Archives for June 2010

Banksy: The Strangest Movie

Jun 27, 2010 by Ted Botha Leave a Comment

Flower Riot

Most people probably think that “good documentary movies” is an oxymoron. Good documentary movies are what other people (Did someone say the losers and the nerds?) go see. Good documentary movies are what you promise yourself you will go see when the trailer comes out, but never do.

Good documentary movies, I realize every time I see one, suffer the exact opposite fate of bad blockbusters. The one you don’t think twice about going to see (think Avatar) and afterwards you are sorry you did see it. The other you really struggle to go to (A documentary about spelling bees? Are you crazy?) and afterwards you can’t stop telling people how fabulous it was and it’s a shame documentaries don’t get the attention they deserve.

Banksy's Addition to Israel

And there goes Exit Through the Gift Shop, a brilliant film by (and mostly about) the British street artist Banksy. Like me before I saw Exit, you might not know the name Banksy but you probably know lots of the images the anonymous artist painted (or stenciled) on walls in Britain from the 1980s onwards, and then in places like Bethlehem, where he painted a piece of a paradise-looking island on the wall dividing Palestinians and Israelis. His art is satirical and funny, and comments on society and politics. And it’s almost always fun. Remember the British red telephone box sawn in half and reassembled as if it had melted?

Banky's Murdered Phone Booth

In Exit, you are given a whirlwind tour of street art around the world, all pumping along with a great soundtrack by Richard Hawley (listen here). How street art started, why it started, and how it got out of control, becoming a multimillion-dollar industry that had grown very simply out of a bunch of down-and-outers getting creative.

The Elusive Banksy in the Movie

One person in particular, Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles, gets major (and not always nice) attention in the movie. In the 1990s, Guetta started documenting street artists around the world with his video camera, hoping to make a movie about it, but after shooting millions of feet of film he suddenly decided to turn himself into the biggest street artist of all, Mister Brainwash. None of this went down well with Bansky, who believes that Guetta made a complete mockery of a genre that had started organically, honestly, and not with the purpose of making money – which Guetta made lots of.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the story in Exit is proof of that.

A Rant for the Week

Jun 24, 2010 by Ted Botha Leave a Comment

A little video prominently displayed on the New York Times website today by one Patrick Barth is interesting to note. (I won’t give the link because I wouldn’t like to give it a viewership.) The story, such as it is, is apparently about the hopes of South Africans after the World Cup. But one of the first sentences Mister Barth utters is this: “Despite the colorful displays of unity, there are some economists who believe that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world.”

Ten Pieces of Good News

And so begins yet another media story saying, Yes, all fine and well, but…

You know those stories? Remember the one that went, Yes, it’s all fine and well that Mandela is in power, but what about when he goes? Then when Mbeki took over, and South Africa didn’t fall off the edge of Africa, it was, Yes, but let’s see how the first five years go. Then when Zuma took over, it was, Yes, he sounds fine, but just wait…

You pick your event over the last sixteen years, and there will be a naysayer, a complainer, a person who sees the glass half-empty. No, there will be plenty of them. Now it’s the soccer. People who were positive – absolutely and unequivocally positive – that South Africa couldn’t do it, could never bring off such a huge event, are now saying, Yes, but it’s still the most unequal society in the world.

Says who? According to Mister Barth, “some economists.” Yes, that famous group of Some Economists Who Are Easy to Quote When You have Noone Else to Rely On. Many of us journalists know how a story like Barth’s gets produced. He will propose a story that might be more positive – like how the World Cup brought together a black and white couple from Sandton and Diepsloot who never would have met otherwise – and it will be rejected by his editor in New York or London who is still living in 1980 and has this fixed idea about what a news story should be (namely, bad news that makes you go, “See, I knew they would fail. I knew there’d be an earthquake under the stadium. It’s just like I told you. See, it’s in the Times, it must be true.”).

And so Mister Barth puts together a video relying on two interviewees and “some economists.” And once again, people who see it will be left with a negative impression of South Africa – wasn’t apartheid, AIDS, township violence enough to keep them sated for a while? – when the country deserves praise more than anything else.

But praise and good news, as we keep seeing, don’t make a good story. It’s not only no news that is bad news, as the saying goes, but good news too.

The A-Team Meets Van der Merwe

Jun 12, 2010 by Ted Botha Leave a Comment

In the ’80s, the TV series lots of people hated to love and others loved to hate was that oddity called The A-Team. Remember George Peppard playing the colonel with the stogie, and The Face, and the jewel-encrusted Mr. T? And then, of course, there was everyone’s foil, Murdock.

Well, as with all TV series that generate a following, Hollywood had to make a movie out of the series. And it’s just been released. The new A-Team stars Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper (the latest movie heartthrob plays, of course, The Face), and Sharlto Copley as Murdock. Yes, that would be the Copley who starred as Wikus van der Merwe in District 9.

Copley at a Premiere

Copley joins a very elite group of actors who have gone from total unknowndom to a major Hollywood movie. Let’s see if he plays an American in a caper movie as well as he played a bumbling hero in a kind of South African one. Welcome back, Van der Merwe!

Wine ‘n’ Soccer

Jun 8, 2010 by Ted Botha Leave a Comment

wine Come Saturday and the match between… well, I’m not sure who it will be between… but a bunch of us in New York will be at a little bistro called the Rouge Tomate on 60th Street, watching the match and drinking wine. South African wine, of course.

There’s no better time to promote SA wine, which is going through a buzzy time at the moment anyway. People all over America are talking about Goats do Roam and Mulderbosch and Meerlust and Warwick and Boekenhoutskloof, and more and more liquor stores have a SA wine section.

A couple of weeks ago a fab group called Wines of South Africa held a tasting where there were winemakers from all over the Western Cape in attendance, in the dozens if not hundreds. It was the function to go to.

During the World Cup, Wosa will be hosting events around the city, calling it World Cup Wine Nights, mixing two passions – wine and soccer – giving Americans a chance to try figure out not only what the rules of soccer are but also why they had overlooked SA wines for so long.