Thursday, July 15, 2010

Exit Through the Gift Shop

 
Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary about various street artists that may or may not be entirely genuine. It starts out with a Frenchman who, for no particular reason at all, decides to start filming his life. After meeting up with a cousin, who has a hobby of making Space Invader stickers and placing them various places aroung the city, the Frenchman decides to follow him around with his camera. Intrigued by the street artist lifestyle, he meets and records endless hours of street artists, including Shepard Fairey (who supposedly invented the red, white, and blue Obama poster) and eventually Bansky, the infamous, anonymous graffiti artist and director of this film. From there the documentary goes in a direction no one could have anticipated. It did not bother me that the filmmakers may have been pulling our legs with this one (I was a little irked with the self-promotion associated with the various artists, especially Banksy). Exit Through the Gift Shop proves to be an entertaining if slight diversion.
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