Everybody’s favorite free magazine goes straight to video with this documentary style tour around some of the most fucked up places in the world. From the biggest gun bazaar in Pakistan to hunting mutated wild boars and bears right in the heart of Chernobyl, the creators of VICE magazine’s first DVD under their new VICE Films imprint, The VICE Guide to Travel, boldly goes where no one has, wants to, or has even thought of going in the world for fun.
As a fan of VICE magazine, the first thing I wondered was whether or not their story style would translate well onto DVD. Not only does it, but the founders of the magazine we’ve all heard about and seen occasionally, Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInness, along with friends like Spike Jonze and David Cross, really come across as honest reporters thrown into the fire of their own story. An interesting and refreshing positive of the DVD is that they are not trying to create a FOX news style drama for our viewing pleasure, but letting the normal fucked up everyday things that happen within the environment of these very foreign places, just happen. In a segment called “The Gun Markets of Pakistan” Suroosh Alvi take us on a tour of “the biggest illegal arms market on the planet” located somewhere in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province as he tells us in his opening interview. This is a place that not only sells guns but makes about 1000 of them a day, selling them to anyone who has the money, including militias and militants fighting the U.S. army.
Whether it’s Derrick Beckles on the hunt for “The Last Aryans of Paraguay” or David Choe in the Congo looking for the last dinosaurs through the jungles and amongst pygmies and albino’s, the DVD is a hard look at hard places we’ll never see on the news, let alone the Discovery Channel, at least not these kinds of stories. The scariest moment captured on film is seeing VICE Correspondent Trace Crutchfield in the most dangerous favella (slum) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the place where the film City of God was made, running down the street after gunshots were fired. A close second was then seeing him at a baile (dance) funk party thrown by the local druglords, walking around videotaping it, though he was just told how a reporter was “microwaved,” or set on fire in a stack of tires after being caught trying to record this party secretly.
The VICE Guide to Travel is an eye-popping look at a world outside the bubble created for us by the media. A world that’s savage, raw, nihilistic, fatalistic, and unforgiving. The extras are worth watching too, just to see Gavin McInness and David Cross buying bootlegs of Arrested Development and Mr. Show, and then dressed up as Uncle Sam in an American bar in China watching the SuperBowl. Very funny stuff here. This is the type of DVD you’ll want to watch again with friends just to see the expressions on their faces after they see what’s really out there. The shit that goes on in places on this planet is really fucked up, and like a car accident, (an old pun I know, but it really works here) you can’t look away, and with a video like this, you understand why you shouldn’t; because the story behind why it happened in the first place is just as wild as how it happened. This is an excellent first effort by a bunch of filmmakers trying to figure out filmmaking and finding a style of reporting in the process that immerses them into the story as deeply as we’d really want them to go, without feeling the effects. |