ALI G'S COUSIN MAKES REALLY GOOD MOVIES

I was smitten by

Bang

when I saw it at the fleapit cinema where I worked back in 1995. Here follows some facts about director Ash Baron Cohen. He's Sacha's cousin. He didn't use his surname on his early films because he was working in America illegally. He's legally blind without his contact lenses. He shot

Bang

, his first film, for $20,000, and he shot it great. A young actress gets evicted from her apartment, runs away from a casting when the producer comes on to her, trashes his mailbox, and after being stopped by a cop who offers her freedom in return for a blowjob, steals his gun, uniform, and bike. That's where the film takes off, as she rides around LA for a day getting into scrapes with various lowlifes and experiencing what it's like to be a cop, for better or, mostly, worse.

Bang

is an exploration of the ways power is abused, although it's also a day in the life of Los Angeles.

The film was partly scripted and partly improvised, shot without permits or permission, and some moments--like when the actress gives away money to a bunch of homeless people who rapidly grow in numbers--are real, and happened on the fly. Darling Narita, who somehow isn't a star today, carries the film, and is completely convincing as an emotional girl out of her depth, while a nutty supporting cast includes Peter Greene (Zed from

Pulp Fiction

) as an unhinged homeless guy, pre-fame Lucy Liu as a hooker brat, and House of Pain's Everlast as a violent pimp. There's a trailer

here

.

Bang

's guerrilla style seems to stem from its director's skill at making due with what resources are available to him. At film school, he was making a thriller about a Big Brother police state called

The Sex Police

. One day he snuck into the Sunset Marquis to use their pool and saw Richard Harris on a balcony. He found a house phone and asked for Harris's suite. Harris answered, "Who the fuck is this?" Ash said he didn't know anyone in town and asked for five minutes of his time. "Be here tomorrow at 7 AM for breakfast", Harris told him, and Ash subsequently asked him if he'd do a free cameo for him in

The Sex Police

. Harris told him to write a scene for him, and Ash went off and wrote a monologue about the etymology of the word "cunt." Harris, who was in town filming Clint Eastwood's

Unforgiven

, loved it and called Eastwood to say he couldn't come to work today because he had food poisoning, and went to the beach with Ash to do this. That night, Harris called Eastwood and said: "I didn't have food poisoning. I was with a young filmmaker, and we were running around on the beach. There were seven people there doing the whole thing, and I was even holding my own light. That was real filmmaking, Clint." Ash used Harris' monologue as the opening to

The Sex Police

. He eventually failed film school for shooting a documentary about a dominatrix on 16mm instead of Super 8, although he says being kicked out encouraged him to make

Bang

.

Oliver Stone loved

Bang

, and after seeing it said to Ash, "We have to make you legal," so he could use his surname. Since then he's made teen bank-robber drama called

Pups

(starring a very young Mischa Barton), a film about a porn star called

This Girl's Life

(with Rosario Dawson and James Woods), and a documentary about kids with AIDS called

Little Warriors

. His next film is a romantic thriller starring Lenny Kravitz (hahahahahahaha). But even though it's Lenny Kravitz, I trust Ash. "A good film has the potential to be immortal," he once said. "When humans are extinct, like the dinosaurs before us, a new dominant species will come across some relics of movies and say, 'Man, those humans were something else… What other species has been so self-reflective? They made movies about life and death… but, man, they sure were obsessed with porn.'"

ALEX GODFREY