I’ve never wanted to be reincarnated as a gross piece of sticky brown stuff on a chair until now.Comments/Enlarge |
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Oh, now look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve made me put you in the DOs for pissing up against a dumpster like a little stray cat. You’re in biiiiig trouble, young lady.Comments/Enlarge |
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A FILM ISSUE
Cover collage by Christopher Doyle
ROMAN POLANSKI’S PIRATE DAYS In the summer of 1976, I was asked to photograph the entire Christmas issue of French Vogue. Roman Polanski, Nastassja Kinski, and I met in the Seychelles Islands, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Very few places are what you think th...READ MORE
MY TOP 10 ART FILMS EYE TO EYE
In 1989, Isabel Hegner asked Robert Mapplethorpe if she could make a documentary about him. He was really sick and at the end of his rope at that point, so he suggested she interview Jack Walls, his longtime lover and model, instead. Jac...READ MORE
GET OFF MY BACK! A Brief Foray Into Amateur Lesbian Pornography There are the ladies who’ll use their abdominal plumbing to make $7,000 helping a couple make a baby, and there are the girls who’ll use their vaginas to make $7,000 fucking a bunch of other girls for a porno. Both are long shots in terms of realis...READ MORE
LIGHTS! CAMERA! SNACK-TION! The Academy Awards Are One Class Act As I sat in the steam room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles with a glass of cucumber water in my hand, pampering myself before the 81st Academy Awards, I wondered: What delights did the evening have in store for me?...READ MORE
NOLLYWOOD OMEN Nigerian Christians Make the Best Drug-Party Film Ever Nollywood is the answer to CNN,” says a star of Nollywood Babylon, a Canadian documentary about the Nigerian film industry—a veritable movie factory that churns out 25,000 films a year at a budget of less than $10,000 each. I was so intrigued...READ MORE
VICE COMICS By Johnny Ryan VICE GREAT MOVIE MOMENTS PRESENTS... CADDY SHACK...READ MORE
THE DOCUMENTARY CRISIS Oil painting has been pursued for around 600 years. Screen-printing was developed during the Song dynasty in China during the tenth century, making it around 1,000 years old. Perhaps the oldest-known poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform i...READ MORE
ROSS McELWEE Ross McElwee's films are memoirs, not documentaries. Since his watershed moment, the cult classicSherman's March (1986), through the films that have followed—Time Indefinite (1993), Six O’Clock News (1997), and Brig...READ MORE
LES BLANK The life and career of Les Blank each deserve to have a book or three dedicated to them, not just a puny interview in one issue of one magazine. But that’s all we have to offer right now, and so we humbly present for your perusal this talk with one of th...READ MORE
WERNER HERZOG Interviewing Werner Herzog is a guilt-ridden experience. That’s not to say he makes the questioner feel stupid or inferior, but there’s still a lingering notion that he could be drafting a screenplay or producing a film in the time it takes to ask ...READ MORE
LARS VON TRIER Whenever Lars von Trier debuts a major film, he does it at Cannes. He travels there in a specially outfitted trailer, because he hates to travel and rarely ventures far outside his native Denmark, where his status as national treasure is surpassed only by the ...READ MORE
GASPAR NOÉ Vice first met filmmaker Gaspar Noé last year in Kabukichō, a Yakuza-controlled sex district in Tokyo where, as the saying goes, you can get anything your disgusting fucking black awful heart desires. When you are in Kabukichō you ...READ MORE
DARIO ARGENTO When people talk about Italian horror and giallo (which is—film-nerd alert—Italian for “yellow” and means “Italian thrillers” and is a term taken from the yellow color of the covers of the Italian penny-dreadful horror/...READ MORE
NARCOTIC FILMS FOR ILLEGAL FANS The Mexican Videohome Industry Makes Movies for the Masses During the last few years, Mexican directors have received unprecedented international recognition. Movies like Babel, Amores perros, Silent Light, Y tu mamá también, and Pan’s Labyrinth have won awards at film festivals all o...READ MORE
OUR TWO FAVORITE CINEMATOGRAPHERS SPEAK Anthony Dod Mantle Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, is an English-born cinematographer who has lived in Denmark for more than 20 years. He recently won an Academy Award for his work on Slumdog Millionaire, a movie he shot in Mumbai, India...READ MORE
OUR TWO FAVORITE CINEMATOGRAPHERS SPEAK - PART 2 Christopher Doyle Christopher Doyle, HKSC, is an Australian-born cinematographer who has lived and worked throughout Asia for more than two decades. He is most renowned for his eight-film collaboration with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. On classic, largely unscripted films l...READ MORE
OVER THE EDGE An Oral History of the Greatest Teen Rebellion Movie of All Time In the spring of 1979, a small-budget movie with a somewhat corny-sounding name was released in just a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles, only to be pulled a few days later due to concerns that audiences would riot. Based (loosely) on a true stor...READ MORE
VICE PHOTOS By Miranda July & Roe Ethridge Dear Julie, Do you ever feel like an extra in your own life? It seems like I am forever stuck in the background, watching other people say and do all the things I feel inside...READ MORE
SURVIVAL OF THE STREETS Snake Plissken, the Cro-Mags, and the Persistence of Megatoilet Nostalgia New York City’s comeback has been an odd thing to watch from afar. When I moved out of Manhattan in 1990, the city was every inch the pee-smelling woe zone I’d known since childhood. When I returned this spring, I couldn’t even find key graff...READ MORE
GEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR In the history of experimental film, George and Mike Kuchar stand out like a luridly lit, throbbing purple thumb. Along with Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, et al., the twin Kuchars are among the most emblematic avant-garde filmmakers of their generation....READ MORE
TERRY GILLIAM Terry Gilliam got his start being the most beloved guy in his high school and then he went on to do every job that anyone has ever fantasized about and to collaborate with everyone that anyone has ever wanted to meet or be. He worked for Harvey Kurtzman on Har...READ MORE
SPIKE JONZE In the five years since we’ve become friends with Spike Jonze, he has never not been working on his movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. It’s been a life-consuming, soul-question...READ MORE
DAVID LYNCH I am a big-time David Lynch nut. I remember having to steal a copy of Blue Velvet and watch it at a friend’s house because my parents thought it was too sketchy for me to see at 12. I watched each episode of Twin Peaks the night that it ori...READ MORE
SHEPPARD’S VIDEO-GAME PIE By Stephen Lea Sheppard DAWN OF DISCOVERY
Most people are familiar with SimCity, and anyone who’s been playing PC games for a few years is bound to have heard of Sid Meyer’s Civilization. Dawn of Discovery...READ MORE
NORMAN J. WARREN Until the middle of the 1970s, British horror films tended to be camp, period rehashes of American horror classics in which hammy, top hat-wearing toffs would end up being killed by the big guys from the gore of yore such as Dracula and werewolves. Not surpris...READ MORE
MICHAEL WINNER Michael Winner is the funny-looking man from those “Calm down, dear!” insurance adverts on television. He is also one of the most successful directors Britain has ever produced.
Name another Brit filmmaker who cut pictures with Orson Welles, M...READ MORE
JACK BOND Jack Bond was a headmaster when he was 21. Sometime after that he lost a full-grown bear and nearly 50 mental patients in the woods in Wales. He also rolled with Warhol and Magritte in New York and drove Salvador Dali into a rage. These days, he’s makin...READ MORE
BREAK DOWN THE WALLS! How Play for Today Changed British Screens for Ever and Ever Television movies are rubbish, right? Well, if you were watching TV in Britain in the 1960s, the opposite would be the case. Play for Today was a series of one-off dramas that dragged television into uncharted cinematic territory via the emerging use of...READ MORE
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT NOISE? Jonny Trunk Loves Really, Really, Really Obscure Film Soundtracks As a child I’d watch crap late-night films on British TV and say “wow” a lot at how great all the music and backgrounds were in movies—especially the slightly weirder and often ruder films from Italy or France...READ MORE
RECORDS Music Reviews - A Film Issue VITALIC
Flashmob
French disco warrior Vitalic takes a break from inventing the future to deliver his second long-playing masterpiece this decade, and the results are nothing short of...READ MORE
DAPPER NIGHTWATCHMEN La Sape Afrique du Sud The worldwide Congolese fashion cult known as La Sape (Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance) dates back to the return of African soldiers to Brazzaville after fighting for France in the First World War. After Zairean despot Mobutu Sese Seko tried ...READ MORE
DIE ANTWOORD Zef So Fresh Nobody really understands Die Antwoord. All we really have to go on is that they’re a ‘next level rap-rave krew’ comprised of a skinny white MC with a box cut and Pollsmoor chappies and a potty-mouthed, bottle-blonde bitchette in gold spandex, often joi...READ MORE
STIFF AS A STORYBOARD Jeremy Draws a Porno from Start to Finish Jeremy Ley is a 26 year old artist who makes a living as an illustrator. You’ll usually find him in his Melbourne studio drawing storyboards for films and commercials or making beautiful drawings for books and magazines. We use him at Vice quite a...READ MORE
MOTION FROM ACROSS THE OCEAN Why Len Lye Didn’t Need to Get High Len Lye was born at the turn of the last century on New Zealand’s then-mind-numbingly isolated South Island. Consequently, the likelihood that Len would eventually have a creative impact on the world was about as slim as him winning the lottery without a...READ MORE
ROY ANDERSSON Roy Andersson is one of the most original and important living Swedish filmmakers who, despite 40 years in the industry, has only made four feature films. Not because he didn’t want to make more but because he refused to follow up his commercially succes...READ MORE
THE DEMON DIRECTOR’S AUTOPSY Maaret Koskinen Found More Than a Few Skeletons in Ingmar Bergman’s Closet When Ingmar Bergman was 20 years old, he faced a fairly ordinary existential predicament: What’s a guy to do with a head full of thoughts he can neither comprehend nor control? His answer: “You open the gas stove at home in the little kitchen and t...READ MORE
