. And that made the festival famous. The person who helped them get Dylan was a guy called Bert Block, who is the reoccurring cynical-agent guy in the film. He knew me and liked my film about the Newport Folk Festival [Festival! ], so I said, “oh, how about making another film?”. I flew to England to discuss it. And little by little, I inched my way into making it.

Did you always know you wanted to make a film about the behind-the-scenes business end of things?
I had the idea of showing the tensions that were developing between the commercialism of the music and the idealism of the music. I wrote it down, so I have evidence of that. It was just my thinking, based on watching the scene evolve and via my Newport film. I wanted to capture the change in that movement as it moved into the year 1970, fuelled by ambiguity and contradiction generated by the Sixties. I went there a few weeks before and stayed a few weeks after, and tried to document the spirit of the times and the culture and the culture of the kids. I concentrated on trying to show the behind-the-scenes activities. I pre-rigged the offices of the promoters, so whenever there was a crisis, they called me and I recorded it. They were part of it - they may say they don't like that now, but at the time they liked that bit a lot. So we got fascinating and unusual contrasts between the music, which was great, and the tensions of setting up a festival.

Did you like the Woodstock film?
I thought that Woodstock put a gloss on it that I didn't agree with.

Would you say yours is the dark half of that film?
In a way, but of course it's also just realism. Reality is not a nightmare. But if we have a dream, it's always going to be shattered if that dream is unrealistic, I think. Unfortunately, I believe that continues today. But that's a bigger story.

Looking back on the sixties, and especially in Message To Love , I'm always amazed by the groupthink of the kids.
When you get a large group together like that, there's a ripple effect, peer pressure, when they're all trying to fit in with what their feelings should be. I mean, the cost of getting into the festival was £2.40. Even then, that wasn't a lot of money and I'm sure most of those kids could've afforded it. I think the idea of making it free was more about getting together in a communal way and feeling excited about being part of a mass movement. A lot of kids told me that the main reason for coming to a festival like this was to be a part of something, to mix with kids who were like them. I actually have that in one of my interviews. Also, I think they promoters misread the audience. They definitely didn't know how to do crowd control. Rikki Farr made one blunder after another so far as I was concerned.

I think Farr comes off as basically earnest.
Oh yes, but he was bewildered as to how to deal with it. I don't know if anyone could find any way to deal with it, frankly. Screaming at the crowd, I don't think does it. Saying: “We've lost money, we're open to creditors” is just going to fuel their cynicism. I don't think he knew how to phrase it so that it would chime with the kids.

Did you get on with the promoters?
During the filming I got on with them. Subsequently, we had our issues.

How so?
I think they were greedy about the film. They wanted to make as much money as possible for themselves. Remember that they had six corporations set up, they were pretty smart with money. They had set up separate corporations for each aspect of the festival: the tickets, the food, the drink. I have footage of them talking to their bankers and all that, which they let me do, which they liked me to do! I have a lot of unusual stuff, which I never used, about mortgaging things twice.

Were you sympathetic to the hippy movement, or were you there more as an anthropologist charting it?
I think I was very sympathetic to it. Then I got disturbed by how it had degenerated into a commercial event. I think a lot of people tried to make money out of it. I don't know how far the movement got in actually furthering its principles. When they did the Woodstock film, some so-called hippies threatened to bomb the shows because the makers had made so much money out of it. The filmmakers claimed they hadn't made much money, but actually they had. Unlike my film.

Yes. I guess the operative question then is why it took you 25 years to get a release?
It could be that I'm a bad salesman. On the other hand, I had a demo reel that excited everyone. But at the last minute studios often withdrew because, well, there were several reasons. Oddly enough, they were worried Woodstock was already out and it was too late to make a film about that. And the artists, two or three years later, weren't as commercial as they had been. It seems strange now – now, they're classic-rock, but back then, they were just not as saleable. Oddly enough, people didn't think Hendrix was so successful. Also the combination of what I wanted to show, I think disturbed people in the music business. They said it didn't, but it did. They didn't want to show the business side of the industry, and I insisted on that. And I insisted on the music. I had one person who wanted to back the film, if it was just documentary footage – I said no. I'm trying to revive it. It has something of a cult following.

Like Noel Gallagher.
Yeah. Oasis called, and they said they wanted three soundbites to use in their song [“Fucking in the Bushes” ]. I wish Oasis were more successful at that time! If only it was “Wonderwall”. So, I wrote an Oasis song, in a way.

The old duffer you dub “The Commander”, who talks about how “behind the hippies is black power, and behind black power is Communism.” What a great line!
It is a great line! All of it seems eccentric and stupid now, but back then there were very powerful people who felt much like him. When he says it's “the death of Anglo-Saxon civilisation as we know it”, I think there were plenty people around back then – an establishment – who would've echoed his sentiments and tried to suppress the movement. They didn't win it that time; let's hope they don't win now.

Were you shocked by the hippy who you film talking about giving his four-year-old son acid and pot?
Yes. But I didn't express it as shock. I let the audience make that judgement. I'm glad you mentioned that. It's a good simple icon of what was happening. He's so collected and calm, but people's ideals were running out of control.

Bloody hippies.

GAVIN HAYNES

A year after Woodstock, Joni Mitchell finally got her chance to play her totemic song in front of a crowd of peace-n-love-lovers even bigger than Woodstock – one of the largest gatherings of humanity ever assembled – the 600, 000 who made their way to the Isle Of Wight Festival. Brother, was she in for one fucking big disappointment...

In Murray Lerner's documentary of the event – Message To Love – immediately after “Woodstock”, an ageing American hippy called Yogi Joe invades the stage. He tries to grab the mic, and begins ranting about how he “has to get a message through to the kids on Desolation Row”. The stagehands grab him, roughly manhandle him offstage. Then the crowd start booing. A day earlier, Yogi Joe had mounted the same stage to talk about how the festival was being turned into a “psychedelic concentration camp”. Backstage, Lerner's cameras capture him in full flow of LSD-paranoia: “Rikki Farr came to me on Wednesday. He gave me a hundred tickets and made me the head of the committee to paint the fence invisible. He wanted to paint it invisible because he was so embarrassed by it.”

Up on the far hill of the Afton Down site, the so-called Desolation Row, French and Italian anarchist kids lie camped outside the festival's massive two-part fence, separated from the paying crowd by twin tiers of corrugated iron sandwiched by guards dogs, and prepare to tear down those walls like an invading army. All for the price of the £3 admission fee. In August 29, 1970, the hippy dream is finally getting its nuts kicked in by reality.

When sociologists and shoot-from-the-hip pop-pundits analyse The Death Of The Sixties – the wave breaking and rolling back – most of them point to one of two events. Cielo Drive – Sharon Tate getting carved-up like a cantaloupe by the Manson Family. Or Altamont – a deranged Meredith Hunter pulling a pistol on the Stones, then paying for it with a fatal knife through the chest c/o an intoxicated Hell's Angel security goon. Really, though, this was all just Bad Stuff Happening that correlated with a certain date. If you want to talk about the real Death Of The Sixties, then you've got to talk about the ideals of the sixties – freedom, free-ness, universal brotherhood - all getting beat down by the cold-porridge realities of life, the necessity of commerce, the “They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, maaaan” cynicism of the business bods, and the simple painful truth: that evolution has bred the human race to be both selfish and self-absorbed.

That's why The Sixties ended exactly 40 years ago this weekend, as the Isle Of Wight's promoters were pitched into a battle of wills against the movement they were trying to celebrate, over what everyone in Lerner's film seems to refer to as “bread”. “Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, want it, want it, want it. Bread man bread, pay, pay, pay, ” as Rikki Farr, the event's MC, rants to the cameras from his offices backstage.

If Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock documentary is the sanitised high noon of the hippy dream, then Message To Love captures the grubby nightmare full-frontal. It is quite possibly the greatest festival documentary ever made. And it is also one of the least well-known. This is mainly because Lerner sat on the tapes for 25 years before he managed to scrape together the cash to secure a release. In part, he claims, this is because his backers were uneasy with him showing the wires: the moolah-mill nuts-n-bolts financial realities of staging a big pop concert. It was only in 1995 that it slipped out, with help from the BBC.

Throughout the weekend, Farr takes to the mic again and again, to cajole, threaten and promise the increasingly agitated crowd into paying its own way. “Once we hear that 170, 000 have paid, then we will make the festival free,” Farr decrees at one point, illustrating that he knows nothing at all about game theory. Someone who could have told him that his optimistic promise is a big disincentive for anyone to actually cough up was the renowned academic, game theoretician and White Panther, Dr Robin Farquharson. But the South African social scientist is instead filmed busily rousing the rabble and decrying the organisers. “It's become a feudal system... the rockstars are a new aristocracy... the promoters, the groupies, are their courtiers...”

Farr himself comes across as an odd combination of the false joviality of an MC, the peevishness of a man out of his depth and on the brink of ruin, and a genuine idealism about the social possibilities of this kind of mass-gathering. He constantly strives to put himself back on the good-guys team. A compromise will be reached, he tells Lerner: if the kids are broke, then they can paint the fences of the site, and earn a ticket that way. Simple. The kids duly paint swastikas on the fence. They write Fuck The Guards and arse about chucking whole buckets of paint over each other.

Meanwhile, the rumours that only 40, 000 fans have so far actually paid to get in – way short of the 170, 000 required to break even – start feeding back to the artists. Promoter Ron Foulk is filmed arguing down the phone with one band's management about breach of contract. “I'll tell you what, Larry,” Foulk quivers, “We haven't got the money right now.”

“Tiny Tim's straight,” Bert Block, the festival's agent, smirks down the lens, “I don't know what time he's going on. We had to give him the money first: can't sing with his ukulele without the money – it doesn't tune-up without the money, Murray – you understand? Right, in cash. In Pounds. They're in there counting it now.” We see a stack of cash being readied, bills freshly unfolded from gate-takings, ready to circulate straight back into Tiny Tim's pockets.

Back onstage, Farr changes tack again from carrot to stick. Now, the festival will not go ahead unless more people pay, he threatens, simply because many of the artists refuse to go onstage without their fees. For their part, the artists, desperate not to be cast as new aristocrats taxing the people, shift the blame straight back. Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson denounces the idea that he's a breadhead. No one has said they won't play without their money, he whines. And he's right of course: why would any artist bother saying that? After all – that's what they employ their agents to say on their behalf.

As if Anderson's flautistry and codpiece combo doesn't announce it clearly enough, musically, there's another death-rebirth motif going on. Prog is busy being born as hippy carks it. The newly-formed Emerson, Lake and Palmer start their first-ever performance by firing an antique canon, while Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix give their last-ever UK performances before they get busy with dying. Somewhere in the background, a torch is being passed. Though perhaps not the one that sets fire to the main stage just after ELP.

Outside, the clamour gets louder. A group set upon the fence, and start rocking it back and forth, shaking it to pieces with their bare hands. They breach the fence. A guard dog is killed. The security, outmanned and outgunned, relent and watch passively as the drifters pour through.

Finally, Farr and his fellow backers have had enough. On the final day, Farr gets back onstage. “Please open the gates. Whoever wants to come in let them come in. We've lost everything. But when I say everything I only mean money. We are now open to creditors. But the very fact that you are sitting out there, and we have been able to make this happen is worth more to us than any money ever could.”

Every great documentary needs character development, and finally, he is redeemed. The crowd applauds. He raises his arms in a double-peace sign. Or is it the Richard Nixon salute? The ambiguity of the gesture is great. He’s a complex man, Rikki Farr. Many years later, Rikki Farr's complex relationship with it's-only-money would take a bad turn. In 2008, he was jailed for 18 months in Arizona, for hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax evasion.

On the Monday, it's pissing down, the camera surveys the wrecked site: fires smoulder, litter is piled sky-high. The Dream has been converted into a series of broken umbrellas, empty beer bottles and crumpled joint stubs. “It'll never happen again,” Farr chokes out through the drizzle, in a weird echo of Withnail's final soliloqy. “This was the last great event.”

It was. In 1971, Parliament passed The Isle Of Wight Act – a sort of proto-1994 Criminal Justice Bill – which was designed to ban all such mass-gatherings. The greatest decade in the history of man was over. They had failed to paint it black.

GAVIN HAYNES

Tonight at the Frontline Club in Paddington we're hosting an exclusive screening of VBS.TV's new documentary, Afghanistan in the UK. It's already been praised by CNN who showed it on their website last week, but if you want to see it in it's complete, non-episodic glory, you should come down, watch it and have a chat with the people who made it as well. Email benwalton@viceuk.com for a chance to get on the limited free guest list. Details of tonight's event are here.

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