Tablet Magazine #92 - Arts

Film Reviews

Your guide to what's hot and what's not on the silver screen

The Underbelly of Activism

Art world terrorists, the Yes Men, are thankfully here to stay

Words: Karla Esquivel

You may be familiar with the tongue-in-cheek culture jamming antics of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, otherwise known as the Yes Men. But if you aren’t, the latest documentary by the folks who brought us “American Job” will surely make you jump for joy at the introduction and even want to join their cause of exposing the horrors of right wing policy. I had the high honor of meeting these rabble-rousers on a cloudy September morning. Dressed in Republican garb, and plastered with tags that state “YES BUSH CAN,” the goofy duo look me straight in the eye and tell me how they have been driving around the country campaigning for Bush in their utterly ridiculous outfits. “We think we can clarify and speak about the issues more clearly than Bush himself. We can actually say the things he somehow has a hard time saying. And we actually like many of his ideas,” says a very straight-faced Bonanno.

I can’t help but wonder what is going through their heads or where they are going with this, and, most importantly, how they get away with it. After all, they strategically snuck into the Republican National Convention, snooped around for dirt and later offered kindred protesters “Republican makeovers” so that they may take visiting delegates on tours illustrating the consequences of Bush’s actions. So I ask them what Bush issues are their favorites. “You know, pre-emptive war. If we could go out and attack everybody, and I mean everybody, terrorism wouldn’t be an issue. If we could just get rid of all the people! It’s a lot like clear cutting. Instead of persecuting individuals, I say we should just condemn entire neighborhoods, like the Bronx,” Bichlbaum responds with a smirk.

The brazen two share a history for rocking the boat, which led to their inevitable union. Bonanno is the brain behind the Barbie Liberation Organization, which in the early ‘90s exchanged the voice boxes of G.I. Joe dolls with Barbies and then covertly snuck them back onto toy store shelves. Meanwhile, Bichlbaum, who had a brief stint as a video game programmer, decided on a whim to replace the regular large-breasted video babes with scantily clad dudes who ran around the game kissing one another. These covert and brilliant pranks insured that Bonanno and Bichlbaum would not only be a match made in heaven but also corporate America’s biggest pains in the ass.

The two later mocked George W. Bush’s website during the 2000 election. In response, an infuriated Bush was quoted as saying “There ought to be limits to freedom.” They were then given the golden domain to gatt.org—GATT being the old name for the WTO—which gave the Yes Men the glorious opportunity to create a biting parody of its website. It resembled the original so much, that economic leaders from around the globe blindly began inviting them to speak on behalf of the WTO and, of course, they accepted. After their first invite, they knew they had to be documented. “Since we had two more invitations we couldn’t help but think there had to be a film here. So we contacted the folks who worked on ‘American Job’ (Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price) and asked them if they wanted to come along,” says Bichlbaum.

And thank God they were game. The result is an often hilarious and sometimes downright scary documentary that hits at the core of corporate numbness. In the film, Bonanno and Bichlbaum go to Finland to talk about slavery and if it had just been kept in the third world there never would’ve been an expensive civil war. They also introduce what is called a “Management Leisure Suit.” Made entirely of gold lamÈ, it also boasts a huge phallus with a TV monitor on the tip, where employers can keep an eye on their workers in remote locations. The sincerity of their speech and demonstration did cause a few people to blink, but few actually understood what was really being said.

“You hear us talking about these ideas that would strike us or any normal person or student as dangerous, but to these people, they are just details within a bigger scheme,” Bichlbaum explains. “To them the idea of the market being so dominant and trumping all other concerns is normal. And that anything you say within that context like slavery—not so bad, and the introduction of recycled hamburgers and spying on your employers with a huge prong is just a minor detail to them, that we find disconcerting.”

While you watch the film, you can witness the Yes Men’s cunning skills and sheer brilliance as they single-handedly shut down the WTO, talk turkey on the British outlet of CNBC and just plain entertain with their sharp wit and performance art. With no economic background, a grant from the Herp Albert Foundation (yes, “Herp Albert”) and thrift store suits in tow, it’s obvious these merry pranksters and impersonators are not just a flash in pan. Their version of reality will hopefully infiltrate the American subconscious. “Truth is always stranger than fiction,” Bichlbaum confesses. “And there are far stranger things in this world than our fiction.”

"The Yes Men" documentary opens at Seattle Harvard Exit on October 1.

DIG!
Dir: Ondi Timoner

“DIG!” is the result of director Ondi Timoner’s desire “to look at art and industry over a period of time and see what happens when the two meet.” Her chosen “art” subjects were ten rock bands on the verge of getting signed. Seven years and 1,500-plus hours of film later, the focus was narrowed to two, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Portland’s the Dandy Warhols, of course, signed with Capitol and eventually found success as alt-rock darlings. Conversely, San Francisco-based BJM proved to have a penchant for self-destruction, chiefly due to the volatility of their leader, Anton Newcombe, who was just as likely to come out swinging with his fists as with his guitar. Indeed, the first time Timoner filmed BJM, at Los Angeles celebrity haunt the Viper Room, the gig degenerated into a full-scale brawl.

“I could not believe it,” Timoner told Tablet when the film played SIFF earlier this year. “But I thought that it was a one-off experience. I really didn’t know that it would be a… pattern. Of course I was compelled to keep filming. And Anton said to me the next day, ‘Forget about all those other bands. I’m doing a full-scale musical revolution. Go meet the Dandys. We’re taking over your documentary.’ And I thought, ‘Ha ha ha.’ But then he did!”

Certainly, though the Dandys’ Courtney Taylor provides the film’s narration, it’s Newcombe who emerges as the story’s anti-hero and provides the film’s driving—if uncontrollable—force. The Dandys struggle with maintaining creative control and try to keep their label interested when their first records fail to take off, but Newcombe’s mood swings have BJM fighting for their very lives.

“Getting people to care about Anton for an hour and 45 minutes as he pummels people was my biggest challenge,” Timoner says. “It’s funny when Anton argues now that this is a deliberately ‘Jerry Springer’-esque edit of the film. But you have no idea—a lot of scenes I shot were way darker and more crazy than what ended up on the screen!”

But “DIG!”’s greatest strength is its immediacy, thanks to Timoner’s determination to “shoot life as it unfolded… keep that idea of just a continuous ‘you are there.’ Later on, it was like an archeological dig to get through this stuff—this project was chaos embodied! But it’s also like my own family album. I mean, I grew up with those bands. And I grew up as a filmmaker; you look at the film and you can see the actual filmmaking evolve. That’s what’s so cool about it.”

Like all the best documentaries, “DIG!”’s story is strong enough to hold your interest whether or not you’ve heard of either band. The film is less about each band’s music than the power struggles that inevitably threaten any creative endeavor, once it begins to attract outside attention. It’s a situation “DIG!” examines with unflinching honesty. —Gillian G Gaar

Shaun of the Dead
Dir: Edgar Wright

In order to kill a zombie, you must aim for its head. “Shaun of the Dead” tries to do more than that by aiming for the audience’s heart, taking a romantic comedy and turning it abruptly into a zombie flick.

Director Edgar Wright and co-screenwriter Simon Pegg (who plays Shaun) manage to nail the right zombie conventions, but special effects fans will miss the punch found in the just-released “Resident Evil: Apocalypse.” Meanwhile, true zombie aficionados will see the similarity to “Evil Dead 2.”

“We were faithful to the material,” Wright tells me. “When you do a zombie film, you have to play by the same rules, the same conventions as other zombie films. But we really tried to avoid the campiness. This is more of a comedy with lethal injections of horror.”

The cast, which includes Bill Nighy (Billy Mack from 2003’s “Love Actually”), meshes well enough. Nighy, as Shaun’s step-dad Phillip, is a natural as the seemingly undead, and he maintains what Wright refers to as his characteristic “laconic, Keith Richards sort of feel.”

The real scene-stealer, however, is Ed, a big, video game-loving geek who pulls everyone else down to his level, but has a bigger heart than his well-meaning best friend, Shaun. Shaun, on the other hand, seems destined for greatness if he can ever escape the gravitational pull of the nearest pub, the Winchester.

Some British films in recent years (like Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch”) capture the essential English reserve in the face of some pretty volatile situations. “Shaun” characters also pull this off rather well, taking time out from bashing zombie heads to bicker over some pathetic soap opera-esque issues before resuming their task of killing the undead.

“The characters deal with the horror, but they react with a calmness, withholding emotion,” explains Wright, “like when Shaun and Ed first discover zombies in their backyard, their reaction is to merely close the curtains.”

Wright and Pegg wholeheartedly insist that judging by the way the human race moves through life that we’re all basically zombies already. “We get up, we need our coffee, we look like hell.” Wright says. “We trudge off to work, and we come home just to sit on the couch and play games or watch TV.” With few cheap sight gags and pratfalls, this comedy should do well enough here in the States to attract both the British comedy fan and the zombie fan alike. —Gregory Wylie