I’ve never been one to have problems with my family, save for my twin brother. If we’re visiting, we can usually manage five days together before we are at each other's throats. Once we pass that threshold, every action, gesture, or comment can be perceived as a slight that draws the other into a frenzy of aggression. We constantly give each other one more chance, one more chance, one more chance, and then it’s too much. We spiral down and it gets ugly. It’s not the type of fight with friends where there was a beef, and it gets resolved. No, our fights are primal. Only time and distance can cure the anger. 

In 2008 Brady Corbet set his sights on that particular kind of macho anger in his short film Protect You + Me. He captured the ebb and flow of a man’s irritation as it pushes against a wall poised to break. The man, played by Daniel London, eats dinner with his mother at a restaurant. The two of them share small talk, but their minds constantly stray. They bring things up only to dismiss them. Both are victims of noncommittal attitudes, unable or unwilling to confront what truly ails them. A stranger in the restaurant becomes the object of their anxiety for supposedly staring at them. They try to ignore him to no avail. Their uneasiness may or may not be of their own construction. 

Corbet leaves the antagonist offscreen and instead focuses on the growing desperation in his main character. London’s reaction to the situation is simultaneously understandable and totally crazy. Repetition is key to conveying the emotions in the film. London obsessively cleans his hands well after they’re clean. The mother mentions things only to circle back to them again. Everything culminates and builds until Daniel snaps and gets stuck in a loop that is unsettling to watch.

Corbet was only 18 when he made the film. He first rose to attention for a brave and harrowing performances in Thirteen, when he was just 13, and then for starring alongside Jospeh Gordon-Levitt in Gregg Araki’s childhood sexual abuse drama Mysterious Skin, at 15. Famed director Michael Haneke tapped him to star alongside Michael Pitt, Naomi Watts, and Tim Roth in his US remake of Funny Games. After that film, he set out to make Protect You + Me. It premeired at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it was was given an honorable mention for Best Short Film. Despite being a young dude, he knows his way around some difficult emotions. His performances caught the eye of the Borderline Film boys, and he went on to star in their moody and unsettling films Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer. Currently, he’s prepping for his debut feature and set to star in a few more pics that come out later this year. He has continued to make smart and mature choices both in front of and behind the camera, and I only expect more from him as he continues to age. I reached out to Brady to clarify and elaborate the process behind his new, unusual film. 

VICE: How did this short film come about? What made you want to direct? 
Brady Corbet: It was supposed to be a series of three short films on the theme of protection. Each film was concerned with an adult male character being faced with a hostile or aggressive situation and tracked his reaction to it. The films all had a moment where the character would get caught in a "loop of aggression" in an effort to demonstrate the absurdity of violence and the male ego. I was 18 years old when I made the film, so it's all a bit weighed down by it's concept, but I still find the film fascinating when I look back on it. The following two films were meant to be shot in France, the following year with an excellent DP named Yves Cape. But we lost the financing and they were never completed.

I had always intended to direct. I was an early cinephile, so in a way, it had been a long time coming. When I was working as an actor on Funny Games in 2007, I asked our cinematographer Darius Khondji to shoot the film, as well as that film's producer, Chris Coen, if he would be interested in supporting the project. They both said yes.

How did you conceive of the climax? It's pretty fucking disconcerting and intense and I don't know if I've ever seen anything like it.
I have a lot of theories about redundancy and repetition in regards to both the visual language of a film and its narrative content. I've often felt that that redundancy can aggressively reinforce certain narrative themes while also allowing an audience to reassess their relationship to what's happening at that particular moment in the story. It is the same way that by the third time you have heard the chorus of a pop song your relationship to it has changed from the first time you heard it. You've only really processed the melody by the end of the song.  

The current project I am working on has shades of these concepts but explored in a more subtle way. My short film was about testing these limits, whereas my upcoming feature will hopefully implement them in a more elegant fashion. 

At what point did you decide not to show the antagonist on screen and why?
I guess the antagonist was irrelevant because it never really mattered to me why he was bothering these two people—I was only focused on the paranoid reaction to the scenario by Daniel's character.

What are you working on now?
I am in Paris now doing very early prep work on a feature I am directing called The Childhood of a Leader. The film is, in part, about events leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. 

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'How to Live with Bedbugs'

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 ambiance 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 Tobey 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:

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Premiere of Daddy’s “Love in the Old Days (Kolour Kult Remix)” Video Directed by James Franco

The ATL Twins Take Us Behind the Scenes of the 'Spring Breakers' Premiere in LA

I've grabbed so much stuff off the streets of New York. Just a couple days ago I found a Billie Holiday record leaning against a fence. And in the past I’ve found umbrellas, frames, games, shelves, money, chairs, a bookshelf, cups, and plenty of other knickknacks. New York City’s streets are littered with treasure. Unfortunately, most people don't take advantage of it because they're freaked out about getting bedbugs. I've never understood how annoying having bugs could be, which is why I've always grabbed whatever I wanted off the streets. That is, until I saw the aptly titled tutorial, How to Live with Bedbugs.

Filmmaker John Wilson grabbed his camera and hit his sheets shooting when he landed an infestation of the bedbug fuckers. For six months he filmed everything that was happening to him and his roommates and created a sort of hopeless tutorial. At points it's upsetting, but mostly hilarious.

The film is a combination of Wilson voyeuristically filming his roommates and their infestation, while inserting singular and surreal moments only a place like NYC can provide. There’s a sort of ramshackle charm to the whole piece. Where else can you see a guy getting a handjob on a public train or a dude break-dancing alone under a Bushwick streetlight next to kittens, or landlords buying solid gold watches? Here it feels right at home, because it helps this very small film take on a large scope. Technically, How to Live with Bedbugs is about something as tiny as a pinhead, but it pulls off a story much bigger than four dudes being sloppy and unfortunate. In fact, it’s quite poetic. Enjoy!

John Wilson has an ever-growing library of life lessons and observations on display at JohnsMovies.com. Luckily, he also told me the answers to a couple questions I had about his movie.

VICE: How did you conceive of this project? When did your personal bedbug story turn into parodying "how to" films?
John Wilson: I've been toying around with the whole "how to" genre for a little while actually. I just love that style of editing and the narrative possibilities. I thought a lot about the lives of people who make those videos and I thought it would be a really great format for a memoir. That, mixed with the fact that I was obsessively documenting the entire process. I was afraid that if I didn't do something constructive with that whole experience it just would have been a net loss.

Why the pseudonyms?
Good question. Not really sure about that one. It's a little contradictory, but I don't really want the films to be about me necessarily. Pseudonyms make it a little easier to shift perspective and approach the subject matter with the appropriate persona. That also may be looking into it way too much. 

Has anyone ever gotten upset with you for filming them so voyeuristically?
Not really. I could be doing much weirder things. I keep myself at a safe distance and try not to disturb the scene. 

How does it feel to be bedbug free (for the moment)?
I will always have this lingering fear that they will return one day. A lot of the bed bug industry is actually directed towards prevention rather than extermination. Like, there's that subway ad right now for this TSA compliant rolling suitcase that you plug in and it heats up everything inside to 140 degrees to kill any bed bugs that may have latched onto your stuff during a vacation. I also have a really terrifying cutout from sky mall of this one product called the Bed Bug Thwarting Sleeping Cocoon. It's something I could talk about for hours but at a point you just need to forget they exist. 

What kind of camera do you shoot on?
This little Canon camera that is about the size of a cigarette box. The only two requirements I have for a camera are that it turns on quickly and has a great zoom. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: Food

I know you've woken up before and thought to yourself, I’m hungry, I should eat breakfast. But you wait too long to eat and go the whole day starving, thinking to yourself, I’m so hungry now, I could devour a small child or an old lady. Crazy Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer must have felt the same way when he completed this three-part short film entitled Food, which tells gastronomic allegories of "Breakfast," "Lunch," and "Dinner" in his trademark surrealist style.

Considering “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” it goes without saying that the first segment is the most powerful in the trilogy. "Breakfast" begins with an older gentleman entering a decrepit room where another man is sitting at a table with worn out directions hanging around his neck. The diner carefully reads the directions on the other’s neck, pulls out some change from his pocket, and inserts it into the man’s mouth like a vending machine. The man pops, creaks, chugs, and “turns on,” before a dumbwaiter rises from the depths of his innards, bringing with it a vaguely appetizing breakfast of sausage and toast. "Breakfast" dismantles and reassembles the notion of an assembly line and ends with a haunting sentiment. In creating this dystopian food farm of a film, Svankmajer uses a combination of live action with human actors and stop motion with clay prosthetics, aided by a discomforting sound design filled with slurps, grunts, and groans.

"Lunch" comes after "Breakfast," as it should, and finds two men again waiting for food to be served, but they are unable to get a hold of the waiter. Instead, the older man takes initiative and starts eating everything things in sight, like flowers, a napkin, a plate, table, his clothing, and—in a nod to Charlie Chaplin—his shoes. The younger gentleman follows suit and eats his suit. When nothing is left to eat and the two are both completely naked, the true nature of hunger comes out. 

"Dinner," the final film in the series, is the simplest and the shortest. It displays a bourgeois group practicing a form of self-mutilation, where everything from your severed limb to your family jewels can end up on the end of a fork. This segment is not a pretty sight, but it epitomizes Jan's grotesque and satiric view of the how we consume food and what that actually means.

Watch Food below and lose your appetite.

Jan is our greatest living surrealist director. Firmly established as cinema’s go-to-guru for the grotesque and perverse, his feature films such as Lunacy and Conspirators of Pleasure have introduced audiences to a singular, slanted world of European decay. His films twist the familiar (body parts, food, household objects) to reveal the absurdities of modern life. He started from behind the Iron Curtain in the late 60s, even being censored and banned from working for seven years by his government. His best known films are Little Otik, Jabberwocky, Faust, and the best version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - 'I, an Actress'

Linear time doesn’t exist for the unnamed Melanesian tribe of the South Pacific that Private Witt find himself surrounded by. Free from the tyranny of the clock, their daily life unfolds to the rhythm of their environment. The islanders enjoy the freedom of their faculties and a profound spontaneity that blends work and play in what seems a pre-Modern paradise. To Witt, an AWOL American soldier in the Pacific Theater of World War II who has taken up in their midst, this must be Eden rediscovered. He happily adopts their way of life, awakening his hardened soldier’s heart. For a glimmering moment it seems as if he has escaped the cold, cruel, and dehumanizing technological killing field of the 20th century.

Quite rudely, a monstrous troop carrier ship appears on the horizon, pouring toxic black smoke into this verdant ecosystem, and contrasting the freedom of humanity with a ghastly mechanical prison: the apex of scientific rationality and so-called development. The present in its most grotesque form has arrived in this fleeting utopian exception to assert its horrific reign. And Private Witt soon learns that the course of history cannot be reversed. There is no escape from the horrors of the present. To flee is vain. He must be fodder for the war machine.

This sequence from Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line captures the central dilemmas of the director’s esoteric films, and echoed in later film like The New World. His works are philosophical meditations set to film, on the meaning of life and the promise of death, on embracing nature and its destruction by modern technology, and on the possibility of spontaneity, fulfillment, and love in a world that reduces living human beings to alienated atoms increasingly unable to relate to one another, to themselves, and to their environment in a meaningful way. His films embrace existential questions with a depth unparalleled in American cinema. Soliloquies drench his films’ soundtracks and pose the big questions bluntly. Malick’s pretentiousness is pure. 

His new film To the Wonder, which opened in the US this month after premiering at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is no exception. Ben Affleck, taciturn in the manner that Malick prefers (his Hollywood hunks are seen and rarely heard), plays Neil, an American testing the soil of the polluted American heartland with stoic disaffection. His romance with a Ukrainian woman living in Paris named Marina (Olga Kurylenko) soars to dreamlike heights only to crash down to reality time and again. Neil flees his failed tryst into the arms of an acquaintance from the past (Rachel McAddams), but his problems are not external to himself, and his failed relationships are doomed to repeat, leaving him seeking the past once more. Malick intertwines scenes of ecstatic warmth and oneness, the source of the film’s title, with scenes of disharmony, dissatisfaction, and even violence. A visual master, Malick captures luminous beauty as few directors can, and does not flinch in depicting its raw reality.

While To the Wonder is certainly of the "Divorced Director" genre, there is no bitterness in its magnanimous heart, but rather a spiritual embrace of life's totality. Moments of wonder are intertwined with depths of destitution, despair, and hopelessness. Complimenting this duo lost in the impossibility of love is Father Quintana (played by the excellent Javier Bardem) who is tormented by his own impossible relationship with a silent and unseen God. He wanders the depressed and polluted landscape at the heart of America alone and unsure why he’s doing it at all.


Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

And what Terrence Malick film would be complete without a dreamlike sequence of an ethereal woman running through a field, her limbs flailing unencumbered, her white clothing catching the wind and drinking in the sun? To the Wonder is no excpetion. These natural moments are always fleeting, but embody the central theme of all of Malick’s films: nostalgia for an irrevocable loss. Like Sean Penn’s Jack in The Tree of Life, Malick’s characters are doomed to wander an inhospitable world, haunted by the memories of their past. That’s where the “wonder” resides. But it’s all that Malick’s characters are allowed: fleeting, bittersweet instances.

This points to the central problem of the worlds Malick, a philosopher by training, creates. Guided by the morose tradition of Christian existentialism, the manic spiritualism of Soren Kierkegaard and the nostalgic anti-Modern theology of Martin Heidegger saturate Malick’s films with two centuries of Christian angst that sees nothing outside the relationship between individuals and themselves and their God, and has no faith in the capacities of humans to reverse the course of their damnation since the Fall except for faith.

Mystified by a world falling to shambles outside of their control, Malick’s characters are left to turn inward, searching vainly within themselves for answers, and failing that, doomed to address their impossible questions to an absent God. Malick’s humanity exists as a mass of confused individuals, uprooted from their historic communities, alienated from an environment they can’t seem to stop destroying, and utterly perplexed as to the nature of their existence in the universe, let alone how to bring about their desire for an authentic relationship with themselves, their fellow humans, and the world they inhabit. The unspoiled authenticity of days past, which Malick projects onto women, natives, and more excusably, children, seems lost forever, as disfigured human subjects grope in vain as powerless individuals for their lost pasts.

In short, Malick’s world lacks politics, the faith in human communities to solve their problems in concert. The existential trials of Malick’s characters are relegated to bourgeois melodrama by their disconnection from the social world around them. It’s only natural for them to turn to themselves, and ultimately to a fictitious God, because they lack the faith in each other. The crises of faith endemic projected on to these characters probably just reveals the director’s own. But the wonder is undeniable. 



@JarrodShanahan

More movies:

I'm Short no Stupid Presents: "I, an Actress"

Beyond the Mortar Fire: Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington

The Biggest Star of the Tribeca Film Festival Was a Weird Little Cat

Five years ago I moved to San Francisco and one of my main goals was to meet the enigmatic cult filmmaker George Kuchar. I was introduced to him and his twin brother Mike’s films in college and they changed my life. George essentially had two different outputs: "story pictures," which is what he called his schlocky and melodramatic narrative films, and "video diaries," which were his crudely shot and ecstatically edited portraits of places and people. The narratives made up the bulk of his early career and the diaries made up the latter. However, just peeking at his 217 films listed on IMDB, you get the sense that he was always working on something. If you’re interested in more of George and Mike’s work, check out the interview VICE did with them in their film issue a couple years back.

George left New York and moved to San Francisco in 1971 to start teaching film at the San Francisco Art Institute. Most of the films made in this period are highly improvisational and appear as if everyone in them was on drugs—even if they weren’t. Despite George never being accepted by the mainstream, students flocked to his classes for his over-the-top tutelage. One such student, Barbara Lapsley, wanted George to direct her in a screen test to show to Hollywood agents. Of course, no sane person would want the dude who had sex with a gorilla in Thundercrack! to direct them in anything they wanted to be taken seriously. Hell, they shot the screen test in one take during the last ten minutes of class. During the test, the poor actress desperately tried to read the absurdly melodramatic script with lines like, "Wipe that smirk off your face, before I mash my goddamn shoe in it," and "…Or is it just the thrill of old, withered hands touching your naked, muscled flesh? Flesh that I bruise with my kisses." George yelled directions at her, but all he really did was ramp up the ridiculousness of it all. And then all of a sudden he just jumped into the frame, told the crew not to cut the shot, and showed the actress how to do her job. He groped his chest and groaned out her lines. It was brilliant. 

One of the most enduring factors of Kuchar’s films is just how endearing his passion and peculiar personality was, especially when he was yelling things like "I’m on my knees, Harold, haven’t you seen women on their knees before or is it only on their backs?" He said that one while on his back during the screen test, kicking up at a dummy wearing a coat and a curly wig. The whole ordeal was supposed to be Barbara’s gateway into Hollywood, but George made it his own, tagging a title on the film when it was done. He called it I, an Actress, a George Kuchar picture © 1977. The clip blends his styles together great, maintaining both the exaggerated script reads and camp, while documenting an event in real time and showing the artifice from behind the camera. Watching I, an Actress makes me realize I had boring fucking teachers.  

GREETINGS FROM TIM BUCKLEY

There are a lot of problems with this movie, but the main one is that it is about Jeff Buckley—a hack who made one shitty album filled with vocal histrionics and session-musician noodling and then thankfully died by way of drowning in the Mississippi River in the late 90s. Why this guy gets so much fanfare is beyond me, and why he deserves a bio-flick less than 20 years after he died is a complete fucking mystery. (Where are the Charles Mingus or Tupac or Kurt Cobain and Robert Johnson bio movies?) The silver lining to this steaming turd of a film is that it spends a few flashbacks dramatizing the life of Jeff Buckley's dad, Tim Buckley, who was a legendary folk musician in the 60s and 70s. Catching some vibes on what it was like to be a rambling, protesting, politically minded folk renegade back in the day was my only respite from Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley bringing to life the obnoxious vocal warblings of Jeff Buckley. Basically, I was born to hate this movie. If you have terrible taste in music, by all means go see it and maybe you'll be lucky enough to have a minor orgasm like the broad who sat in front of me did during on of the movie's too-true portrayals of Buckley's vocal shitshows. Personally I'd rather drown in the Mississippi River than sit through anything else even tangentially connected with this corpse's muzak. 

—Wilbert L. Cooper

DARK TOUCH

Kids are scary little buggers. They're small and strangely smell of syrup. The main protagonist in Dark Touch is one of those creepy ankle-biter types, and she’s got violent telekinetic powers too. She’s supremely fucked up considering she was sexually abused, and she kills her immediate family by bludgeoning them to death with the furniture in the first few minutes of the film. On the surface, the movie is kind of like Carrie meets I Spit on Your Grave, starring Wednesday from the Addams Family. I wanted to like this movie because it seems noble to try and tackle deep issues like child abuse through the tropes of horror flicks. But maybe putting the horror genre in the hands of a director who admittedly doesn’t even like it, is not the best way to wade into the complicated issues that arise when adults play with a little kid's genitals.  

—Wilbert L. Cooper

OXYANA

Prescription pills? Check. Obese hicks with incomprehensible Southern drawls? Double check! This documentary about a small town in Bumfuck, USA, (OK, West Virginia) that falls victim to an Oxycontin plague was surely destined for glory. Too bad it was just scene after scene of the same Hot Topic teens complaining about how easy it is to “score,” or sad-eyed farmers waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. Actually, it’s probably my fault. The Xanax and weed I ingested while watching this movie made me too stupid to understand it. Oh, the irony.

—Michelle Lhooq

HARMONY LESSONS

Although all the documentaries have been excellent, a few of the narrative films I've seen at Tribeca sucked bloody AIDS dick. Harmony Lessons, however, was a major exception. It's so good and thoughtful, I'm still processing it and thinking about it days later. Ultimately, I think the film is about violence and how we use it on the the things around us from the food we eat to our friends. It opens with 13-year-old Aslan, a Kazakhstan science wiz who lives with his grandma, brutally and beautifully skinning and gutting a lamb. We follow Aslan as he tortures roaches in peculiar science experiments in his bedroom, and gets bullied for being a nerd at school by a vicious gang of kids who are racketeering their fellow students for real adult gangsters. After being brutalized mercilessly by the gang's leader, Aslan devises a plan for ultimate revenge. It's a dark film that leaves you questioning when it's right to kill and when it's time to forgive. Because of its strange ability to capture the beauties and horrors of growing up in a world steeped in aggression and wonder, it's a movie I plan on watching again. Look out for an interview with the director, Emir Baigazin, here on VICE.com sometime soon.

—Wilbert L. Cooper

V/H/S 2

This movie is an amalgamation of every tired horror trope, done through the ultrapredictable first-person handheld-camera perspective popularized by The Blair Witch Project and pornos—so obviously I loved it. They use a girl exploring a missing person’s collection of VHS snuff films to jump through different vignettes about standard shit like alien abduction and flesh-eating zombies. But the kicker is the vignette about a suicidal cult, which culminates in the best “monster bursting out of an impregnated woman’s stomach” scene I’ve seen since Alien. Is it gross if that sort of thing gives me a chubby?  

—Wilbert L. Cooper

ALMOST CHRISTMAS

Photo curtesy of Tribeca Film Festival

Imagine my delight when midway through this pointless, cheesy story of two guys from Montreal selling Christmas trees in Brooklyn, I saw a reflection of MY OWN FACE on the screen! It was actually just Paul Giamatti’s “I fucking hate this movie so fuck you, fuck face” face, but close enough. Getting to see Pauly G’s pissed-off glare over and over again was the only thing that stopped me from giving the dude next to me a “boredom beej” (you know, when you suck dick out of sheer ennui). Although I definitely started leaning toward his crotch every time “Jingle Bells (The Smooth Jazz Remix)" came on. I’m also not sure why the director (whose last movie was the “critically acclaimed” Junebug) thought it’d be a good idea to put two middle-aged men in a Greenpoint lot, and make them bicker in circles over a 50-year-old Kristen Stewart. But I’m pretty sure it boils down to one thing: Canadians ruin everything.

—Michelle Lhooq

LENNY  COOKE

When I was younger, I had dreams of being a ball player. But after watching this nightmare scenario of a film, which tells the story of 90s high school prodigy Lenny Cooke’s downward spiral from being the highest-ranked basketball player in the nation to becoming an obese loser sleeping on his girlfriend's couch—I’m super glad I stuck with all my no-pussy-getting nerd shit. A lot of people will probably play this film for young athletes to warn them about the pitfalls of experiencing sports superstardom at an early age. But they should play this for all the guys who get beat up by jocks. Hopefully whoever is bullying your ass today will be tomorrow’s Lenny Cooke.  

—Wilbert L. Cooper

TABOOR

Taboor takes place in Iran in the future, even though it looks disappointingly like it is happening right now. The main dude is an exterminator who rocks a Santa beard and wears a Pop-Tart wrapper to protect himself from the fucked-up future sun's dangerous radiation that is slowly killing him from the inside out. I was hoping to see the dude get cooked at the end of the film like a Peep in a microwave, but it never happened. The only face-melting I got out of this flick was my own from the fat dude passing gas in the seat in front of me. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing that kept me awake through this beautifully shot but painfully boring movie about an Iranian guy in a Diddy suit.  

—Wilbert L. Cooper

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

In Before Midnight, the lovebirds (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have to deal with new problems, like having kids and being constantly pissed off because they’re in a full-on relationship. There’s still a lot of talking, walking, joking, bickering, and bullshitting in this one, and it actually seems more sincere than the first two films—probably because the characters have two decades of history behind them. There’s even a 13.5-minute scene of the couple in their car, and it’s awesome. Don’t ask me how. But if they do another one of these movies nine years from now, my only request is that they better have a sex scene. Nothing would be hotter than seeing the romantic geriatrics gum on each other one last time. 

—Jeffrey Bowers

GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA

Gore Vidal is a writer I should’ve known more about before I saw this bio-doc. He’s one of the earliest American novelists to explore homo-boning, he was a thorn in the dick of every right winger with his biting social commentary on everything from the war in Vietnam to civil rights, and he famously clowned William B. Fuckley, Jr. in a historic intellectual beat down way back in the day. This film does a flawless job of showcasing what made Gore so vital to our political discourse over the past 50-plus years. The movie got me so stoked, I am about about to buy, like, three of Gore's books right now just so I can soak up more of his iconoclastic queer swag.  

—Wilbert L. Cooper

THE MACHINE

Man, I really wanted to like this dystopic sci-fi thriller. If only because actress Caity Lotz spends half of the movie as a naked cyborg killing machine. Basically, the film is a rehash of themes delved into by any number of nerd flicks concerned with technology getting so advanced, it gains a will to defy its creator and preserve itself—2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Blade Runner, etc... I’m not going to give you a plot rundown, because it’s pretty predictable and that’s the major flaw of this film. It never presents a new perspective on the age-old question of what it means when the microwaves of the world transform into Hal 9000s. Instead, we get some eye candy, some middle-of-the-road special effects, and a surprisingly emotive performance from Caity as “the Machine.” But for a flick that is all about the future, it’s a bummer its muddling script wasn’t more forward-looking.

—Wilbert L. Cooper

FEAR OF FLYING

Pretty simple concept here: a cartoon about a bird that’s afraid to fly and has to decide whether it should: A) suck it up and head south for the winter, or B) chill at home and risk getting too “chill.” And yet, like most animated movies with an adult sense of humor (Shrek, Shrek II, Shrek III, Shrek Forever), the little details are what made this adorable/great—like how cutely the tiny yarn ball on the bird’s beanie bobbs around in the wind, or the adorable “squelch” sound it makes when it poops. Basically, watching this animated short is like peaking in on a very good ketamine trip. Everything is hypersaturated, full of serotonin, and the only way you can react to the world is through making guttural noises of pleasure.

—Michelle Lhooq

The festival is happening as we speak, so we'll be updating this page with more reviews as the week progresses. Stay tuned, dweebs. 

For more of VICE's fine criticism, check these out:

April Record Reviews

Brief Reviews of Every Movie I Saw in Theaters in 2012

Food Stamp Beer Reviews  

The scene starts gleefully. Tim gives a stand-up intro to the camera about the hard march they just made, while cracking an ear-to-ear smile at the prospect of a cold one. It’s throwaway footage, not part of the project that he and fellow war photographer James Brabazon were there to do. But it’s one of those moments between moments that needed to be documented for its absurdity. The tough-it-out slogging of war reportage meets the eerie-but-hilarious coincidence of abandoned infrastructure. Spring break: Liberia.

But things at the beer factory turn pear-shaped (probably after the rebels imbibe their share of suds), and the frantic energy of young rebels with guns transforms from showmanship to menace. The wild-eyed leader of the group accuses the only medic tending to the wounded of being a spy for the government. The medic is led into what looks like a loading dock and we see through Tim’s camera as the rebel leader waves a pistol in the medic’s face and threatens to execute him like he’s done others in the past.

James Brabazon, who invited Tim to come along on the embed, steps back to get a wide shot. He’s seen executions before. But Tim intervenes, grabbing the leader’s gun and explaining that killing the only medic they have makes no sense.

“He did the right thing,” Sebastian Junger told me last week when we met at HBO’s headquarters in Manhattan. “I mean the rebels were out of control, on drugs, whatever. They were not a professional army. A lot of innocent people were getting executed and he knew that, and this is one he could stop. So he did."


Tim and Sebastian. Photo courtesy of HBO

Intervening during the course of documenting the atrocities of war is unusual for photojournalists, and what Tim did could easily be seen as a rookie mistake. (It was Tim’s first time covering a war). But what becomes clear through Which Way is that Tim’s project as a photographer was to look beyond the circumstances of conflict to find the harder-won truths of humanity. And his actions in that moment in Liberia exemplify both his compassionate spirit and the unfortunate lengths to which his mission as an artist took him.

Tim died covering the Libyan revolution two years ago, when he and a group of other journalists were struck by mortar fire in Misrata. Sebastian’s film, which premieres tonight on HBO, is a moving obituary. But it’s also an extension of the collaborative work that Sebastian and Tim started when they made their Oscar-nominated documentary about a platoon of soldiers in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, Restrepo.

That film shows the bonds of love among men at the front line: the I-will-die-for-you relationships that hold together a unit through the harrowing moments of conflict. When you turn the camera away from the bombs and toward the men who launch them, you glimpse something eternal about our survival as a species: holding together.

Which Way goes one step further and points the camera at those who normally hold it. And it turns out that the urge to create, to make art and find what’s beautiful behind the horrid, might be as essential to being human as fighting others.

I know that sounds cheesy as fuck, but spending two hours in Hetherington’s world is intoxicating. Here’s more from my conversation with Sebastian, an enviably talented storyteller in his own right.

VICE: At one point in the film, Tim says that he’s “not interested in photography per se.” What do you think he meant by that?
Sebastian Junger: That was something he said many times in conversation with me and in interviews. You know I think someone of his creative talent and genius easily feels limited by things. And I think he saw the possibilities of photography, but was also very aware of its limitations. I think what he really wanted was to experience the world and understand the human struggle. That’s really what he wanted. Photography was kind of his excuse to do that. He just also was extremely talented and so became an extremely good photographer, but it just wasn’t the central narrative in his head of what he was trying to get out of the world—it was a means to an end.

In making the film, did you learn something about him that you didn’t know before?
I wasn’t quite so aware of the gentler side of him. I didn’t realize that until I saw the footage he shot from Sri Lanka. I’d known him in the context of war and that requires a certain set of characteristics and behaviors, and the way he was with children he photographed was so sweet, and I just didn’t quite ever see that, certainly not at work. And that was a really nice discovery, and I kind of got to know him a little bit better in doing the film because I saw him in all these unguarded moments, and yeah, that was really nice.

One unguarded moment that I thought was poignant was at the beginning of Which Way, where we see outtakes of Tim trying to explain what his mission as a photographer was all about, finding the right words but criticizing himself for being clichéd.
That was sort of classic Tim. He overthought everything and made his life a lot harder because of that. But he also understood the media, and he understood what the media wants, what the media is satisfied with is a very low level of understanding. So you can sort of put out a boilerplate, humanistic sensitivity about the human struggle and no one’s going to bat an eye—that’s what they expect, it doesn’t mean much, but it works fine. And Tim was smart enough to realize that that’s really bullshit, and that anyone can pay lip service to that stuff, and it doesn’t mean anything, and so he was self-correcting because the media can’t be bothered to correct in that situation, you know they’re fine with the first thing he said, but Tim wasn’t fine with it, and he realized he was not being honest and was not saying something of real meaning and so he kept correcting himself. That was classic Tim.

What did you learn from Tim?
I learned how to not focus on the obvious aspects of a story, and most dramatic aspects of a story, particularly combat. I learned to sort of look at what was happening one or two layers beneath in the sort of emotional realm. I learned to do that.

Did things you learned from Tim affect the way you told his story in the film?
It affected the traits of his that I focused on. This is sort of circular, but it got me to focus on that part of him that I had learned from.

Do you remember the first time you met Tim?
Yeah it was at the departure gate a Heathrow airport on our way into Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair.

You knew of him before?
Kind of, I mean I knew that this extraordinary film had been shot in Liberia, and one of the reasons I chose Tim to work with. One of the reasons I wanted to work with Tim was because he was an excellent photographer, so Vanity Fair wanted to hire him, but also I knew that he could shoot video so I said, "Look, I have this movie project, Vanity Fair has nothing to do with it, but you might be interested." And he was.

What’d you guys talk about on the plane?
Girls probably, I don’t remember. I probably told him a lot about what it was like over there. He really liked to laugh, big laugh. He was pretty close to perfect to people who encountered him. He was, psychologically, very complicated and had some real veins of deep unhappiness running through him, real torment. And eventually that came out in his relationships with other people who were close enough to him. I don’t mean just romantic relationships, those too, but even in our friendship. He was complicated. But he was a really, deeply good person.

More from Tim:

The Doodles of War: Child Soldiers Tag Liberia

To be fair, though, I knew of Scott’s work long before I decided he’s a great human. He had directed a handful of beautiful music videos for Wolf Parade, the Handsome Furs, and (blech) the Head and the Heart, as well as a feature, Ellie Parker, starring Naomi Watts. That movie told the story of a struggling young actress in LA with a realism that made things like Girls possible. Lena Dunham actually brought Scott into an audition for season two just to tell him that Ellie Parker had been a huge influence on her work. Which was a legitimate request because before Scott starting directing, he was an actor. He was in Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Tank Girl, Shag, Wayne’s World 2… even in the classroom scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And, growing up in Hawaii, I can only assume that he smoked pot with a young Barack Obama in between gorging himself on Spam sliders.

Adult World, Scott’s latest film, is opening today at the TriBeca Film Festival. It stars Emma Roberts as a recent college graduate who wants to be a poet and John Cusack as a grouchy bard named Rat Billings who influenced a generation. She makes him her mentor and then finds a job at a dildo shop. It should be a fun film, especially if you have had previous wet dreams about John Cusack reading poetry to you or Emma Roberts playing with dildos. (Everyone fits into one of these two categories, right?) Find screening times here, New Yorkers, then watch it and gloat to your friends around the country that you got to see it and they didn’t.

Now. Irrelevancy.                          

VICE: Can you tell me a little bit about your elementary school?
Scott Coffey: I grow up in Hawaii, and I went to this bizarre, very post-war 1950s school that was all old and crumbling and weird. I was the whitest, freckled-ieist, red-headed kid in the world, and small. Everyone wanted to beat me up, but I also grew up in total paradise. Hawaii still felt very post-military, post-World War II, at least when I was growing up in the mid-70s and 80s, which was totally surreal.           

When you were growing up, who was your role model?
Woody Allen and Robert Redford. That was when I was really young, though. That was before I discovered Joe Strummer.

What was your favorite movie when you were 15?
At the age of 15, my favorite movie was La Luna that Bernardo Bertolucci directed. It was about a mother and her son. She’s an opera singer and she takes her 15-year-old son to Rome with her after her husband dies. Then her son becomes a heroin addict, and they have a weird incestuous relationship together. It’s a beautiful, kind of amazing movie. I sat by myself at the theater, because a bunch of friends of mine were all to the beach and I was like, “I want to watch this movie instead.” So they all went to the beach, and I went to the movie, and it totally changed my life. Years later it was on cable, and I sat next to my mom and watched it again, and it was the most awkward film experience I have ever had.

Can you describe your first date?
My very first date was with this girl—even though I don’t make out or go on dates with girls, anymore. When I was in eighth grade, I had a date and went to this party with her, and I was dressed as Luke Skywalker, and she was dressed as Princess Leia. I had on a karate robe, and my mom’s go-go boots. We were all playing Spin-the-Bottle, the bottle hit us, and we had to go in the bathroom together. I didn’t really want to kiss her, but she wanted to kiss me. A few weeks ago, that same girl was dating a friend of mine, Mark, who I had a crush on. She was telling me what they did, how they kissed, and then she was like, “So anyway, here’s Mark,” and then she kissed me. It was very surreal. And I was like, why is she pretending to be the guy she used to date? The one that I totally had a crush on. So, that was weird.

Have you ever hitchhiked?
Oh yeah, a lot. Tons. I hitchhiked all over the place. I hitchhiked all over England. I hitchhiked all over northern Italy, and Switzerland. When I was a kid I used to hitchhike home all the time, especially, like, when I was in tenth grade. I’d hitchhike home over the mountains because I hated waiting for the bus. The kids were so mean to me on the bus, too, so I’d be like, “Fuck them,” and hitchhike.

What was some of the weirdest drivers you can remember?
Oh God! So many. I mostly had really good experiences, but I have two really great ones. One, this guy picked me up and made me roll a joint from his glove compartment. Then he pulled over on Pali Lookout in Oahu, which overlooked the side of the island I grew up on. He got me really stoned and gave me a blowjob. When I got home, my mom knew I was stoned the second I walked through the door. I was like, “Hi!” And from the kitchen, she was like, “You’re stoned!” She had no idea about the blowjob though. The other time that was really great was when I was outside of Paris. I didn’t want to start using my Europass until after I was in Paris, so I hitchhiked and this young guy in his Volkswagen Bug picked me up. He took me to where his mother lived, and she made me a huge meal. Then that night he drove me into the city—into Paris—and showed me around. It was really fun. It was wild. Nothing really scary or strange happened hitchhiking. It is kind of different growing up on an island, though. You can usually totally get away with hitchhiking and that sort of thing. There were these girls I knew in elementary school, that got picked up and they were raped—one was murdered—by truckers in Hawaii. That was pretty bad. After that, nobody was really hitchhiked anymore.

What’s the best Halloween costume you’ve ever come up with?
Once in eighth grade, I dressed as a hippie. And my mom and her sisters were hippies, and they were horrified that it was actually a Halloween costume. They were so mad at me. That’s probably why it’s my favorite, just because they were so furious.

Your favorite Golden Girl and why?
I like that one, Maude, um, you know, Bea Arthur. I thought she was a man for a really long time. I realize that she was actually a woman, but I really did think she was like a drag queen. Some friends of mine had some great stories about her, too. They were at a dinner party together and—God, it was some really bawdy horrible thing she said. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but something really dirty came out of her mouth, something you would never think of somebody like her saying. You wouldn’t think she could be so X-rated, but she said something really nasty that caught everybody’s eye. “I’ve had more men in me than a Trojan Horse,” I think it was something like that.

@irrelevant_views

More Irrelevance:

Greer McGettrick of the Mallard

James Jackson Toth of Wooden Wand

Bydlo is an animated nightmare, where man becomes a slave driver and ultimately drives himself into the ground. The eight-minute short, whose fitting title is the Polish word for cattle, opens with a monstrous ox forming out of the Earth. The ox is tethered to a yoke and pulls a cart that also takes shape out of the refuse. As he pulls the cart out of the dirt, he also pulls up faceless miniature men with it. With the men in the picture, the ox becomes their slave even though it is the beast that is carrying the little men forward. It’s a set for disaster, because the men push the animal to it’s limits and sacrifice each other to further their slow death march. Needless to say, things don’t end well for anybody.

With Bydlo, director Patrick Bouchard’s meticulous animation steals the show, as he breathes life into everything from water droplets forming and arid earth drying out to dozens of writhing naked bodies and one powerful beast. The short is also bolstered by the perfect music of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. The short was inspired by the fourth movement of Modest’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which also bears the name Bydlo and is used as the short’s score.

Patrick was born in Saguenay, Quebec, in 1974. He studied at Université du Québec à Chicou-timi where he made a couple of student films. In 2002, he made The Brainwashers, a nutso, semigothic puppetry film about a musician who was falling apart. It won a bunch of awards and is amazing. All of his films are pretty dark and tormented, but they’re filled with sensitivity and love. Right now he’s working on a new animation project with Julie Roy that revolves around the combination of music and movement. As you might be able to tell, I’m all girly over Patrick’s films, so I reached out to him for a short interview about his process.

VICE: What drew you to this story?
Patrick Bouchard: It all started in 1986, in a music course I was taking in high school. The teacher played Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to introduce us to symphonic poems. We focused especially on Bydlo, which was inspired by a Victor Hartmann drawing. It showed an ox strapped to a yoke. The teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine the ox walking to the rhythm of the music. After that, I became interested in that piece of music, but I didn’t know I’d come up with the idea of creating images to express it 23 years later. It’s something I carried inside me for a long time without thinking it was film material. It was when I talked about it with my producer, Julie Roy, that the possibility of a project like this opened up.

What was the process of creating Bydlo?
I wanted to show real artifacts in the film, real objects that have their own stories to tell. The yoke, wheel, chains, and wood of the cart are all objects from the past that I depicted more or less in their natural states. The last part of the film is kind of in the same vein. I wanted real clay that dries naturally. The greatest challenge with that sequence was synchronizing motion and time: the amount of water in the soil so that it would crack properly, a heat source strong enough to produce the right effect, and the meter-long vertical movement of the lamp for the sun rising. We synchronized the motion-time relationship by taking a picture every 10 seconds over a period of six to eight hours. That’s the formula that makes the scene completely natural.

Were you forced to create any new techniques to complete Bydlo? 
Bydlo doesn’t reinvent the stop-motion technique. It would be more accurate to say that stop motion is reinvented with each film. It’s not an exact science. The movements have to be anticipated with every shot and we have to solve problems along the way. Most of the time the solutions are specific to each shot. For example, to give the impression that the ox is rising out of the earth, several shots were animated backwards. So the shot and its splice have to be imagined in reverse. No need to tell you that’s an additional challenge, but the approach made modeling much easier.

Thanks, Patrick!

You can check out Patrick Bouchard work and other great shorts for free at the National Film Board of Canada’s site.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex 

Previously - 'Tastes Like Chicken'

In college, I chose to become a vegetarian. It’s been seven years, and I’m still happy with my decision. But there are times when I feel stupid for refusing the flesh—like when I am starving at 2 AM in New Orleans after a long night of boozing and the only edible stuff available is barbecued ribs and brisket. Situations like this remind me that even though you can chose how you want to live your life, you can't control the world around you. Sometimes, in spite of your choices, you have to go to bed on an empty stomach. 

With Tastes Like Chicken, film director Quico Meirelles captures this sentiment. The short is told through the eyes of a chicken living in a factory farm who becomes self-aware. As the chicken achieves lucidity, she desperately searches for meaning. With no chance of meeting her father (due to artificial insemination) and a missed opportunity with her mother when she was rolled out onto a trundle with 23,000 other eggs, she longs for a normal life filled with afternoon strolls with her parents.

She grows ever more cognizant of the forces pressing down on her, such as the hormonal food being pumped into her body all day and the blaring factory lights that keep her from sleeping. She is forced to live like a slave and watch hundreds of her sisters die around her (there are some wicked chicken disemboweling scenes in here). How she wants to live and how she is forced to live are two drastically different things and raise ideas about free will within a system that everyone can relate to. 

Tastes Like Chicken is beautiful, funny, and riveting. Also, in the time it takes you to watch it, 1,141,553 chickens will have been killed. Just a little food for thought. Enjoy!

Tastes Like Chicken's director, Quico, was born in 1988 and is the son of filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, who directed great movies like City of God and Constant Gardener. Quico worked as a assistant director on his father's film Blindness and made Tastes Like Chicken as his graduate film at the University of São Paulo. He is currently planning his debut feature-length movie. I loved Tastes Like Chicken so much that I hit Quico up for a chat.

VICE: Why did you want to make a movie about chickens? There are plenty of domesticated animals experiencing the pains of factory farming.
Quico Meirelles: I read the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer the semester before I had to choose what my graduation project would be. The theme, the author's approach to it, and the intensity of what's told there were so big for me that I wanted to try and show it to a broader audience. What impressed me the most about the book was the chickens because of the numbers that surrounded their breeding. Everything is huge and is only getting bigger. But I also have to admit that I have a sort of fascination for these animals. Looking closely at them makes me feel like I'm staring at a dinosaur.

How did you develop the visual style for the film, which integrates animation, stock footage, and original content together?
Since the beginning of the project I had set the challenge for myself of creating a rich visual tale that had to be both great aesthetically and powerful narratively. I have no idea if I accomplished this task and I believe it's not my job to analyze it's merits or demerits, but in the end what matters most to me is that I was able to build a unique world inside of those 15 minutes. When I first wrote the script I was at the same time insecure and thrilled with the idea of developing a universe with such a variety of styles and looks. I wonder now if this insecurity/passion to try it wasn't actually what compelled me to work so hard on every part of the film.

Are you vegetarian?
Yes, I am vegetarian. I normally say I am a political vegetarian, but not because I preach about it all the time. I just find fundamentalists of to be very annoying and dangerous. I am a political vegetarian due to the fact that I don't eat meat because I am against the system within which animals are bred, not because I'm against eating meat as a concept.

What are you working on next?
I am starting to direct commercials, but at the same time I'm developing a TV program about elderly people and begging to work on a script for a possible feature film. Let's hope all of them work out.

Thanks!

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Six Shooter'

Most film nerds are familiar with director Martin McDonagh’s feature-length work, like In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. But not enough people have seen his excellent 2005 film debut: the 27-minute Oscar-winning Irish short, Six Shooter. Martin first made a name for himself with a series of theatrical plays he wrote in the 90s, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Following his 2005 Broadway production of The Pillowman, he turned his talents to moviemaking and pulled his frequent theatrical collaborators into the cast of Six Shooter.

Brendan Gleeson stars in Six Shooter as Mr. Donnelly, a man whose wife has just passed away. It seems odd for Martin to begin with such heartache, since he is known for his black humor and stylized violence. But by pitting this dark occurrence against the absurd situations, his characters find themselves in, Martin creates a perfect environment for his trademark deadpan. This short is filled with great supporting characters, like the Kid who is played by Rúaidhrí Conroy. The Kid shares a booth with Gleeson on his train ride back from the hospital and quickly demonstrates a total disregard for  people’s feelings, even though there is a hint of charm underneath all of his bullshit. 

Martin laces the film with unexpected bait and switches. At first events come off as minor comedic moments, but later reveal themselves to be emotionally resonant devices. And death hangs over the entire production. But it is not a film about dying. In fact, each time a life is lost in the film, the tragedy is tempered with laughter. What Martin offers in Six Shooter is a film that is an edgy, funny, and bloody meditation on life.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - 'I'm Never Afraid!'

It astounds me when people know what they’re put on Earth to do, even if they have fears or reservations about it. Which is why I'm inspired by I'm Never Afraid!'s hero, Mack "the Motor Midget" Bouwense. In the 20-minute documentary, we watch the eight-year-old overcome incredible health and personal obstacles in the pursuit of his dream to become a motocross racer. 

The short takes place over the six days leading up to his first motocross race since breaking his femur. During the race, Mack witnesses his friend die on the track. Shot in the Netherlands in lush 16-mm film with a surreal Ennio Morricone-esque soundtrack, I'm Never Afraid! paints an intimate portrait of a boy surrounded by death but filled with an iron will to win. I'm Never Afraid! has won six international awards, including the Kinderkast Jury Prize at 25th Cinekid and a Golden Gate Award at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival. Check out I'm Never Afraid! below if you’ve ever been scared shitless about something in life, but persevered anyway.

I'm Never Afraid!'s director, Willem Baptist, graduated from Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, in 2009. In addition to the short above, he also directed the dramatic short DONNIE. His work has been shown at numerous international film festivals such as IDFA, Rotterdam, BFI London, Slamdance, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and many more. He is currently filming a documentary about wild boars in the Netherlands and writing a feature-film drama. I was so captivated by Willem's documentary about Mack, I reached out to him for a chat to find out more about the short. 

VICE: Mack is such a unique character. How did you find him?
Willem Baptist: For this film, I was inspired by the fears I had when I was growing up. I was afraid of a lot of things—big crowds, waterslides, you name it. So I started to look for children who seemed very tough because I was interested in seeing if I could uncover some fears they might have. It was my first time at a motocross track when I met Mack. It was a rainy day, and I saw this very tiny boy covered in mud head to toe. He was angry and kicking the door of his family's motor home. He was upset because they canceled the competition for the kids due to the holes in the track caused by the rainfall. Mack insisted it was his right to join the grown-up competition, instead. I asked if he wasn't afraid to get caught up between the wheels of the big bikes. He answered with a determination I had never seen in a kid his age: "I'm not afraid!" I knew then that I had found the right boy for my film.

How long did you film him and his family?
I spent six months getting to know him very well. Then when I was ready to shoot, he broke his leg during a race, and a friend of his died on the track. Those events changed him a lot. Gone was his natural self-esteem, and beneath the cracks I could see a more vulnerable version of him. This changed the way I approached the film. Only three months after his accident we shot the short in six and a half days nonstop using 17 rolls of film. When you see him riding his bike in the film, it's literally his first time since the accident.

What was the process like working with such a young subject?
In documentaries, I tend to treat children more as adults and grown-ups like bigger children, but it depends on the subject. In the case of Mack, it was more about creating the right environment. I choose a young all-guys team to shoot with so Mack would feel he was one of the guys and try to prove himself more. But for me, the most challenging thing was telling the story in an intimate way versus the fact that Mack was eight years old. At that age, it is hard to reflect on one's own thoughts and actions.

What is Mack up to these days?
After the film aired, Mack gained a lot of attention from the media in the Netherlands, which was a little crazy for him.  Mack continues to race motorcycles.

We'll keep a look out for him. Thanks, Willem!

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - 'Flotsam/Jetsam'

All photographs by Ali Khoshravani

Joshua John Miller
Actor / Writer
River’s Edge (1986), Near Dark (1987), Teen Witch (1989), The Mao Game (1991)

As yuppie dreams began to turn dystopian, 1986 saw the release of River’s Edge, a film about emotionally confused delinquents that resonated with American teenagers and soon became known as the Rebel Without a Cause of the 80s. River’s Edge sparked Joshua John Miller’s Hollywood legacy, thanks to his chilling portrayal of Tim, a 12-year-old pot smoker who pulls a gun on his own brother.

Born into the business, Joshua John Miller is the son of Susan Bernard, the kidnapped bikini babe in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Jason Miller, the playwright and priest from The Exorcist. If that's not enough, his grandfather was Bernard of Hollywood, photographer to the stars and friend of Marilyn Monroe. Surprisingly, the pressure of that lineage never seemed to get in the way of Joshua John Miller’s own career or identity. By the time he was 12 years old, Joshua had established himself as an actor focused on playing dark and intense children who were often in trouble, giving stunning performances in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and the cult classic Teen Witch. He averaged a movie a year throughout the 80s, but by 1991, he decided to quit acting to pursue a career in writing. In 1997 he released his first novel, The Mao Game. The story follows a 15-year-old child actor's odyssey through the temptations of Hollywood and the emotional minefield of a broken family—a story very familiar to him.

Honoring the ghosts of showbiz, I met Joshua at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to discuss The Mao Game and how one’s life story is sometimes more truthful when told in fiction.

VICE: Why did you decide to stop acting and start writing?
Joshua: I had always dreamed of being on Broadway, but when Neil Simon fired me from Lost In Yonkers, I personalized it. There were far more complex reasons for my being replaced. Not to mention I was 16 and beginning to question my sexuality. I had to take a moment and ask myself what I was doing with my life. This is something most 30- or 40-year-olds deal with. But when you are a child actor, you go through it at 16. My grandparents, who raised me, had recently died, so I began writing as a way to process my grief. A few years later, I started writing fiction based on my childhood, and that’s how The Mao Game came about.

How much of The Mao Game is true to your life?
Not all of it. Maybe half. What most people wonder about is what goes on in the book with my father, but in real life, my father never touched me.

What did your father have to say about the fictionalized molestation in the book?
He knew about the creative process and my rage toward him. As a father and a writer himself, he understood that some people have to work it out on paper.

What made you turn your grandmother into the photographer, when in real life, it was your grandfather who shot pictures of movie stars and pinups?
I wanted to do a story about both of them, but combine them into one character. But also my grandmother was a showgirl, a director who worked in television, and she had her own photo studio—she was a real pioneer, especially for her time. Most women after the war got married and had children, but she started her own business. She was a character that deserved to be explored further.

How did Whoopi Goldberg become the executive producer of The Mao Game film?
She read the book and approached me about making it into a film. But when it comes to the movie, if I could, I would do it over again. It’s not always a good idea to direct and star in your first movie, and it was too much too soon.

Both of your parents were actors. As a child, did they force you into show business?
My goodness, no. I begged to be on camera. When I was seven years old, I was at a family friend’s house with a sweeping staircase. I carried a portable record player with me at the time, and I put on the soundtrack to Cabaret and sang, "Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! Fremde, etranger, stranger,” while coming down the staircase in a cape. No one asks their child to do that.

By the time you were 12, you had established yourself as an actor best suited to play the bad kid.
I always wanted to be a serious young actor. I suppose I was also one of the only actors whose mother would allow them to play those roles. My mom was instrumental in guiding me to choose roles that were complex and to take my craft seriously. We sought out roles that were more than just a kid among the family. Often in movies, the child actor is just a prop.

Then in 1987, you played a sadistic child vampire in Near Dark.
One of my favorite roles. I remember Kathryn Bigelow was both graceful and powerful. She made sure the cast felt like a family, even off camera. She made sure we always ate our meals together, and she took me to Melrose Avenue to pick out my costume.

A kid wearing a William S. Burroughs T-Shirt is so dark and appropriate for your character. Did you have any issues playing a vampire?
Not really. You know, my father played the priest in The Exorcist, so growing up and seeing your father get possessed a lot... it didn’t feel unnatural for me to play a vampire.

How did you get a part in Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 movie?
Janet was a big fan of Near Dark. I was already walking around singing “Control” all the time, so I was really excited when Janet asked me to be in the movie.

You must have been the coolest kid in school after that.
Actually, I was picked on by the “improv bullies.” One day as I was walking into drama class, these two guys, who everyone thought were really funny, started doing a sketch about me and telling jokes about how I had a big lisp. I didn’t think it was funny at all. I wanted to be liked. I was constantly being bullied by these drama fags, which I also happened to be. [laughs]

In 1987, you appeared as the snarky and pestering little brother named Ritchie in Teen Witch, which went on to become a cult classic, due in part to its heavy rotation on cable television throughout the early 90s. Where did you draw your inspiration for Ritchie from?
It was so long ago, I feel like I’m talking about someone else. But when I look at it now, I see Richie as a young Bette Davis. I’m not comparing our talents, but he had the intonation and the broadness, the dramatic delivery, and her histrionics.

I must admit, I have probably seen Teen Witch 40 times, mainly because of Ritchie.
If you look at Teen Witch, it was a very campy performance. But it’s a really fun film and something I have grown to honor. It wasn’t until years later though, when a drag queen named Peaches Christ started hosting midnight screenings of Teen Witch in San Francisco that I began to appreciate it. He invited me to one, and prior to the screening, he sat me down and explained that as a teenager he could see that I was not like the other boys; that there was something sexually ambiguous about me that gave him a sense of comfort, especially in Teen Witch. That meant the world to me. From then on, I was proud. I don’t take compliments from drag queen’s lightly, because they have no problem telling you what time it is. There’s no fucking bullshit.

Never underestimate the power of camp—sometimes the best way to tell the truth is through humor.
I agree with that now. About a year ago, I studied with Werner Herzog for a week in London, and he told me very sternly that I had to return to acting, which is something I had not considered in ten years.

I had always been a bit leery of associating myself with camp before. I have always taken my craft very seriously. Then one afternoon, Werner gave a lecture on Russ Meyer and pointed out the significance of camp and its value as a pure American art form.

And there you are, Herzog’s student and the child of a classic Russ Meyer actress!
Yes, and recently my mom was just hanging out with John Waters—who collects a lot of my grandfather’s photography and thinks I have lived the life of B-movie royalty.

Well, you have. I can’t think of any actor who came near you as a kid.

Previously - David Worth

@telefantasyTV

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.

@christianstorm

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

Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame

Preppy in Pink:Daisy Von Furth is the Girl Behind X-Girl

High School Confidential

In 2007 I was introduced to the enigmatic short films and music videos of brothers Nathan and David Zellner. I quickly became a fan of their work, as did the Sundance Film Festival and the now-defunct Wholphin DVD quarterly. The Zellners’ films are idiosyncratic, aggravating, and contain a subtle wit and intelligence that makes them rewatchable. Flotsam/Jetsam, their short film from 2005, encapsulates the brothers’ vast knowledge of cinema and comedy, its rules, and how to break them.

The five-minute film is broken into two segments. The first part, "Flotsam," is defined as the part of the wreckage of a ship and its cargo floating on the water, and observes a desperate man lost at sea with only luggage to float on and a caged chicken for company. As a warning, the first three minutes of Flotsam/Jetsam are going to wash over you like the boring black-and-white 8-millimeter art film that it is. However, this first section is a ruse, a purposefully boring pretentious deception. This is the true appeal of the Zellners’ humor. When they are not hitting you with the punch line, they are building a setup that will ultimately be just as rewarding as the payoff, but usually only after the reveal.

Their films are slow-burners. When the "Jetsam" section starts, which is defined as goods cast overboard deliberately as to lighten a vessel or improve its stability in an emergency, you realize the pretensions of "Flotsam" make the finale all the more intense and revelatory. Flotsam/Jetsam is not trying to be anything more than a comedy with a meta payoff. It’s a short, weird, and smart little film that sticks to the definitions of its title and concept. However, since the Zellners never approach any material traditionally, their version of jettisoning things off a boat in an emergency is fucking hilarious.

Here is a short interview I did with the Zellners:

VICE: In a number of your short films you play with time and perception, especially the act of filmmaking itself. What interests you about the medium and its more meta aspects?
Nathan and David Zellner: When we were teenagers, we spent a summer interning for Chuck Berry as his personal videographers. He taught us everything we know about filmmaking and got us to look at things from a fresh perspective.

What was the genesis of this project? When did the specific elements such as the chicken or use of multiple film formats come about?
We have a penchant for animals, adventure, and filming on the water, so it all came together naturally.

Congratulations on your latest film, Kid-Thing, getting picked up for distribution. What's next on your plate? More shorts or features?
Next up is the six-hour Minnie Pearl biopic, though we like hopping back and forth between features, shorts, and music videos depending on what the story dictates.

If you had to be trapped at sea with someone, who would you choose?
Minnie Pearl.

If you dig this short film, check out their other shorts, which are available on their website.

David and Nathan Zellner are filmmakers based out of Austin, Texas. They have made two feature films, Goliath and Kid-Thing, both of which premiered at Sundance and continued on to many other festivals. They have handfuls of short films and a number of music videos under their belts. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Last week I tried to watch Street Dreams only to find out that I had mistaken the title for a Christian propaganda film titled Hardflip. If you want to read a review of that movie, click here. If you want a review of Street Dreams, trudge onward.

As I mentioned in last week's review, I'll pretty much watch any movie that has skateboarding in it. I had assumed that Street Dreams might be the worst in the boarding genre, but surprisingly I actually enjoyed the film. Sure, it has its faults; the acting is poor, the storyline is predictable, the soundtrack is horrendous, the motion graphics at the end of the film don't stylistically match any other aspect of the movie... stuff like that. Nevertheless, I totally liked the movie. Why?

Unlike most movies that incorporate skateboarding into the storyline, Street Dreams has actual skateboarders playing the roles of the main characters, which means all of the stunts were performed by the actors instead of stunt doubles in bad wigs. This probably doesn't matter to most viewers, but if you actively participate in skateboarding, then you know there's nothing worse than watching some bozo do a limp mongo push toward a ledge only to cut to an actual skateboarder performing a delicate dance on top of it. The angles are always wrong in these scenarios, too, because you have to make sure the athlete's face is obscured, so you usually wind up with a butt shot or a foot-fetish scenario.

At some point during the film I realized that the only reason I thought I'd hate it is because I'm secretly jealous of most of the dudes in it. The majority of the skaters/actors in the film found a way to capitalize on their skate stardom and turn their subculture fame into successful mainstream revenue outlets. Some people refer to that as "selling out." I refer to it as, "Good job being a smart person."

One of my main complaints with the movie probably has a lot to do with the fact that I'm a dad. The main character, Derreck Cabrera (played by Paul Rodriguez), is an up-and-coming skateboarder who is fucking up in every other aspect of his life that doesn’t involve riding a skateboard. He's failing out of school, he's having issues with truancy, he gets arrested for trespassing, and he is constantly making his momma cry. And for what? To win fifth place at Tampa Am. Can anybody out there name a skateboarder who placed fifth at Tampa Am off the top of their heads? No? Exactly. I understand that in order to have an underdog story you need to come from humble beginnings and achieve the impossible, but fifth place? It just seems kind of depressing instead of impossible.

My only other major complaint with the movie was the soundtrack. It seems like Hardflip and Street Dreams both consulted the same youth culture consulting firm when deciding what type of music best accompanies skateboarding. The answer? Limp Bizkitesque garbage. I think more young skateboarders are listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin these days than this type of crap. But I’m guessing there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through when making a movie, and if old white dudes who fund movies want kids to skate to rap-rock on the big screen, then that's how it is, I suppose. It's still painful though.

So, in conclusion: my apologies to rap-rock, I'm sorry that your genre is so crappy. And I'm sorry that I'm jealous of P-Rod's diamond earrings and flawless nose grinds. The End.

Previously - I Finally Watched Hardflip

The Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin just hosted the European premiere of Peaches's rock opera cum feature film, Peaches Does Herself. The film showcases 22 songs like "Rock Show," "Talk to Me," and "Fuck the Pain Away," with no dialogue in between. It stars Peaches (obviously), a gorgeous transsexual named Danni Daniels (who fucked for the first time to a Peaches song) and the New York stripper/comedian, Sandy Kane (she sets her tits on fire with firecrackers).  Oodles of other talent flies in and out of frame over the course of this epic nod to Rocky Horror, the “anti-jukebox musical,” but Peaches is its definitive star, offering a semiautobiographical take on her exuberant and provocative career as an artist and performer. The film is the most expensive project Peaches has produced. She also stole a pink wheelchair from the London airport.

VICE: I saw you perform Peaches Does Herself live at HAU theater in Berlin, and now you’re showing the film version at the very same location. What has changed?
Peaches: The ending. The most prominent change is the ending. For the audience, it’s a surprise. It’s a complete Peaches ending. I love the ending so much. I’m so happy I could make the film. During the performance, we just all sing "Fuck the Pain Away" and everyone jumps onstage and dances. That’s the difference between live and film: You can’t just show that and make it a film. It’s more intimate; there are close-ups and cutaways. It’s the exact theater production with a different ending.

What was it like putting this feature together?
It was exciting and exhausting. There are over 1,500 edits in the production. Robin Thomson filmed and edited everything. At first it was going to be just documentation. I have footage from the beginning, from everything I’ve ever recorded with my own camera—everything I’ve ever done. The footage looked really good. We did two runs of production. We had a second chance. During the performance, we had people painstakingly come in and do the scenes with the proper lighting to get close-ups. It’s exciting it actually worked. We made a film that actually worked.

You’re accompanied by Danni Daniels throughout the film. How did you meet Danni?
I met Danni in London. I was doing a Perez Hilton party in London with Kelis and this school choir from London. Danni showed up there and said, “I lost my virginity at 14 to your music in the back of a pickup truck in Florida, and now I can shake my dick and my tits.” I was like, “Wow nice to meet you!” Two weeks later I broke my ankle. I had to do a show the next day, so I went to London and decided to do a wheelchair show and stole a wheelchair from the London airport. We studded up the chair. I called Danni and asked, “Could you be my nurse tranny and wheel me around the stage?” I knew Danni was in London, and Danni said “Sure!” Danni came on tour as my naked, tranny nurse wheeling me around the stage.

How did the theater show come about?
The HAU Hebbel am Ufer asked me to do a production. I had to think about it. I didn’t know what to do. I slowly realized that I wanted to do an anti-jukebox musical because jukebox musicals never honor where the music comes from. They just devise some hideous story to string the music along. It really depresses me, especially in the case of the Queen musical, where you have this incredible character Freddie Mercury, and you could imagine what his songs are really about: his life. But they made up these ridiculous stories that have nothing to do with the characters. It was like, “The world is ending with robots, and we have to find the secret guitar behind the wall to save emotion.” Give me a break. So, I thought I would make my own. I’m going to make a narrative building on the mythology of what and who people think I am. That’s where the idea came from.

How did you meet co-star Sandy Kane, the naked cowgirl?
I was obsessed with Sandy Kane, a 68-year-old stripper comedian I met through Gloria Viagra. I had Sandy open for me for a few shows in the States. I warmed her up to the idea of being in the musical. To me, she is the character I would be if I were born a few generations before my own. Maybe I would have been Sandy Kane. I might have to be a stripper and a comedian at the same time. Or is she my future? To me, she is the gauging character and had to be my weird fairy-godmother figure and nemesis in the production. I needed another, younger love interest. Danni came to mind. After we did the wheelchair thing in London, I asked Danni, who is not an actor but was really excited about it. I could build a great narrative that involved dreams, power, disappointment, love, heartbreak, and self-realization. There’s a lot in there.

This project is kind of a homecoming. You studied theater at university, right?
I studied theater at York University. I wanted to become a theater director. That was my dream. I didn’t know anything about art or conceptual art when I was growing up. There was no musical talent in my family. But they had this amazing theater program at my high school, the AY Jackson High School in Toronto, where they offered an independent study trimester where the kids in grade 11 were the actors, the grade 12 students were the producers, and the grade 13 students were the directors. I thought it was so cool. I couldn’t wait to be the director; then I went to university. It was the first time they had the director’s program at York. To be honest, I dropped acid one day and I thought, No way. I want to get the fuck out of this program. I don’t want to work with actors, I am going to have a heart attack by the time I’m 30 if I do this. This is not what I want to do. So I took art classes and fought with a lot of profs at York. I would take the multimedia classes with a musician’s point of view, but I wasn’t a musician then.

They always gave the musicians the certain roles but everyone else was mixed. It was challenging. I fell into music and realized that’s the best because I can do directing, acting, and have immediacy. That was the biggest thing; theater didn’t have the immediacy. It was great coming home to the Toronto International Film Festival to premiere the movie last fall and also to do theater. I had all this experience and a love of musicals, which I know so many people hate. I want people to like musicals for the right reasons. That’s why I did Peaches Christ Superstar as a one-woman show because the ostentatious productions don’t give justice to the music. It’s horrible. It’s not for any age group I know. People like that music. This was the next step. It all started with my video for “Lose You.” It was a HAU theater project. You go on a tour and you get someone’s apartment for five days and you can do whatever you want. Only two people can come in for ten minutes, and it switches over. I gave people the experience of being in a musical without even knowing it. For Peaches Does Herself, I wanted to do musicals I love and go beyond.

You said it’s about what people perceive about you?
When I started my career, people were wondering if I was a girl, a guy, a stripper, a crazy feminist? Do I hate men? Am I an angry person? In the production, I get enveloped with my fans and turn into a transsexual with big boobs and a big dick. No balls. What good is a big cock, if you don’t got any balls?

Is there anything about yourself people don’t know you’d like them to know?
I think I’m pretty straightforward of who I am. People get disappointed. They want me to be ridiculous and wild all the time. I live my life, too. Surprise! People want to challenge that. When they see me at a bar and they take off their clothes and shove a beer up their pussy. Great! Glad, thank you. Sometimes they’ll do it as a way of honoring me. Once I got this private puppetry of penis show. I get a lot of perks being me and what I sing about. 

How did you finance your life before making a living off your work?
I taught kids music and drama. I got a job busing tables two nights and broke all the plates. They gave me another chance, but I didn’t want to do it. I got a really boring job in a day care and I used to sneak kids away and started to play guitar and tell stories. They would role-play. It was awesome. The director saw me and said, “I would like you to teach teachers to do this.” I started to teach teachers and got hired to teach nine classes a day. I would teach rich kids in their homes and I made good money. It got to ten years and all the while I was doing music at night, three times a week. I always felt like I would get fired tomorrow. One day, things started moving. I got an offer in Berlin. I never thought I would have a music career.

What’s happening next?
Making my studio over again, this is my fourth studio in Berlin. Start to make some music again. Let’s see what else comes out. Anything could happen.

@nadjasayej
 

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In the year or so since Fishing Without Nets was released we've yapped about it quite a bit. But short films about Somali pirates starring Somali actors don't come around too often, and when they do, they deserve lots and lots of attention. So that’s exactly what we’re giving them.

Since director Cutter Shepard Hodierne shot the initial short in Mombasa in 2009, a lot has changed in the pirate industry. In 2012, only 14 ships were hijacked, the lowest number in four years, in part thanks to the big men with guns who were stationed on the commercial vessels that travel near the Somali coast. But the pirates still pose a serious problem, one the government is eager to quash. Just last week, for example, the Somali government offered amnesty to lower-level pirates willing to give up their swashbuckling ways.

Cutter recently returned to Mombasa with his producing partner, John Hibey, to expand Fishing Without Nets into a feature-length film, starring many of the same actors and set during modern piracy's heyday, around 2009. If you haven't seen the short, you can buy it on iTunes for $1.99, and if you're in Austin for that tune- and booze-fueled shindig no one will shut up about, we'll be screening it tomorrow evening at 401 E. Cesar Chavez.

Cutter is editing the feature version of Fishing Without Nets in our New York office, about 15 feet from my desk, so I decided to find out how it's coming and what he thinks about the current state of piracy in Somalia.

Photos by Katelyn Partlow

VICE: Around a year ago, you wrote an essay for us about your initial shoot in Mombasa, Kenya. You were robbed at gunpoint on the beach by a bunch of no-goodniks disguised in military uniforms. Any similar experiences this time around?
Cutter Shepard Hodierne: We were in a very different situation this time because we had way more people with us, so we weren't as vulnerable. That said, there is nothing like producing films in Africa. You're always bound to find some sort of calamity, and, of course, we did.

Let's hear it.
Well, my favorite story took place while we were shooting a scene on the ocean. We were out there in small speedboats early in the morning. One of our pirates was extremely hungover from a night of drinking and khat chewing, and his hangover worsened as it combined with seasickness. He was in a horrible state. We arranged for a boat to take him back to shore, but before it got to us, the other members of our cast raised their AK-47s and pointed them at the driver of our boat, a white guy from South Africa. Their guns didn't have bullets in them, but the actors, who were now pretty into their roles, scared the boat driver so much that he panicked and allowed the actors to "pirate" the ship. The radio chatter on this event was priceless. The first assistant director was saying something like, "We can confirm that the boat has in fact been commandeered and is heading back to shore. We are chasing it down currently." On the way back the engine died, and a second boat showed up and took the hungover/seasick actor back to shore where he recovered.

But no, we weren't robbed this time.

What's the new storyline going to be like? Is it going to focus on Abdi, the central character in the short? And are the other actors going to be the same?
Yes, the story follows Abdi. A few of the other key cast members return as well. The feature follows Abdi and the pirates as they head to the high seas and capture an oil tanker. In some ways it's like a continuation of the short film.

The Somali pirates aren't in the news as much as they were a couple of years ago, when you were shooting the original short. Do you think that's because there are less pirates, or has the media just gotten tired of talking about it?
There are fewer pirate attacks. This is due to a variety of factors like an increased military presence in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, and more efforts to thwart piracy on the ground in Somalia.

So where the short served as a film about a current event, the feature will fall more into the category of "recent historical fiction." Regardless, I think this subject matter is timeless, and the story from the perspective of the Somalis will open people's eyes to a new world.

Is the new story going to take into account the changes in the pirate landscape?
The story takes place while piracy is still a thriving business. However, there are a few pirates [in the film] who are extremely aware of the increasing military presence and are fearful of what they perceive as an almost supernatural enemy in the foreign naval forces.

Going back to the Somali perspective you mentioned, what are the actors' backgrounds? They are all refugees, right?
Yes, all of the actors are Somali refugees who live in coastal Kenya. Their backgrounds vary, but many of them spent most of their lives in Somalia and have seen and experienced things that allow them to portray their characters very realistically. They are amazingly talented actors.

For the short you had to deal with two translators in order to communicate with the Somali actors: one who spoke English and Swahili, and another who spoke Swahili and Somali. Did you have to play that horrible game of telephone this time, or did you manage to lock in one translator who spoke English and Somali? We had one phenomenal translator the entire time who spoke English and Somali fluently. He became one of my closest collaborators on the film, because he allowed me to speak with the actors and helped me connect with the cast in amazing ways. Additionally, a few of the new cast members spoke great English, so in a few cases I was able to speak directly with them. The cast was among my closest creative allies on this movie. They are co-authors of the story.

Did you meet any real pirates?
Without sounding cliché, I can't comment. But I have met a lot of people who are intimately involved in piracy, and I consulted with them heavily.

What do you think are some of Somalia's economic and social problems that might make the pirate lifestyle attractive?
There hasn't been a functioning government in Somalia since 1992. Civil war and famine has afflicted the country for decades. Somalia is one of the most dangerous and brutal places on Earth. It occupies 2,000 miles of coastline in one of the most valuable and heavily trafficked shipping lanes in the world. So what could be a thriving tourist industry with gorgeous beaches and ports that connect the Middle East to Asia, Europe, and the Americas is instead a tragic place. The country improves every year, but given the current conditions, piracy is an attractive lifestyle. However, those days may be near an end.

Many pirates cite illegal fishing by foreign ships as the reason they got involved with piracy. Do you know if international ships have stopped fishing in Somali waters?
To my understanding the problem is one that persists, since there is no central government to defend the waters. One researcher living in Kenya told me that the fishing trawlers will go in and get a huge catch, then sail over to a larger international fishing vessel and literally sell the fish on the high seas to the bigger company.

Just the other day, Somalia's president offered amnesty to junior pirates. Do you think many of them will accept it?
I'm not certain what the politics are behind that decision, or what else besides amnesty is being offered, so it's hard for me to answer whether or not they will accept it. If I had to guess, I could definitely imagine an unsuccessful, lowly pirate selling out his pirate superiors for a cash reward from local politicians. But I'm not sure.

Fishing Without Nets is now available on iTunes. If you're in Austin and want to see it on the big screen tomorrow night, click here to RSVP.

@Jonathan_Smth

The 1980s and 1990s were the glory days of the home movie—cameras and VCRs were affordable and easy to use, but no one had any dang idea how to film something anyone else would want to watch: poorly thought-out video dating profiles; cheesy, no-budget advertisements; and embarrassing corporate training videos abounded, and since this was before the dawn of YouTube, all of those glorious disasters were left to rot in the cavernous bins of thrift stores and garage sales. 

The Found Footage Festival is devoted to bringing those accidental gems to life. For eight years, a couple guys from Wisconsin with a passion for scouring through dumpsters, second-hand shops, and warehouses have been curating the best, worst, and strangest clips they could find—they’ve made six DVD compilations and a book of VHS covers, and tour all over the world with their videos. I caught up with founders Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher before they headed off to Europe to see how they were doing.

VICE: Hey, Nick and Joe. How’d all of this come about, anyway?
Joe Pickett: We started doing this documentary based on a cassette tape that we found at a truck stop in southern Wisconsin by a guy named Larry Pierce. He had, at the time, recorded about eight albums of filthy country songs. We fell in love with this guy and decided to write him a letter and see if we could shoot a music video for him or maybe do a little documentary on him. Within three days, we got a call back from him saying, “Hey, I got your letter, my life’s not that interesting, I work third shift at this factory, I write these dirty country songs on my lunch break, I’m married with children, I record them in my garage.” We’re like, “Holy shit, that’s an awesome fucking story,” so we both quit our jobs and worked on this full-time and quickly realized that they don’t hand out grants for movies about dirty country singers.

Nick Prueher: We applied for grants, but they always go to something about African orphans with HIV.

Joe: Our rejection letters were basically, “Fuck no, no money for you.” So then we had to get creative with how we raised our money, so we started doing the Found Footage Festival.

What has it been like taking the FFF on the road for the past eight years?
Nick: We’re basically traveling around doing a show-and-tell every night for a new group of people. But the rigors of flying, renting a car, driving nine hours to get to the other city, setting up, doing the show…

Joe: Yeah, my shitting schedule gets all off. My butt is just confused.

Nick: I can attest to that.

Joe: We’re doing a 50-state tour this time; I think we’re at 42 or 43. I’d say maybe there are 39 good states.

Nick: Yeah, there are about 20 you could take or leave.

Do you find that your shows are more popular among certain types of people?
Nick: The show plays to a far broader demographic than we ever thought it would. We did a show in South Dakota with a mostly older crowd, like my parents’ age. We had maybe one walkout, but the people who stayed really enjoyed it, and it felt like they were tapping into something they maybe didn’t know about.

Have you run into any towns that really didn’t like you?
Joe: Right before we did Salt Lake City for the first time, we found out that they had decency laws—and every one of our shows features full-frontal male nudity, that’s kind of our unwritten rule for the show, so we were wondering if we could get arrested, but it was actually a good show. In Laramie, Wyoming, we had two people walk out angrily after I said the F word, and they wrote an angry email with the subject line “Disgusting.”

How far do you go to get your videos?
Joe: With training videos, they’re really hard to find. You have to steal them. I heard a rumor that Suncoast Videos had awful training videos. So I got a job there and put them in my duffel bag and went home at the end of the night and dubbed them. The next day I came back and was like, “Here are your videos back, and sorry, I can’t work here anymore.”

Nick: That was in the 90s. Last year we were picking up a package at the UPS office here in Queens, and there were some VHS training videos and so I was the lookout while Joe went behind the counter. So we’re 37 and still stealing training tapes.

You get all of your stuff from VHS tapes, but obviously no one is making new videos in that format—is there any danger of running out of available material?
Joe: In the last few years, we’ve started dabbling into DVDs, and we’re not proud of that. The way that we justify it is that the format may change over the years, but bad ideas are here to stay.

It seems like there are a lot of “so bad it’s good” outlets out there these days. What do you make of the competition?
Joe: Well, I love the genre. We’re good pals with [Found magazine editor] Davy Rothbart, and we know Tim and Eric too. I have no problems with any of them. I heard that Everything Is Terrible doesn’t like us. We haven’t met those guys yet.

Nick: It’s weird. Everybody has their own spin on it, and there’s this infighting.

Joe: [Derrick Beckles from TV Carnage] heard that we stole a video from him.

Nick: And we hadn’t, we just happened to find the same tape.

Joe: A lot of those sites, like TV Carnage and Everything Is Terrible, I don’t watch, because I don’t want to be influenced at all by anything else.

How do you explain the popularity of really awful videos? Are we running out of good things to watch? Are our tastes changing?
Nick: I don't know that they are. What's changed now is that there are more outlets for appreciators of that kind of material to get together. It's just easier to find things that fulfill your weird, specific interests. We're thankful there are so many outlets out there for weirdos. It's a big, strange world.

Nick and Joe and their videos will be on tour in Ireland and the UK this month. Go here for more information.

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 Juliette 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!

Here's an interview VICE online editor Jonathan Smith did with a Ray two years ago that includes more of his work:

Ray Tintori’s life sprang from the seed of a film editor. His mother, a script supervisor, carried him in her cinematic womb for nine months, until he burst forth sometime during the beginning of the Reagan administration. As could be expected, Ray traveled around a lot as a kid. He accompanied his parents from set to set absorbing the art of filmmaking.

Death to the Tinman, his senior thesis film at Wesleyan (and perhaps one of my favorite short films ever) premiered at Sundance in 2007 where it won a short filmmaking award. He’s been busy since then, not only as the director of several MGMT videos, but as a co-writer for Glory at Sea, which won numerous awards at festivals across the country. Most recently, he was selected by Spike Jonze to direct an adaptation of the Shane Jones novel, Light Boxes. I sat down with Ray to talk about film and crap.

VICE: I really like how your films tell great and sometimes heartbreaking stories without taking themselves too seriously. It seems like a lot of indie filmmakers would have gone the more melodramatic route where you’ve taken what seems like a purposely stilted approach. Is there a reason behind that style?
Ray: Yeah, I think that sometimes young filmmakers feel like they need to prove themselves by tackling issues that are really older people’s stories. So you end up getting these festivals with a ton of films by really young kids trying to tell stories about middle-aged people going through traumatic, angst-ridden moments in their life, but you get the feeling that the filmmakers actually have no first-hand knowledge of living through any of those things. So while they’re trying to be truthful, it ends up ringing very false. I recently taught a class at the University of Virginia and one of the things I said to the students was to recognize their own level of immaturity and try to make films that knowingly operate on that level. The emotions in Tinman are essentially teenage emotions. I made it in college, and a lot of that story was based on experiences I had when I was in high school and the way I felt about people who I was involved with romantically. I had just enough distance on those kind of teenage, rip-your-heart-out to prove your love for someone kind of feelings that I could make a film about it and both really empathize with it, but also have a critical distance of what that usually leads to. In the end, that kind of behavior is not how you make someone love you again. He doesn’t get the girl back. He tears the community apart and brings about the rapture.

Yeah, one of my favorite things about that film is how his feelings are never really reciprocated after he turns into that freakish hunk of tin.
I wanted to do a story where an act of self-sacrifice isn’t rewarded by the hero getting what they want. Ultimately, he gives up his heart, which is this huge gesture but it results in almost nothing. There are way too many pro-sacrifice narratives out there already and I think they’re actually really corrosive. I didn’t want to have any part in that. But I think the films are highly melodramatic in a silent film kind of way. I like melodrama that knows what it is and plays with the freedom that being a melodrama gives you, rather than something that thinks it’s kitchen sink realism but is in fact really contrived. All narrative movies are essentially about as real as a sock-puppet show. You can either have fun with that or not. The acting style, which I’ve heard people refer to as stilted or dead-pan, mostly comes from the fact that my main advice to actors has always been to play it as straight as possible. Whether it’s the two characters in Jettison Your Loved Ones talking about overthrowing the government or Andrew VanWyngarden shooting an arrow with a stick of dynamite at a crab monster that explodes into thousands of dolphins, I’ve always told my performers that the straighter they play it, the funnier it’ll be.

I like the sound of that perpetual motion doohickey in Jettison Your Loved Ones but I don’t have any idea what it is.
A perpetual motion machine is something that doesn't exist, and can't really exist because of the whole "energy cannot be created or destroyed" thing. That part of Jettison Your Loved Ones came from a story I had read about David Lynch in that book Lynch on Lynch, which is totally excellent by the way. When he was an art student he was always telling people that he had invented a perpetual motion machine, something that even Einstein could never figure out. But Lynch was totally certain he had cracked it. He even went to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and tried to explain this world-changing, major breakthrough he had discovered to a scientist, thinking that he was sitting on something that would basically revolutionize society. The guy very patiently and politely explained to him why he was totally out of his mind and how his plan was delusional on multiple fronts and then sort of sent him out into the cold. I just really loved that level of confidence that a totally irrational person could have and found it really, deeply charming. I wanted to make a film about those kinds of people.

How did you get into making films?
I grew up on film sets. My mom was a script supervisor and my dad was an editor. So my sister and I kind of traveled around like army brats and spent a lot of time just sort of bumming around film sets as little kids, checking out everything. I always thought I wanted to be a visual artist or a writer and I initially pursued that pretty seriously. Eventually I got tired of the static quality of most visual art and the incredibly lonely aspect of fiction writing. Film is great because you get to do a lot of the same stuff you would in either of those fields but you're surrounded by your friends and your work isn't just sitting in a gallery.

You co-wrote Glory at Sea right?
The credit I have on that film is a co-story writing one with the director Benh Zeitlin. Most of the writing input I had on the film was very early on, when Benh was working on the fundamental plot points and the arc of the story from the first germs of the narrative, sort of structuring out the basic fairy tale. Benh and I have been collaborating for about seven years now.

At first I thought it was going to be a heavy-handed statement on Katrina and I was sort of scared, but it actually seems like more of a story about very different people coming together to accomplish something great, with the storm as a backdrop instead of the main focus.
Yeah, we weren’t trying to make a sort of pious, lefty boilerplate film about how the storm was George Bush’s fault or something like that, although I do think the film is quite political in it’s own way. We were more interested in making something that felt like a new myth. Because essentially the story is more like a fairy-tale or something along those lines, but set in a landscape that was so obviously real, where you could basically feel the grit on each one of the pieces of debris.

I could almost feel the grit on the actors as well. Their faces had the worn look of people who have seen some shit. Where’d you find them?
The whole cast was non-actors. A lot of the story of the film was influenced by the process of making the film. As we were doing pre-production we had a huge series of open casting calls and a lot of the people who ended up being in the film were people we met in bars and places like that. When we met people, Zeitlin would restructure the characters around who those people were and write a lot of their own stories into the film. We were driving around the city collecting debris to build the boat out of and keeping it in our backyard. The actor who played Sgt. Major showed up with a bunch of stuff in his truck and was like, “I found these. I thought you might want to put them on the boat.” And we were like, “Yeah, put it on the boat.” That kind of continued and led to the whole part of the film where everyone in the community brings their own stuff and latches it onto the boat until it becomes this kind of shrine.

It was sort of about Katrina though, right?
Without a doubt. It’s actually more about the character of the city and about the very specific way in which people deal with tragedy down here. The film is really about figuring out how to respond when confronted with overwhelming tragedy or horror in your own life. The devastation was so biblical in nature that there were a lot of people who actually believed God was trying to send a message to this historically hedonistic city. When confronted with something like that, do you retreat and try to atone for your sins that have brought this about, or do you start to re-establish your community with the same wild hedonistic energy and try to recover what you’ve lost, even if it seems like an insane plan doomed to fail.

I really like the urgency in the film. Everyone hauls ass while they’re building the boat. Was that stuff in the screenplay, or was that more of a directorial decision? What was the reason behind the rush?
I know that we always wanted the film to have the feeling of something that was just snowballing and gaining its own momentum as people begin to believe that they can actually save their loved ones, that they can defeat death itself. It was supposed to build in the kind of way that mass hysteria does. But yeah, it’s a race against time to rescue the people you care about the most. That seems like a pretty good reason to act with a sense of urgency.

Do you like making films or music videos better?
The main difference is that the films are your own things, where the videos are a supporting part of someone else’s artistic project. Music videos can be incredibly fun to make when the band has a really strong idea of what they want to communicate and a strong understanding of who they are. Working with MGMT is really fun because they are old friends and we get to collaborate on every level of the videos from the concept stage to the final edit. Their ideas are often really counterintuitive but you’re able to trust that they’ll work. Music videos have been fun for me because I’ve gotten a lot of experience actually running sets and trying out different aesthetic approaches to different projects. There’s a lot of stuff we tried on the videos that I don’t know if I would have done if it were a narrative project that I had developed for over a year. It’s also fun to make stuff that gets seen by so many people. No matter how good a short film is, there’s a fairly small audience for those things. Reading the comment boards on some of the videos we’ve made that have millions of views is really interesting because they’re getting out to such different kinds of people, even if sixty percent of the responses are along the lines of “That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever seen,” or “What drugs do you think these guys were on when they made this?”

That’s a pretty badass flame scene at the beginning of "Kids". How’d you do that? Are you a pyromaniac?
That’s stock footage of a barrel rolling through a wall of fire. I think the idea was to have it sort of be a reference to the opening titles of T2: Judgement Day, and definitely Wild at Heart, which is one of my absolute favorite films. We wanted the opening to be as pretentious as possible so people would think they were about to see some kind of requiem for a generation or something. The music is actually a string quartet playing the melody of "Kids," which was an old recording I had from when we were all at Wesleyan. I always thought that piece of music was really funny and that it would be really funny to set this video up as if it was going to be this massive spectacle and then cut to a baby in a crib getting the living daylights scared out of it. At the beginning of that video we attributed a Nietzsche quote to Mark Twain and I couldn’t believe how many people got pissed off. I had no idea there were so many incredibly humorless Nietzsche fans out there who watched MGMT videos. I actually had to write a letter to the estate of Mark Twain explaining the joke to them and getting them to sign off on it, because the label was worried that we were going to be sued for libel.

Yeah, Nietzsche fans can be total assholes. What’d you do to that kid to make him cry?
Anyone who's spent a sizable amount of time around an 18-month-old baby knows that crying is pretty much what they do all day. They can't really talk. It's their only form of communication. So the difficult was that Zachary would often be laughing when we needed him to cry, and vice versa. He was a lovely kid, but the communication between us was limited, to say the least. But it wasn't like we needed to actually terrorize him to make him cry. It was a big video, so we followed all the child welfare laws really carefully and Zach definitely understood that the monsters were puppets and was goofing around with them. I have a picture of myself as a baby weeping in Dan Ackroyd's arms on the set of Ghostbusters 2. Even though I was a Ghostbusters zealot, it just freaked me out to have this weird guy picking me up. So I totally understand. I just hope that kid grows up to be a gigantic Joanna Newsom fan.

I cannot fucking believe you got the Rock-afire Explosion from Showbiz Pizza to play in the "Electric Feel" video, where’d you find those guys?
Andrew initially wanted to have a ton of animated hillbilly bears composited into that video in a style like this totally rad film Butterfly Ball. As we were working on that plan, Jordan Fish sent me a YouTube video of something Chris Thrash had made, where he programmed a full Rock-afire Explosion set-up to play along to Usher's "In the Club". It was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen. I was able to contact Aaron Fetcher, the inventor of Rock-afire Explosion through his YouTube account and to my surprise, he was totally into MGMT and game for the whole thing. I never thought we would be able to clear the rights for this family-friendly thing, considering the band was taking acid and talking about doing heroin while holding babies in the previous videos. But Aaron was super excited about the whole idea.

Spike Jonze recently announced that you’ll be directing Light Boxes. How did that come about and have you started working on it?
I think Spike liked the "Kids" video and then found out about the other stuff I had made from there. I started working on that and some other ideas with him over the past summer and fall.

Are you working on anything else right now?
Right now, I'm living in New Orleans, working on Zeitlin's film and writing my own stuff. I’m doing a couple of videos later in the summer. Last month I taught a short college course on filmmaking at the University of Virginia, which was totally surreal and lovely. It was bizarre to pretend to be a professor for a week and a half, but the students were totally inspiring and really knocked me out with the films they made. I'd like to do more of that in the future. I also camera operated a feature film for this really exciting director Kentucker Audley, which was great. It was a three-week feature shoot. We went from New York, to Lexington, to Memphis, to New Orleans. It was a style of filmmaking pretty much the polar opposite of the stuff I've previously done, but that's what made it fun. I'm also doing a re-write on a feature script and working on a variety of other things as I’m getting ready to do my next narrative project.

@Jonathan_Smth

Having won 44 awards and been selected in 80 festivals, Martin Rosete’s short film Voice Over obviously has something going for it. It’s not your typical short, and with a budget of $100,000, it shouldn’t be. Voice Over tells the story of... or more accurately, the disembodied voice of Féodor Atkine tells the story of three men, who might be the same man, all played by Jonathan D. Mellor. You see the three men stuck in extremely tense and similar situations, which all have dire consequences. If that seems confusing, don’t worry. The structure of this stylish allegory may be complex, but it tells one of the simplest and most human of stories.  

Some people seem to get perverse satisfaction from making their lives difficult, just to see if they can push and overcome their boundaries.  Director Martin Rosete seems like one of those men, and he succeeds beautifully. He ambitiously set out to make a film that’s as difficult to capture as the trials his characters must endure. The short opens with a desperate space pilot, who has been jettisoned from his ship after crash landing on an alien planet. To make things worse, one of the local creatures has crawled inside of his suit and is getting frisky with his nutsack. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the pilot has three minutes and 33 seconds to get back to the ship before he runs out of oxygen. As the details of doom build, the stark beauty of the locations and cinematography keep you glued to the screen. The film starts to shift at this point and since the action is driven exclusively through voice over it is prone to the shifting sentiments of the narrator. The narrator describes vast, dark, and beautiful scenarios, but never seems to get the story right—until he seals it all with a kiss. I don’t want to give too much away, so do yourself a favor and spend ten minutes with one of the most-lauded short films of 2012.

Originally from Madrid (1980), Martin Rosete shot his first 35mm film, Revolution, at the age of 21 and won more than 50 international awards in film festivals. He studied audiovisual communication at Madrid University, directed actors at the Cuba Film School, attended the First Talent Campus of Berlin International Film Festival, and earned an MFA in the US. After shooting commercials and more short films, he is now preparing his first feature film in the US. Voice Over was written by Luis Berdejo. Voice Over writer Luis has obtained huge international success with horror movies like: REC and REC 3 Genesis. Watch a making of Voice Over here.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - A Chjàna

I will watch any movie that has something to do with skateboarding. They're all terrible, but the 80s kid in me still thinks there's something cool about watching a flick that has dudes Thrashin' in it. That being said, this Sunday I sat down to watch what I assumed would be the worst skateboarding movie yet. I was about halfway through it when I realized that the movie I thought I was going to be watching is actually called Street Dreams. Although after seeing the trailer for Street Dreams, I think Hardflip is pretty much the same movie. The only difference might be that the main role in Street Dreams is played by a professional skateboarder, whereas the main dude in Hardflip looks like he learned how to roll on a skateboard a week before they started shooting. The result was way too much footage of a guy with a really awkward stance who looked liked he had to poop every time they showed him rolling down the sidewalk. I can relate, bro.

Like most people, I love underdog stories. Rocky, The Karate Kid, 8 Mile, Hoop Dreams, Hoosiers, Babe... I'm guessing that we respond to these stories because we're all losers in at least one aspect of our lives, and so we can relate to struggle. These films give us the temporary belief that our own stories might have a life-transforming music montage somewhere on the not-so-distant horizon. Hardflip follows the underdog template verbatim, with absolutely no surprises or plot twists. A kid has it rough, things get rougher, he takes a stand, things all work out in the end after he accepts Jesus as his savior. Wait, what?

Oh, you know, it's the typical underdog skateboarding Christian propaganda film that we've all seen a thousand times. Personally, I don't care what your belief system might (or might not) be, but it's always been confusing to me when people try to combine sports with religion. In this instance, if there's a higher power at work, I really hope He or She has better things to worry about than whether or not some dude at a skatepark lands a hardflip backlip down a handrail. OK, now I'm preaching.

I'll just touch on a few other things that seemed strange in this movie. The main character was convinced that he was going to make it in the skateboard industry, and yet he was unwilling to film or compete in events that would showcase his athleticism to the tastemakers. Every ten-year-old skateboard kid has a sponsor-me video up on YouTube these days. How did this character grow up in the internet age of skateboarding without feeling the need to document his moves? Seems unlikely.

The main character also told his mom that he was going to make it in skateboarding, and that skateboarding was going to take him away from "all of this." Let me briefly describe the character's life situation. He's 18, lives in an awesome apartment skating distance from the Venice Beach skatepark, has no job and doesn't appear to go to school, has enough extra income to buy pot from his pot dealer, and his mom works two jobs, meaning he has the apartment to himself all of the time. Seems like a cushier situation than most working pros have. And if he was talking about getting away from "all of this" in a geographic sense, it's important to keep in mind that pretty much the only other place his skateboarding might take him would be northern California. If that's the case, then he's in need of a serious skate-makeover: clothing, hairstyle, and trick selection included. Getting started on a tattoo collection might not hurt, either.

One last silly thing in the movie was when Luis Tolentino (a skateboarder from NYC) told the main character to beat it because he wasn't from around there or he wasn't welcome there or something along those lines. That was silly to me because they were in southern California and the dude had a very strong East Coast accent. Seems like they could have had Sheckler deliver that line. Maybe they couldn't afford him.

Anyway, all in all it was a pretty bad movie but definitely not the worst movie I've ever sat through. I'd definitely recommend it to somebody who is trying to quit smoking marijuana and wants to convert to Christianity. If you don't fall into that category, I'd recommend renting Gleaming the Cube or MVP: Most Vertical Primate.

Oh, yeah, there's also a strangely homoerotic skate-date night session in the movie, which was probably the best part of the whole thing.

Previously - I Wonder If Natas Still Skates

The ABU edits countless Hollywood popcorn films together, forming orgies of death and destruction at the hands of our society’s hopeless antagonisms. Drawing clips from such box office hits as Independence Day, The Dark Knight, and The Siege, they reveal the violence and chaos lurking just below the surface of the present order.

Their first film was Unclear Holocaust, a devious medley of over 50 disaster movies, in which New York is destroyed over and over again by its own hopeless contradictions:

This week I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of their new film Police Mortality, the cop film to end all cop films—literally:

After the screening I caught up with the filmmakers to chat about their projects, the insane world they've diagnosed, and the new one they strive to bring into being.

The ABU is an “anonymous three-headed hydra,” so their voices have accordingly been collectivized for this interview.

VICE: So you make movies that are like... a bunch of a different movies... edited together... to make a new movie. That’s crazy! Tell me a little about the process that goes into this.
Anti-Banality Union: Initially we wanted to pursue two formal experiments: one, to see whether a film could be made for absolutely no money, and two, to understand whether or not Hollywood could be mobilized towards revolutionary ends, that is, against itself.

Narratively, we registered how disaster movies are basically structured the same way: a quotidian existence is interrupted by an anomaly manufactured by different apparatuses, whether scientific, military, administrative, pedagogical, or civilian, which are then turned into real objects of crisis and catastrophe and deployed as political stratagems by a governmental apparatus. Unclear Holocaust is, in this way, a literalization of neoliberalism.

Can you elaborate on that?
Meaning: the constant production and reproduction of minor, manageable crises that can be used as catalysts for ever more capitalization on certain populations and resources, as well as the popular habituation to a permanent state of exception. These practices, which became clear after 9/11 and, on a smaller scale, after Sandy, have been the paradigm since the 1970s.

The hopeful lilt toward the end of Unclear Holocaust is that this catastrophe will become unmanageable, and this increasingly destructive strategy may spin out of control and destroy the world as we know it.

The same in Police Mortality: you have this increasing consolidation and universalization of “police” as a practice and as a group, that at the moment of its total realization, just when they’ve deputized everyone who wasn’t already a cop, and overcome themselves in this class struggle within the police force, they accidentally release all prisoners, and the police and the system it buttresses implode, committing mass suicide.

Both films are very much retrospectives of the last ten, 20, 30 years—broad surveys of long processes of governance, made into a narrative and condensed. In Police Mortality and Unclear Holocaust, we have very literal depictions of OWS, 9/11, and the killings of various unarmed black men in the city, among other occurrences. But it’s also meant to be future oriented. That is, the logical conclusion of all these contradictions, events, and violences is hopefully the complete eradication of such structures.

A simple way of viewing your work is that you reappropriate these films into something that they weren’t initially supposed to be. I think it’s more interesting that they are, as you’ve said, a “reading of Hollywood’s dream diary,” so that you’re not actually creating something that didn’t exist, you are instead drawing out something that is latent within the films.
We would argue that Hollywood has more or less completely occupied the collective unconscious and determined roughly the coordinates of the social imaginary. This is extremely clear in the prefiguration of events in movies like The Siege, where prior to 9/11, you see a more or less accurate prediction of the incarceration and vilification of the Muslim population of the US, as well as events like the OWS Brooklyn Bridge protest.

Whether this is an aspect of plagiarism between reality, documentary, and fiction, is not so much at issue here. Anthropologist Didier Fassin describes how French cops model themselves after characters in the TV show The Shield. In this way, Hollywood becomes more prescriptive than it is descriptive.

To this effect, I’m interested that the two themes of these films—the destruction of New York by every possible means and the absolute carnage unleashed by the police being turned on the police itself—are so firmly lodged in the American unconscious.
We think that there’s a kernel of liberation in all of these Hollywood narratives, and the destruction of New York, and the police destroying themselves from within, are both maybe sublimated forms of revolution, or maybe ideas of revolution that insinuate themselves into Hollywood in these masked forms. So the idea that the world ends, whether it’s the world as a geological planetary reality, or the world as a social order, as in the police no longer being able to withstand its own contradictions, are both forms of wanting to see this world, or its present organization, end in some way.

Essentially, we think that all the machines, all the apparatuses we are dealing with here are essentially thanatos-driven suicide machines, self-hating, self-perpetuating, extremely powerful systems, that at their core must surround themselves and fill themselves with death. And at the end of this intense accumulation, there can be nothing but toppling under their weight and their implosion.

Can you please clarify this notion of thanatos?
We’re using it loosely but also in an orthodox Freudian way. In that sense, eros, the fundamental life force, is blocked by the reality principle, by civilization, and all of these different repressive patterns force us to sublimate our eros, and forces it to rebound back in on itself, turning it into thanatos—still a libidinal investment, and a very pleasurable thing, but an investment toward death, self-hatred, and self-destruction.

And this isn’t limited to the police.
Absolutely not. This is a society-wide affliction, which we’re sure everyone can sympathize with. It is also excruciatingly obvious in Hollywood. Thanatos is just a heightened state within the police, because they have a particularly obvious means of exercising it, with their weapons.

Recently we had the well-publicized case of Christopher Dorner, who became a hero to many people of various political stripes. I’m interested in your take on this romanticism of Dorner by so many.
On the one hand, his manifesto is incredibly militant, but it is essentially militantly reformist. It’s about purging the sort of “racist” or “Nazi” aspect of the LAPD, in order to instate “justice” and “true order” and the like. We would argue, however, that despite their reformist appearance, these goals are totally incompatible with the continuing existence of the police, and in order to achieve such contradictory aims, he would essentially have to wipe out the entirety of police. His brief killing spree revealed that instead of the common notion of the police maintaining an equilibrium, or order, within society, in fact what it needs to function is a total dissymmetry of force, a total monopoly on all violence. An imperative was issued by an opinion piece in the New York Times not long ago entitled “Don’t Mythologize Christopher Dorner”

They say “don’t mythologize Christopher Dorner,” but if you read his manifesto, it’s just an amalgamation of all these different Hollywood clichés. The way this man understood himself was a direct product of Hollywood. We could say that Hollywood mythologized Christopher Dorner before he was even born!
Not to mention the biographical films already in development. Initially we said we were going to add him last minute into Police Mortality, and then realized he was this intrusive figure, precisely because every character in the film was acting out his struggle. It’s redundant. Magnum Force is Christopher Dorner, Bruce Willis is Christopher Dorner, Robocop is Christopher Dorner. So this literal adaptation, retroactively, would have been an intrusive addition, because it was already there, fully formed.

How has the film been received so far?
The prescriptive idea for its reception, that we introduced it with at the premiere, is that it will hopefully become a documentary by this time next year. And while that seems more unlikely than ever, considering the strengthening of police ideology and the police state, we’re at an extremely critical threshold that contains this potential.

In Unclear Holocaust you have a fabulous juxtaposition of all these clips of idyllic New York, just before the disaster announces itself. But it seems like in the present, we don’t have that anymore. It’s almost like the “idyllic New York” would be a catastrophic New York. How do you understand the fact that we live in this period in which crisis, whether ecological or political, is more or less the norm?
The present stage of “apocalyptic capitalism” is basically predicated on this continuing crisis, key in Neoliberal strategy, where even a very minor seasonal snowstorm becomes an ostensibly devastating event. The fact is, we’re becoming daily more accustomed to this apocalyptic mindset, and if we take hold of or appropriate this way of thinking, and urge it further, it can result in something extremely revolutionary. The idea of revolution as apocalypse is pretty concisely reflected in a slogan we heard not long ago: let’s apocalypse. 

Your method raises the question of agency in analyzing politics or film. The impetus for most who analyze film or politics is to find the human agent. So in a film, you’re looking for the vision of the auteur. What is Bergman trying to tell me about finitude? Likewise in politics, there’s this comforting fiction that the United States government took down the World Trade Center and controls all events in the world. Personally I find much more accurate (never mind interesting) the idea that we live in a disordered world governed by vague laws like that of capital accumulation. What are your thoughts on this oppressive need to decipher agency in the world?
That there’s not necessarily a doer behind the deed, and when we look for agency, the agency of Bergman in a Bergman film, we’re just desperately avoiding the conclusion that Bergman as such is just a node for the indirect discourse of cinema to pass through. Really, it’s Hollywood, or the dominant form of cinema, conceived as a totality, coursing through these different nodes that receive proper names to differentiate very similar, compatible worldviews. We try to avoid the question of individual free will, particularly because it is a relic of metaphysics, a centuries-old diversion that philosophy professors continually assert in order to distract people from the political. What should be studied, rather than this mythological irruption of pure will and individuality, is the conditions of possibility for certain subjects and objects to erupt into existence on a mass scale, and how they are used strategically in the opposing camps of power and resistance.

Police Mortality isn’t a product of some highly original individuals, some fucking young New York entrepreneurs. It is an important accident in the dirty history of cinema and the political and a damning, recorded admission of how power operates in the 21st Century—a particularly visible spot on the filthy sediment of Hollywood’s spectacular sheen.

@jarrodshanahan

Photos by Matt Swinsky

The world has always been a terrifying place, but few have the bravery to stick their head into the vilest and most dead-end aspects of the human condition and document it. As far as we can tell, this is the thesis of Vrille, a twisted-ass video series directed by Matt Swinsky. We found out about Vrille by way of our favorite stripper-banging, double-penetrating duo, the ATL Twins. They helped Matt put the inaugural “episode” together, which features their childhood friends Adam and Andrew Gates—who also happen to be twins and go by the collective “Suave” and “Cutesy,” aka the Li’l Twins.

The ATL Twins and Matt first met the Li’l Twins at a young age, via the skateboarding scene in Atlanta. But over the years, the Gates boys went off in a peculiar and depressing direction, devolving into boozing hermits who spend their days watching obscure films on a near-broken TV, smoking cigs, and, on the rare occasion when they were feeling social, hanging out with the dregs of society. You can tell after the first few moments of this clip, which is shot on gritty VHS tape inside the Li’l Twins’ dilapidated home, that the two boys have seen some really fucked-up shit in their day.

We won’t completely spoil the story in the video for you, but we will say that it involves an allegedly murderous KKK member who has skinned a few folks (whether they were alive or dead at the time of the skinning has been lost to the sands of time). We also want to make it clear that the gnarly-ass tale told by the Gates Twins is believed to be gospel by both the ATL Twins and the director, Matt. The ATL Twins and Matt also want everyone to know that this documentary is not meant to be exploitative in any way, and the Li’l Twins gave them full approval to shoot it—in other words, it’s “just real shit.”

VICE: How’d you guys meet the Li’l Twins?
The ATL Twins: When we first moved to ATL, we moved to this neighborhood, and we met them. They were skaters, and they were twins. The whole crew was little kids, we were young too, but they were younger—like 16 or some shit—but we got with them and started skating and became really good friends with them. Eventually we became roommates with them and worked with them and shit. Actually, they used to be really amazing skateboarders.

In the interview Chris Nieratko did with you a couple of years ago that sort of introduced you to the world, you guys said something like “fuck other twins.” So I’m surprised you were so close with these two.
Yeah, well, we never really ever met any other twins to be honest with you. Other than the Li’l Twins, we haven’t kicked it with any twins. We can relate to them in a lot of always; they were different, they would fight, they were close, but they would also get into fights. One of them knocked the other one’s tooth out. They were bad. They were also really close. We really clicked with them—skateboarding, movies, and shit. We always saw eye to eye on everything, they were really cool.

So what happened to them? They seem to be sort of living in squalor, and from the looks of things, they’re in a pretty dark place. Is that their reality, or was it played up for the video?
I don’t know, man, we used to skate and the whole crew we had just fell apart, but they went and did their own things. The other guys just started fucking drinking and never stopped. I think the first time they partied was probably with us.

You corrupted them?
They probably would drink two beers and be fucked up, you know? They’re just something else, man. For years they just got deeper and deeper into hermitry; they don’t leave the house. They used to come kick it, come out and go party with us and shit, somewhat. I think one of them had a serious girlfriend, and she broke him. Now they don’t even really leave the house or anything. Gotta be miserable.

What sort of neighborhood were they living in when you shot the video?
They were living in this crazy-ass Mexican-black ghetto, a shitty apartment complex. That’s where that video was filmed. But they actually ended up just moving out of there and in with their grandmother.

How often do you see them these days?
We always keep in contact with them. They’ll fall off for a couple of months, and we’ll talk to them on the phone and shit, and we’re like damn, so if we’re in their area we’ll stop by and say what’s up. I heard about this spot they were moving in, and when we were in the area, we’d go by and stop by for 10 or 15 minutes and smoke a cigarette, talk to them, catch up real quick. We saw how they were living; it was so crazy. We were like, “What the fuck?” They wouldn’t throw their trash or beer cans away. All they do is drink. They don’t ever eat, and if they have to eat, they’ll order a pizza and eat like two bites of a slice and be like, “Ughhh,” you know? All they want to do is drink and watch movies.

Where do they get money for beers and smokes and the occasional pizza?
They used to work in this Mexican sweatshop that their uncle owned. That’s where we met them because we had been working there too, years ago. It’s a place where you process junk mail, like shit you get in the mail from workout places—LA Fitness bullshit or a Gold’s Gym membership. They’d pump that bullshit out all day. It was really nasty, shitty work. They’d work like 15 hours a week, enough to get beer and cigarettes.

Why’d you shoot this video? How’d it come about.
We just saw how they were living. It was nuts. It was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing? You’re going off the deep end, like you just don’t give a fuck anymore.” They were just gone, they’re like, “Nah, we don’t give a fuck, we don’t give a shit.” I’m like, “You guys gotta quit drinking, you know?” We’re trying to help them. I mean, they’re really in bad shape. And we were shooting the shit with them, and they started telling us these crazy stories. The craziest story was this one about this dude, and these murders—this guy “Dr. Giggles” who was in the KKK and skinned these three black dudes, and he was giggling the entire time—and I was like, “What the fuck?” The dude was so fucking faded, the next day he didn’t remember, we’re like, “What, that’s creepy.” Anyway, they were telling this story, and I was weirded out by it. We have this good friend, Matt Swinsky, who’s a fucking dope cinematographer. I think he’s a genius. We’ve always fucked with him. He used to come skateboarding before he moved on to bigger things. We start talking to him, like, “It’d be sick to document this in some way,” and he was like “I wanna film it with a VHS camera.” So we went over there, and we were like, “Can we come over here and fucking film you?” And, of course, they didn’t give a fuck. They were like, “C’mon over!” So we go over there, and they know we like Gwar, so they had Gwar playing on their shitty TV. So, yeah, we just went over there and fucking filmed it, and just the video that you see, I think it’s fucking dope. Kinda creepy.

No shit, it’s creepy.
We showed it to Harmony Korine. He said it was very haunting.

When did you shoot it?
Maybe, like, six months ago. But they’re still doing the same shit. They need to come out of the house. They just won’t do it, they just get enough money for beer and drink box wine, the cheapest fucking alcohol you can possibly get.

What’s up with the fire-extinguisher scene at the end?
I don’t know. They just started fucking spraying it; like I said, they just don’t give a shit. I had to, like, get out of the room. Do you know how shitty it is to breathe that shit in? It was fucking crazy—they’re like dancing in it, smoking cigarettes in it. They don’t care about anything.

So, do you think the story is true? Do you think this guy actually skinned people alive?
I think it’s creepy, and I think it’s fucked up and real. They didn’t make this shit up. I just think it’s like they say: There was just this guy who blacked out and told them all this shit, and the next day he was like, “I don’t remember shit. I was wasted.” They like just kind of looked at each other like, “Uhhh, fuck.”

The second installment of Matt Swinsky's (@MattSwinsky) Vrille is already live on YouTube. Although it was produced without assistance from the ATL Twins, it's no less disturbing than Part One and involves bloody fetuses and smoking crack. Check it out here at your own risk. 

Love the ATL Twins? Follow them on Twitter and Instagram. And check these out:

The Twins of Atlanta 

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 mom he would come get her later, but he never did, so my mom 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 mom 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 realize how blessed I am.

Sean, Inocente, Andrea, and the film's editor Jeff Consiglio 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 holder.  
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 realized 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 mom? 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

David Worth
Cinematographer / Director
Kickboxer, Bloodsport, Lady Dragon, Bronco Billy, Any Which Way You Can

David Worth is a tough, blue-collar filmmaker whose work as both a cinematographer and director has helped boost the careers of some of Hollywood’s highest-caliber badasses like Clint Eastwood, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Cynthia Rothrock.

Influenced by the history of cinema, David stays true to the philosophies put forth by the Italian neorealists, believing films should be made by any means necessary and kept as original as possible. A major advocate for the future of independent cinema, David continues to make films and teach courses to film students around the world. In 2008 he published his first book, The Citizen Kane Crash Course in Cinematography. While most textbooks put me to sleep, this fictionalized account of how Orson Welles learned the art of cinematography over a scandalous lost weekend proved the director of Kickboxer must be a real cinema rebel.

How did seeing a broadcast of Citizen Kane inspire you to pursue a career in filmmaking?
I was home alone one afternoon in high school when Citizen Kane came on television. Despite all of the commercials and watching the film on a relatively small screen, I got it. It blew my mind. It put me on the path. After that I was looking to become a part of something that could affect people the way Citizen Kane had. If I had known how hard it was going to be—or how fucking long it was going to take—I may have been better off being a janitor.

In 1979 you directed a gritty feature called Hollywood Knight, but the film has a few different names. On VHS, it is called Hard Knocks, but I’ve also seen it called Mid-Knight Rider. What do you call it?
It was originally called Hollywood Knight. My partner in the film, Michael Christian, was the producer, writer, and star, while I was DP, director, and editor. We covered six jobs between us and made the whole film for $150,000.

I love how raw the film is. It shows a dark reality of a down and dirty Los Angeles. What was your camera setup?
I shot it on a 16mm Eclair and then we blew it up to 35mm. Unfortunately, the film didn’t go nearly as far as it should have. In 1979 there was nothing like Sundance where a little film like that could have been seen by more people. We took the film everywhere and everyone said no. The studios were only looking for big pictures with big stars. At the time there was only a small group of people making what we would now call independent movies. Jonas Mekas, John Cassavetes, and a few other people out here in Los Angeles. It was all very new and resources for screening and distributing films were limited.

By 1980 you were the director of photography on Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy. How did that happen?
A few years earlier I had worked on a film called Death Game with Sondra Locke and Seymour Cassel. I shot Panavision anamorphic widescreen, and Sondra thought it was the best she had ever been photographed—in my opinion her first film was masterfully shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe.

Now, this is how things happen in Hollywood: Sondra went from that low-budget movie to starring in The Outlaw Josey Wales where she began a 13-year relationship with Clint Eastwood. It was Sondra who brought my work to Clint’s attention. Hollywood isn’t like a law firm where you work your way up. You get breaks based on who you know and having the right film at the right time. After I sent Sondra a 35mm print of Hollywood Knight, Clint sent me the script for Bronco Billy.

What was your approach to the cinematography in Bronco Billy?
A wonderful accident happened when I was editing Death Game. Before nonlinear editing, we edited on the Moviola, and before going to a final mix you had to separate the actors’ dialogues. Between each track, the editor would put a strip of fill leader, which was just recycled 35mm prints. I was running low and called the lab to ask for some more. They sent me a box of used film, but I soon discovered they had sent me a print of Clockwork Orange with French subtitles. I was such a fan of Mr. Kubrick, and now I had a print that I could study! This was before VHS and DVD, so you can imagine how lucky I was to be able to run the film forward and backward and study every cut and every choice made by the cinematographer, John Alcott. Through owning that print, I discovered something that changed my life. You know the scene where Alex kills the woman with a giant phallus? Well, the camera spins and chases her around with an 18mm lens and you can’t see one movie light in the whole scene. I just couldn’t quite figure it out, until one day I realized the lights were built into the set. I immediately adapted that technique to the way I worked as a cinematographer.

I brought a lot of those techniques to the way I shot Bronco Billy. We built a huge circus tent, and put in practical theatrical lights like the kind you would see at any carnival or road show. Then we used follow spots to get the action. While shooting I would wake up, flip a switch to turn on the lights, and just start calling out the f-stops. It was a very fast way to work, and we came in under time and under budget. I did the same thing on Bloodsport.

How did you come to direct Kickboxer?
As the director of photography on Bloodsport, I averaged 70 setups a day with 35mm Panavision cameras. The producers noticed how well I worked with the crew, and I kept nudging them to let me direct the next one. When we were preparing to make Kickboxer I worked on storyboards and casting for six months with no money before they officially hired me as director. We shot Kickboxer in Hong Kong and Bangkok in just 36 days and on only 150,000 feet of film.

Bloodsport and Kickboxer made Jean-Claude Van Damme a huge star. How did they boost your career?
My phone still didn’t ring. I think people passed it off as just a martial arts film. That’s how it is sometimes.

Even though martial arts films usually don’t get nominated for Academy Awards, I don’t think they are in a lesser genre. They have a loyal fan base and impact viewers directly. Every time I leave a martial arts movie everyone is walking out punching and kicking.
The cult following is huge, but it’s outside of Hollywood, and they usually aren’t even made in America. Martial arts films are not part of the system.

You continued making martial-arts movies after Kickboxer, directing Lady Dragon starring Cynthia Rothrock in 1992 and Lady Dragon 2, as well as American Tigers.
We shot Lady Dragon in Indonesia and it almost killed me, but like Nietzsche said  "what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger." Cynthia Rothrock did that movie with no craft service. Talk about badass! I love martial arts films the way I love any film that comes across my desk.

What made you a warrior for independent films?
Independent filmmaking actually began with the Italian neorealists after World War II. They didn’t get together like Dogma 95 and say “these are the ten rules.” They were all big directors in Italy—Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica—who wanted to do nothing more than make films. Their country was in ruins. The studios were bombed into oblivion, there was 25 percent unemployment, and they had to use old dupe negative, short ends, and things like that to put their films together. They got out into the street and started making movies with the things they had. They used available light, natural locations, first time or nonactors, inexpensive equipment, and organic episodic scripts—not the normal boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl formula that’s in your typical movie. These films astounded the world because they were thinking outside the box and they were real.

Same goes for French new wave—they were proud to warp the influence from mainstream Hollywood pictures.
They were going out with lightweight handheld cameras filled with Ilford short rolls, making films in the streets and shrugging off the big Hollywood productions. Talk about breaking the rules. Jean Luc Godard drove a stolen truck over all the rules of filmmaking—just put it in reverse and backed up over them again.

Why do you think it’s important for people today to make films outside of the Hollywood system?
Who wants to work with a committee of people who have just come out of law school or people who want to piss in a jar because they think it will make it better? I’ve worked with some really big names in Hollywood, but right now I’m more interested in seeing what people are doing with their DSLRs. I’m tired of these million-dollar CGI films. If I never see another superhero CGI fucking movie in my life it will be too soon. What a bunch of beautifully produced horseshit! Green Lantern, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, are you fucking kidding me? How devoid can film get? The expansion of independent film may be the only opportunity people get to see something that has a pair of balls.

Previously - Denise Crosby

@telefantasyTV

Since the most offensive things trolling the internet right now are the Quvenzhane Wallis Onion tweet and Seth MacFarlane’s entire persona, I wanted to introduce something that has a bit more gravitas. Up until I saw A Chjàna last summer, I had no idea race riots and murders were occurring in Italy as recently as two years ago. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like there aren’t a million fucked-up things happening in the world at any given moment, but it’s a rare thing when a piece of art comes along and makes you want to be better.

In 2008, over 1,500 African immigrants from countries like Senegal, Ghana, and Burkina Faso took uneasy refuge in the ghetto of the small Italian town of Rosarno to work in the fields known as A Chjàna (which means "the Plain"). The local Mafia controlled the labor market, which mainly consisted of fruit and olive groves, and forced the men to live and work in abhorrent conditions. In fact, the town was so under the control of the Mafia that a prefectoral commissioner replaced the mayor in 2008. Tensions were high, but the situation didn’t improve. The Mafia maintained its hold on the town, the local residents began to lash out at the immigrants and more and more Africans were forced to pile into squalid, abandoned factories to live. After a senseless, race-induced shooting in 2010 killed a migrant worker, the people began protesting their treatment and took to the streets.

This is where Jonas Carpignano’s powerful short film named after the ghetto picks up. Opening with a striking recreation of the 2010 riots, one is immediately thrown into the violent and brutal world these people endure. The scale and intensity of the riot, complete with burning cars, Molotov cocktails, and motorcycle gangs, is a testament to the assured filmmaking team behind the short film. As the riot grows out of control, two best friends named Ayiva (Koudous Seihon) and Chico (Cheikh Baity Kane) from Senegal and Burkina Faso realize the situation is beyond them and that they must escape. The story transitions to one of male camaraderie, respect, and decency in the face of a city that wishes to strip them of those qualities. Propelled by tense and tender performances by the two leads, the film captures a sense of urgency and gives their plight significant importance. The plainspoken mantra of the film "If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes, and if you don’t wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes” hopefully inspires you to want to do something important in your own life. 

Jonas Carpignano is an award-winning filmmaker based in New York City and Rome. His short films have been shown in prestigious film festivals around the world including the Venice International Film Festival, SXSW, and New Directors/New Films. His latest short film, A Chjàna, won the Controcampo Award for Best Short Film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and was awarded a Nastro D’Argento Special Mention from the Association of Italian Film Critics (SNGCI). Carpignano is an alum of the 2012 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab where he started work on a feature adaptation of A Chjàna. He was recently named one of the top 25 new faces in independent film by Filmmaker magazine.

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 traveled, 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. Follow him on Twitter here.  

As various conflicts continue to rage across the Indonesian archipelago, the ramifications of one particular event can still be felt. A botched—and still much debated—coup in 1965 brought President Suharto to power, and with it the sudden and brutal eradication of The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Anyone suspected of being a member was killed, their bodies dumped in ditches and mass graves that line the country. The exact figures may never be known, but upwards of a million people died in the space of a few years.



Many years later, in 2004, director Joshua Oppenheimer traveled to Indonesia for a project that brought him in contact with a bunch of people who survived that period. By listening to their stories, he became a secondhand witness to the countless atrocities the people of North Sumatra had endured as well as committed. The elderly men he spoke to still lived in the same communities where their crimes had taken place and were only too happy to talk.

 These testimonies were what inspired Oppenheimer's latest feature film, The Act of Killing.

"All of the perpetrators I met were showing off, and were all performing instead of testifying," he explained when we spoke at the Berlinale film festival in Berlin. "By 2005 I wasn’t looking for a confession about what happened in 1965. I knew that simply providing documentation about the crimes that occurred was not sufficient to break the silence. In fact, the killers were talking about what happened all the time. And it didn’t constitute an exposé. By the time I started, I wanted to find out what the nature of the boasting was, and how it related to the fear I was seeing.’
"

The film focuses predominantly on Anwar Congo; a self-styled former gangster, playboy, and lover of American movies who made most of his money through scalping tickets at the local cinemas in Medan, the capital of that region. As the perceived threat of communism intensified across the country Anwar and his friends (including high-ranking officials) went on a bloody killing spree, killing thousands—encouraged by the machismo in the foreign films they admired. To date, none of them have been prosecuted.

Joshua Oppenheimer, photographed by Oliver Clasper for VICE.



When the audience first meets the white-haired Anwar, he has returned to the building in which he carried out a series of crimes between 1965 and '66. At first his methods were messy, he says, so he began using wire to garrote his victims because it was quick and clean. In the film he demonstrates this technique candidly. When the grueling segment is done, he dances the cha-cha.



As Oppenheimer saw it, Anwar was "somehow trying to get into his pain, trying to somehow make what he did OK by making a beautiful movie about it, but also by distancing himself through acting. I think something very dark was conjured up through the process. Ultimately, I don’t think Anwar has the strength to look in the mirror every day and say ‘Yes, what I did was wrong.’ I don’t think he knows how to live like that. His whole community has been about celebrating those facts, or sweeping them under the carpet."



Other notable figures in the film include Herman, a playful, rotund, ponytailed playground-bully type with political aspirations of his own, and Anwar’s old friend, Adi Zulkadry, who claims to feel no guilt or remorse for his crimes.

Throughout the filmmaking process, Oppenheimer encouraged them all to reenact the killings, allowing them to play both victims and perpetrators in increasingly lavish, camp, and outlandish setups—often dressed to the nines in sharp suits and hats, or even in women’s clothing. In one telling scene, Anwar takes the role of victim—bound, gagged, and harassed. It’s only acting, but the reconstruction leaves him feeling distraught and disorientated.

While the overwhelming majority of critics and filmgoers have lauded The Act of Killing, a few have questioned the director’s motives, concerned that by giving such an open platform to the perpetrators Oppenheimer has ignored the plight of the survivors. But the impression one gets by spending time with Oppenheimer (who also speaks Indonesian) is of a man deeply committed to both the aesthetics of cinema and the fundamental truths of harmony and reconciliation—which he insists must be sought whatever the consequences. "One of the problems is that human beings flinch," he says. "We mustn’t flinch from the truth, otherwise we’ll dance with our eyes closed over the cliff and right into the abyss."



He also suggests that the world is not as black and white as many of us tend to think, and that in order to find what we’re looking for, we must empathize with the enemy. "I remember my mother asking me if I’d forgiven Anwar, and I didn’t even understand the question. It occurred to me throughout the process of making this film that I don’t know how to judge people. I can see you are a human being who has done something bad, but I can’t take the next step and say you’re a bad human being. I think having family, on my father’s and my stepmother’s side, who died in the Holocaust, made me think: If we want to comprehend what happened, we have to understand that we don’t live in a Star Wars universe, where good and bad guys are clearly separated."

I

n 2011, having accrued over 1,000 hours of footage, and with the editing process finally underway, a rough cut was shown to legendary directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, who thought the film so important they agreed to become its executive producers. It wasn't only their names that would help push the film, but their considerable experience: "Werner Herzog said to me, 'Josh, art doesn’t make a difference... ' Then he looked at me for a long time in a way that only Werner Herzog can do, and said, '…until it does.'"

A scene from The Act of Killing.

The Act of Killing has already made a significant impact since it was first screened at Telluride, followed by its official premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It will soon be heading to festivals in Hong Kong and SXSW, among others. More importantly, it has already been screened over 300 times in Indonesia, despite being banned in the country, and has been written about in countless magazine and newspaper articles there.



In many ways that is Oppenheimer’s chief aim: to be seen by the widest audience possible. "If we can’t get it in cinemas there, then we keep the discussion up until something big happens—like an Academy nomination," he says hopefully. "That would force the Indonesian government to take notice, or at least the Indonesian people. And then we would release it on DVD so everyone can have a copy. And I think this is a film that delivers on its promises. People have read about it and thought, Oh, it can’t possibly be like that, and have come out and thought that it was more than what they had read about. That’s what I’m most proud of."

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If you're one of those army fuckers with 20/20 vision, chances are you're not aware that there’s a whole other (very fuzzy) world that us lesser-sighted people inhabit every day. A world where sometimes you can't even tell if another person is staring deeply, romantically into your eyes or if they're asleep. Sometimes all you normal-sighted folk's eyes are just two dark splodges on a big pink splodge. Sorry.

This happened to me the other day, when I tried to watch Ratatouille and couldn’t find my glasses. I had to listen really intently to figure out when the rat was talking, and when the humans were. But obviously a lot of people can't just put their glasses back on, so movies with shitty soundtracks and clumsy dialogue sound 100 times worse.

Tommy Edison goes by the title the Blind Film Critic and makes YouTube videos reviewing movies he's never seen, only heard. It's pretty fascinating, and totally useful for fellow blind and partially sighted movie buffs. We caught up for a chat, largely to find out what he thought of The Matrix, but also to learn more about his Instagram account, his favorite movies, and who he crushes on.



VICE: What exactly made you want to start reviewing movies in the first place?
Tommy Edison: Well, I’ve always been into film, but sometimes with movies it’s a long watch, and then you get to the solution at the end and… they don’t say anything, it’s all visual. Ben, my video producer, was like: “You’ve got to see Die Hard, that’s an action movie with great dialogue." So we thought, Hey, why not start reviewing movies?

Which movies are the most reliant on visuals?
Action movies are, quite frankly, pretty dull for me, what with all the CGI, fights and effects. That's true of most superhero movies, really. Like Thor, for example, bored me—the story wasn’t much. Although The Dark Knight was amazing.

Some movies are hard enough to follow when you’re not blind. Like Inception, WTF.
Well, if you close your eyes, I think you can actually follow Inception even better. That was one of the earlier ones we reviewed. Everyone kept asking me to review it, but in the end, I was actually able to follow it pretty well.

How about The Matrix?
When the first Matrix movie came out I watched it over and over and still couldn’t figure out why everybody thought it was so great. Then I used the “descriptive video” feature and was able to follow it. Then I realized why everyone was going crazy for it! When I go to the movies with Ben, though, we don’t talk about the visuals—I just listen. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in being a blind film critic.

Do you develop crushes on movie stars?
Mila Kunis—I’ve never seen her, but I love her!

Do you think your blindness helps you filter out the Hollywood bullshit?
Yeah. I mean take Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. I like Kanye West, I think he’s a pretty smart guy, but if he closed his eyes and listened for a minute, he’d be bored to tears! I’m not a big fan of the Kardashians. I think visual beauty is given too much weight.

So what is “beautiful” to you?
To hear Miles Davis play or John Coltrane or one of the greats—that’s art. To hear Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald… I think jazz is art, some say it’s the only true form of American art. A lot of pop music is good, but is that art? I don’t know. In terms of painting or photography—I don’t know anything about it!

Which leads me to your Instagram, it’s amazing.
It’s a crazy thing—I’ve heard some people in comments refer to that stuff as art, and I’m like, “Really?” I always wanted a camera, but I’ve never had a way to organize the pictures. Instagram is great because I can just label them right there and then and post it.

Have you ever thought about making your own movies?
[Laughs] No, I don’t think so. I’m more of a fan. I’m not sure how much I could get into the creative part of it. I’m a music fan too but I couldn’t write a song if you paid me, I just can’t figure it out. It’s hard, writing music and film.

Finally, what are your all-time favorite films?
Well, Die Hard has got to be up there—I love that movie—and Goodfellas is a classic. One of the more recent movies would definitely be Ted, I can’t think of anything wrong with that movie.

Thanks, Tommy!

For more about movies, check these out:

North Korean Film Madness

Inside Iranian Cinema

I Was an Accidental Nigerian Film Star

"Red Band" means it probably has a boob or two in it, so don't watch this while you're babysitting or working at a bank. Or, you know, do watch it and get fired. You'll be happier and have more time to do whatever it is you really love to do. Unless you feel that working at a bank or babysitting is in fact your true calling in life. If that's the case, and you get fired for watching this, uh, sorry. You could always apply to work here at VICE. Looks like we need a new junior systems administrator. If you know what those words mean you have a pretty decent chance of being hired probably. Hey look, Cinnabon's always hiring. Just watch the trailer, you'll be fine.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been highlighting a number of shorts from the talented Blue-Tongue Films collective, including Nash Edgerton’s Spider and Bear. This is not without good reason—their short films are excellent. All of the films under the Blue-Tounge banner have the same modus operandi: no matter how ridiculous the premise, the content is grounded in reality. Each film has incredibly high production value, great stunts, and strong special effects. However, Spencer Susser, the only American in the otherwise Australian film group, switches structures with Edgerton, opting to start his film I Love Sarah Jane mean and to end it sweet. 

I Love Sarah Jane opens with a beautiful tracking shot that follows timid young Jimbo, played by Brad Ashby, as he rides his bicycle through a post-apocalyptic zombieinfested world while brandishing a bow and arrow. The opening scene sets the film up to be pretty heavy for something titled I Love Sarah Jane. Nevertheless, Susser manages to create a believable, awkward, and vulnerable romance in the middle of the desolation with two convincing central teen performances by Jimbo and Sarah, who is played by Mia Wasikowska of Alice In Wonderland and The Kids Are Alright. 

The interesting arch in the short is that despite the bulk of the running time being devoted to zombies, boys being boys, and killing, the childhood crush Jimbo develops seems even more scary and unpredictable than the zombies who surround them. Clearly at odds with his surviving friends, who are more interested in being hard asses in easy situations than dealing with their true emotions, Jimbo finds refuge in the enigmatic Sarah Jane. The only adults appearing are (un)dead and are for obvious reasons not too pleased to see these kids playing around with weapons and fire. Despite the apocalyptic setting of I Love Sarah Jane, the kids manage to ignore a lot of what's bad and even have the chance to fall in love.

Spencer Susser has made a number of award-winning shorts and in 2010 he debuted his feature film Hesher in competition at Sundance. The film starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman. Both Hesher and I Love Sarah Jane were co-written by Blue-Tongue member David Michod. Michod won the 2010 Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Film for his feature Animal Kingdom, which was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Susser’s newest film is a short co-directed and written with Nash Edgerton called The Captain, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Keep your eyes peeled for that one and enjoy I Love Sarah Jane below.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - 'The Ellington Kid'

The Ellington Kid is kind of based on a true story. Two kids meet up in a standard South London kebab shop and start to spin some urban-legend yarn about what happened to the eponymous kid. Its premise is small and contained. The whole thing could have just been a story overheard at the kebab shop it takes place in, but of course, it has a killer punch line.

The filmmaker Dan Sully skillfully crafts the secondhand story of a gangland stabbing into a cultural conversation piece. The speech, led by the wonderfully ghetto Charlie G. Hawkins from the popular BBC show EastEnders, jumps back and forth from black British comedy to heavy drama regarding the gutted teen found in the same kebab shop. At four minutes, it’d be more efficient and definitely more fun to just watch the short yourself instead of me trying to thirdhand tell it.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - I'm Short Not Stupid Presents: 'Dance Music Now'

Directed by Dan Sully

Read the full credits list here.

I don't give a shit about the dance-music scene. Dance clubs are miserably hot, the people who like them are obnoxious peacocks, and the bass-heavy music that plays inside them seems to be better at making you feel like you're being disemboweled than sparking a good time. (I do, however, have a soft spot for the club drugs and meeting women with daddy issues—even though it doesn't usually end well when I mix the two.) 

I'd never go to a dance club on my own, nor would I call anyone up and say, "I could go for a good dance, you in?" The times that I have been dragged against my will by friends for obligatory wing-man duty, I pumped my body full of chemicals and resorted to a series of ironic "dance" gestures to get through the night. So naturally, when I heard about the short called Dance Music Now, I was predisposed to detest it with the same intensity I have for long lines to get into places that charge $25 for well drinks. Surprisingly, however, the short is really great and has nothing to do with shitty coke and "wubs." Instead, it's about feelings. Writer, director, and star Johan Jonason's short kicks off in the middle of an argument between a producer and a singer throwing ego-bruising insults as perfectly timed as the pop song they are failing to record.  

The film delves deep into the neuroses at play between friends when one demands something of the other that they can't give. The filmmaker and cinematographer create a number of silent moments where expressive colors and blank-faced ancillary-music-producing extras heighten the tension of the friends as their egos do battle. Almost immediately their relationship is thrust on the line, and they kick and scream to stay on top. Dance Music Now captures more than people arguing about a pop song's integrity—through humor and discomfort, it explores man's internal anxiety regarding self-confidence and masculinity. Each man is too proud and too unwilling to move out onto that metaphorical dance floor, let loose, and take responsibility for who they are and what they're feeling. The short's darkly comic vulnerability is reminiscent of Todd Solondz’s films and is just as much of a pleasure to watch. In just eight minutes, Jonason incisively conveys the breakdown of a friendship and how being vulnerable and exposed can open the doors to something you never thought you could do. 

Dance Music Now was recently awarded with the Guldbagge for Best Short Film (the Swedish equivalent of an Academy Award) and previously won the Startsladden prize at the Göteborg International Film Festival, one of the most prestigious short film prizes in the world worth $158,000 US. Filmmaker Johan Jonason was born in 1970 in Stockholm. He has a BA in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Art, London and an MA from KKH, Stockholm. His work includes the Guldbagge-nominated short film Terrible Boy and his 2009 feature film debut Guidance.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Previously - 'Spider'

The Academy Awards are mostly known for their bloated, hideous ceremony and nominating Famous White People Who Put on Accents and Pretend to Be from Another Historical Era for everything. But go down the ballot to the documentary-feature category, and you’ll find that the Academy isn’t completely allergic to nominating controversial films about present-day subjects—like Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, which tells the story of the Shin Bet, Israel’s brutally effective, secretive internal security force. Dror interviewed six former heads of the agency, recreated top-secret locations using CGI, and ended up criticizing Israel’s religious right pretty harshly. The film was shown in festivals to widespread acclaim last year but hasn’t been widely available in the US until this month, so I thought it would be a good time to talk to Dror about his film, the settlers, and Israel’s best hopes for peace.

VICE: First off, congratulations on the Oscar nomination. 
Dror Moreh: Thank you. When you start to do a movie, you never think about those things. But when you hear that kind of praise, it’s really heartwarming. Not a lot of documentaries get big attention.

How did this movie come together? Did six of the former heads of the Shin Bet decide they were going to talk and call you up? 
It started with an interview that I read in an Israeli newspaper in 2003, in which four former heads of the Shin Bet said that if the policies of Ariel Sharon continued, it would lead Israel into catastrophe. Later, when I interviewed Sharon [for 2008’s Sharon], his chief of staff told me that Sharon was deeply moved by the article because it came from the center of his defense establishment. It wasn’t coming from left-wingers crying for peace, it came from his closest advisors, his security system. And when I did that interview, it resonated with me. If Sharon was moved, maybe I could create something that would speak to the Israeli-Palestinain conflict as a whole. When I approached the former heads of the Shin Bet in the beginning of 2009, they were concerned about the beginnings of Netanyahu’s government and about what kind of future lay ahead if Israel continued the same policies. They wanted to speak up.

Do these men routinely speak out against Israeli policies?
One of them [Jacob Perry] has moved into politics. He was elected as a member of the Knesset, and I think he will be a minister in the next government. Some of them, like Yuval Diskin, have never spoken out before, and Avraham Shalom continues not to speak… They’re not one group.

How much access were you given to the internal workings of the Shin Bet? 
Look, a secret service is secret. In terms of visuals of their operations, like prison cells and interrogation rooms, I didn’t have access to that. But I saw these places with my own eyes, so I knew how to create CGI that looks exactly as it does in reality. They didn’t let me get into their methods of intelligence gathering or their different branches. They use techniques that cannot be exposed to the wider public because that could endanger civilians and workers on the ground. They gave some access, but many times I asked to see something and they said, “We cannot get into that.”

So you filled the space with CGI. Were there any ethical concerns about combining archival material with recreated scenes? 
Absolutely. In the film, I created the movement of the camera in the [300 Bus Incident] sequence based around the real photos that were taken on the ground. If you watch the screens in the Shin Bet office, the data on those files is accurate to the point. The drone view that I recreated… even the Palestinians who live in those houses won’t know that it’s recreation, because it’s recreated exactly. We have still photos of, say, the house in which [chief Hamas bombmaker] Yahya Ayyash was living, and even photos of the room where he was killed. The main thing when you’re working with CGI is keeping yourself within what needs to be achieved. You can do whatever you want, include amazing camera angles and effects on anything, but I put the monitors in front of the viewer as if he was in the gatekeeper’s seat, looking at the exact data and details.

The film casts Israel’s religious right in a seriously negative light. Can you speak about their role in the peace process? 
Their role is the most destructive part of any kind of reconciliation efforts between not only Israel and the Palestinians, but with other nations as well. The [religious right's] attempt to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was an attempt to stop the peace accord with Egypt, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin came from an extreme right-winger who managed to stop the peace process with the Palestinians. Any time that there is even the smallest movement towards reconciliation with our enemies, they’re there trying to stop it any way they can. Extreme-right fanatics have done the most damage in the history of the Jews.

Did you encounter any resistance towards the way you portrayed them? 
Of course. The most powerful, the most influential, the most dramatically policy-changing group in Israel are the settlers. They have the biggest lobby in the Israeli political arena. They basically almost control Israel, and critics of that group are getting smaller and smaller… It’s a pity because, as we say, they’ve "wagged the dog" since 1974, the start of the settler movement.

One of the unfortunate takeaways of the film is the sheer impossibility of an easy solution. Can you speak on your thoughts on how the peace process can go forward?
There is no easy solution to this problem. And I don’t know if there is an answer. There’s a solution that everybody knows, but it’s a religious task, a military task, and the administration headed by Netanyahu is not the kind of leadership that can do that. Neither is it on the Palestinian side. So what can you do? Just try to move forward.

Do you think that the former heads of the Shin Bet really feel a strong sense of remorse? Or are they just trying to absolve themselves with the public? 
I never speak on behalf of the members themselves, but I sense that there really is a true feeling of missed opportunity. I felt very strongly that they feel that something else should have been done, should have been solved, or should have been said much earlier. And they really regret that they didn’t because it’s kept Israel in a fragile state and cast her in a poor foreign light, as an occupying force.

It’s an incredibly powerful film, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it does internationally. I think it’ll open the eyes of many. Thank you for speaking with me. 
Thank you very much.

The Gatekeepers is out in theaters now. Check your local listings, or just google it.

I think everyone can relate to Jack, who's always running headfirst into things and not thinking them through. You can see the climax in Spider coming a mile away, but when it comes you realize objects far away are a lot bigger and more fucked than they appear. Once you make it out of Spider’s web, be sure to check out Bear if you haven't already or watch it again to catch all of the hidden gems you might have missed the first time around. And remember, always listen to your mom.

—Jeffrey Bowers

Last week VICE debuted the short film Bear by Nash Edgerton, so this week I'd like to highlight its predecessor, Spider. Spider follows the well-intentioned Jack, played by Edgerton, who is always on uncertain terms with his girlfriend, Jill. Things between the two of them would be alright if he'd just heed his mom’s advice, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”

I think everyone can relate to Jack, who's always running headfirst into things and not thinking them through. You can see the climax in Spider coming a mile away, but when it comes you realize objects far away are a lot bigger and more fucked than they appear. Once you make it out of Spider’s web, be sure to check out Bear if you haven't already or watch it again to catch all of the hidden gems you might have missed the first time around. And remember, always listen to your mom.

Previously - Bear

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Nash has been on the scene for some time, making his mark as an actor, stuntman, writer, and director. While doing stunts for big-budget features—like the Matrix trilogy and the Star Wars prequels—he made a number of music videos, including three for Bob Dylan. His original work is darkly comic, violent, and expertly executed. And Bear is no exception.

There are many reasons Bear is so effective: good actors, realistic characters, beautiful cinematography, and a smart script. However, what really takes it over the top is Nash’s closely controlled reveals in story and character that string the audience along so we’re just as stunned as Emelie is when Jack makes his big “transformation.”

—Jeffrey Bowers

[Editor's Note: Welcome to "I'm Short, Not Stupid," a weekly column focused on highlighting rare and obscure short films. Enjoy this flick (the video is at the bottom) and check back next week for another peculiar adventure in the art of short moving pictures.]

Bear is not a classic story of two lovers, two lovers fighting, two lovers making up, and two lovers living happily ever after. Jack, played by director Nash Edgerton, is a fuck up with a good heart. He also always seems to have something up his sleeve. The film begins with sage words from Jill, Jack’s ex-girlfriend who went all the way down the drain in Nash’s previous short film, Spider (which will debut on VICE next week). Unfortunately, Jack’s new girlfriend, Emelie, doesn’t know about his penchant for pranks and has no idea the wild ride in store for her. Both Bear and Spider are crafted around the premise of a boyfriend messing up and attempting to right his wrong with a theatrical gesture.

Nash has been on the scene for some time, making his mark as an actor, stuntman, writer, and director. While doing stunts for big budget features—like the Matrix trilogy and the Star Wars prequels—he made a number of music videos, including three for Bob Dylan. His original work is darkly comic, violent, and expertly executed. And Bear is no exception.

There are many reasons Bear is so effective: good actors, realistic characters, beautiful cinematography, and a smart script. However, what really takes it over the top is Nash’s closely controlled reveals in story and character that string the audience along so we’re just as stunned as Emelie is when Jack makes his big “transformation.”

Previously - Asparagus

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

[Editor's Note: Welcome to "I'm Short, Not Stupid," a weekly column focused on highlighting rare and obscure short films. Enjoy this flick (the video is at the bottom) and check back next week for another peculiar adventure in the art of short moving pictures.]

Now 35 years old, Suzan Pitt’s 20-minute mind-bending psychosexual drama Asparagus is just as shocking, imaginative, and adventurous as it was when it played before David Lynch’s Eraserhead. From its opening images, the filmmaker lays bare the idea of a female being controlled by sex, as a snake slithers down her leg and tongues out her name. Rife with sexual metaphors and phallic shapes, the film channels the energy of a pent-up housewife aching to get fucked. The lush cel animation, which was painstakingly drawn over five years, propels you into Pitt’s dreamlike narrative.

Following Carl Jung’s idea of images being pregnant, each new image expands in meaning based on what came before it. Associative logic is even employed in the animation style where scenes fold into themselves without any straight cuts. The no-faced protagonist flows effortlessly through her over-stuffed, ostentatious home filled with pussy shaped lights and red velvet curtains covering fields of big dick surrogating asparagus, leaving us to wonder, Why isn’t this woman masturbating right now? This may be due to the fact that the piece wisely and expertly explores identity, what it means to be an artist, reproduction, and sexuality—instead of succumbing to immediate passions. In fact, in one of the more rousing scenes, when the faceless character is trapped in a hall of mirrors of sorts, Pitt reinforces her struggle to overcome stagnation simply by utilizing different animation styles. When she finally breaks from the loop, she dons a mask and is able to exit her house. Of course one problem begets another, so instead of talking about the fact that this woman needs to put on a “mask” to go outside, I will just say that you should watch the film again. There’s always something beautiful and intelligent at work in Asparagus and I find something new upon every viewing. Pitt believes the film should be felt rather than strictly interpreted, so please leave comments on how you feel about fondling, shitting, and deep throating the asparagus dicks.

Suzan Pitt has had major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, and the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam. She has designed two operas in Germany which were the first to include animated images for the stage (Damnation of Faust and The Magic Flute). In addition, Pitt has created two large multi-media shows at the Venice Biennale and Harvard University. Pitt is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Award, three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. To see more of Suzan's work, visit her website. 

Previously - Removed

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index. 

[Editor's Note—Welcome to the inaugural post of "I'm Short, Not Stupid," a weekly column focused on highlighting rare and obscure short films under one unifying theme, which will shift on an arbitrary basis. When the curator, Jeffrey Bowers, told us the inaugural theme was "Phallic Fever," we got really excited because we love wieners and so should you. Enjoy this flick and check back next week for another short vaguely related to major bonage!]

Removed is the ultimate cocktease. Made back in 1999 by director Naomi Uman, the short attempts to examine the female form through the reappropriation of vintage 16mm porno. But before you break out a bottle of Jergens, you should know that you don't actually see any sexed-up women at all. Using a number of household products, Naomi physically strips the objectified woman down to a blank object and subverts our collective carnal gaze. The void where all the lady-parts usually would be turns into a perfect space to project our own fantasy woman. 

 Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index. 

The Shoplifting from American Apparel movie is the cinematographic equivalent of the Doritos Loco Taco—a total lack of substance covered up with gimmicks to distract the consumer. Based on alt-lit wunderkind Tao Lin’s novella of the same name, it was produced for $30,000, half of that financed from the director's own pocket. After a protracted attempt to get the film into festivals, it was self-released this December in six theaters for single-night engagements.

Pirooz Kaleyah, a Los Angeles-based indie filmmaker, secured the rights to make the film after befriending Tao Lin. Tao was initially asked to play himself, but declined. In lieu of a real appearance, he appears in homemade iMovie clips.

The original title of this movie was "Ski School 2: Revenge of the Fallen."

The opening scene features the cast and crew sledding down a hill, skateboarding, playing rock and roll, and generally acting wholesome, young, and Millennial. None of these things happen in the book. The rest of the movie is a scripted faux-documentary about the making of the movie. Jordan Castro, an internet writer and non-professional actor, plays Tao Lin. Brad Warner, who blogs about Buddhism, plays himself as an actor in the film portraying Tao Lin. “Brad Tao” and “Jordan Tao” interact throughout the film as scenes taken from the book overlap and entwine with scenes about the making of the movie. With two actors playing Tao, plus the aforementioned iMovie cameos of Tao Lin, the viewer is left with the sense that the movie is a fake documentary about the making of a fake movie, with a real documentary about the making of a real movie wedged in the middle.

For once, this movie and I agree.

In the past (before we were all on Gchat and Twitter all the time), people did tangible things and this tangible reality was portrayed in films. Tao Lin’s literary career has been built on portraying the technological dullness of the 21^st century. His characters don’t do much of anything, and their dialogue is choppy and awkward and doesn’t resemble natural speech. Here’s a representative sentence from Shoplifting from American Apparel: “He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen. He showered and put on clothes and opened the Microsoft World file of his poetry.” This is as close as you get to an “action scene” in his oeuvre. Making a fucking smoothie and using a laptop don’t exactly scream "gripping cinema," so perhaps when the director decided to undertake this Sisyphean task he didn’t quite know what he was getting into.

This is probably the last time I'll be photographed with one of Tao Lin's books.

For full disclosure, I made a brief appearance in the film in exchange for $50. Even though the filmmakers put years of toil and hard work into the production and the experience of making it with them was so pleasurable, Shoplifting from American Apparel was never intended to be a film. The book, and all of Tao's literary output, is not cinematic in conception. I e-mailed Tao for comment. He wrote back:

Hey, I don't have anything to say about it. Thank you for asking though. Interested in reading what you write about it.

His lack of interest in speaking about the film (and his asking a Village Voice reviewer if he was going to write “something snarky” about it)  lead me to believe that he might be embarrassed by the film.

Brad Warner (left) and Jordan Castro (right) express ennui through plaid.

Tao’s former wife, Megan Boyle, told me she thought the film was “weird,” “tried too hard,” and that Tao and the film’s writer/director “have different ideas about what art is.”

Tao Lin projects an image to the world of being someone who is too alienated to care. In a recent VICE interview about his new book, Taipei, Tao said he doesn’t write for outside approval. He claims he wrote Taipei because he “was going to need to do something for money.”

His statements make him seem above fame, literary respect, peer approval or artistic satisfaction. If he just wanted to get paid, he could have continued to sell his possessions. His history of picking fights with literary figures and websites he doesn’t care for makes it seem like he’s after one thing: attention.

These two are as confused as you are right now.

The film version, ultimately, came out as scattershot and confusing. It resembles an extremely low-budget Charlie Kaufman movie. The tonal shifts and changes of perspective are jarring. Despite all the attempts to liven up a bland book, there’s no emotional resonance or thematic weight to the material. The Gchats are illustrated with cute cartoons, but are still boring to read. There’s far more action in the movie than in the book, but the action in the film is empty. A claim could be made that the creative forces behind the movie were not faithful to the text they were adapting, but a more straightforward adaptation would have involved watching someone do fifty jumping jacks and prattling on about stealing batteries while high on cocaine.

It will probably be a while before another one of Tao’s books is adapted to film. I doubt this sits well with Tao. There’s a large section of the world that will never be exposed to his work. Some critics will never approve of him as the “voice of his generation.” Tao Lin tried to go Hollywood, but in the process it was revealed that his work is so vacant that the director of this movie had to add a bunch of postmodern distractions to make it remotely tolerable. And if that’s not true, then I’m sure Tao will make sure everyone knows.

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 realize 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?

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