Country and Year: US (2006)
Director: Various
Starring: Various

Review By: David Austin
Rating: 2 1/2 out of 4 stars (above average)

Vice Magazine is a hipster rag par excellence with an intelligent skate-punk aesthetic. Subsidized by advertising, the writing ranges from engagingly snarky to cooler-than-thou, with a heavy focus on the traditional – sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, along with a hefty dose of fashion. Though Vice was founded in Montreal, I was introduced to it years ago as a free alternative giveaway in New York. Since then the staff has permanently moved publication to NYC.

Vice is a classic mixed bag - some of the writing is essential, like Chris Nieratko’s Skinema column, where reviews of pornography DVDs form a platform for amusing digressions (the ostensible subjects of the column are lucky to even get a mention in the body), or the DOs and DON’Ts photos of random people on the street. Other articles devolve into mock race-baiting and attempts to show off the magazine’s street credibility (the overabundance of American Apparel ads speaks to that). It’s always a mix of the irritating and the brilliant – the recent “Cops” and “Gangs” issues featured some excellent reporting, but other pieces can make you want to smack the editors. Still, there’s always something worth checking out, if only the pictures.

After publishing a few successful books, the Vice brand has branched out into video with The Vice Guide to Travel - a classic piece of gonzo journalism in the Hunter Thompson tradition. With its international orientation, VGT plays out like a mash-up of Robert Young Pelton’s “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” travel guide (check out the chapter on Syria) and 60 Minutes, assuming Mike Wallace had a few too many before going out on assignment. Each segment focuses on a different geographical area, and has a different theme, drawing attention to parts of the world that many will know nothing about.

Ultimately, however, while the aim is laudable, the result is frustrating. I admire what Vice is trying to do, but they fail as much as they succeed. The main problem (besides Vice’s habit of employing terminally annoying smartasses), is that many of the reports fail to cohere into anything significant. For every 60 Minutes report that makes it to the air, there must be a number on which the journalists spend time but ultimately fail to develop a story. VGT lacks the self-editing – instead of giving up such pieces as lost causes, Vice has included them on the DVD. All too many of the reports leave the audience with a sense that there was a lot more that could have been done.

Nevertheless, despite its noteworthy flaws, Vice has done what it always does - mixed some true gems into a flawed package. The individual segments are as follows:

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“The Slums of Rio” – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Correspondent Trace Crutchfield visits the favelas of Rio, and tours the same slums featured in the film City of God. During the course of his visit, Crutchfield explores the local conflicts between police and drug lords, meets with local journalist Gherardo Milanesi, and wanders the bullet-riddled streets. His peregrinations show off the conflicts of the town – violence coexisting with ordinary citizens trying to eke out a normal lifestyle. The highlight of this segment is some grainy but impressive footage from a Baile Funk, a massive party/riot thrown by drug kingpins to keep the local populace happy. Crutchfield’s faux-preppy demeanor gets old fast (he seems to be the only correspondent who has adopted a persona for his report), and the report is directionless, but the neighborhood footage captured is interesting enough to compensate.

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“Bulgarian Dirty Bombs” – Sofia, Bulgaria

Shane Smith, a founder of Vice, and correspondent Jake Burghart attempt to replicate a famous reportorial coup of recent years in which a French journalist demonstrated that it was possible to purchase a nuclear warhead on the black market. The Vice team contacts “Ivanov,” a former military intelligence officer to arrange a deal. Ivanov is looking to set up a nuclear waste management business but is not averse to a little arms dealing in the meantime, and discusses his minor connections to Osama Bin Laden and the possibility of terrorist groups acquiring decommissioned warheads. In the end, while the subject matter is frankly terrifying and the report draws further attention to the frightening conjunction of terrorism and capitalism in the post-communist world, this is one of the more pointless episodes – Vice’s reporters have little to add to the original French report. They simply show that it may be possible to replicate the feat under similar circumstances.

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“PLO Boy Scouts in Beirut” – Beirut, Lebanon

Before the recent war between Lebanon and Israel, Shane Smith and editor Jesse Pearson visited Beirut and explored the process by which young children are converted into explosive “martyrs” for Allah. They spoke to the head of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade and to Mia Bloom, the author of “Dying to Kill,” watch the last videos of Palestinian suicide bombers, and wander through a bombed-out skate park. They are joined in watching the footage by director Spike Jonze, who forms a sort of “gee whiz” Greek chorus (I suspect Jonze is considerably smarter than this, and is revisiting his hick character from “Three Kings”). The footage is chilling and, overall, this is one of the stronger segments.

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“The Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl” – Chernobyl, Ukraine

Shane Smith, correspondent Pella Kagerman, and guide Yuri Tatarchuck visit ground zero in Chernobyl, ostensibly in order to hunt radioactive animals. This segment largely consists of Smith and Kagerman getting severely drunk on the long train ride to Pripyat in Chernobyl, where they wander the halls of an abandoned school before firing off some Kalashnikov automatic weapons. The sight of desks left in disarray during the evacuation of Chernobyl, and the creepiness of a steadily climbing Geiger counter, are effective but, sadly, the aforementioned mutant creatures never make much of an appearance and the crew’s drunken antics get old fast.

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“The Gun Markets of Pakistan” – Darra, Pakistan

Vice founder Suroosh Alvi pulled in some serious connections in order to be allowed by the Pakistani government to visit Darra, a town in the tribal areas near the lawless border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darra sits right on the border in the hills – at one point Alvi is able to look down into the famed Khyber Pass through which the last remnants of a colonial British army once straggled. Now Darra is a thriving gun market – old men and small children build, repair and sell weapons ranging from antique Khyber rifles to WWII-era German pistols to modern Kalashnikov assault rifles – over one thousand a day.

Alvi is accompanied on his tour by a small private militia headed by Naeem Afridi. Afridi is a superbly cheerful man, pointing out local dangers and miseries with a jolly grin and a pride similar to that of New Yorkers secretly reveling in the troubles of the big city. During his visit, Alvi meets tongueless artisans who live in caves and build automatic weapons with their bare hands, and gleefully test-fires weapons from a local roof. This segment is both interesting and informative, and provides real insight into the US’s adversaries in the region, and just how tough they are.

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“The Last Dinosaur of the Congo” – Republic of the Congo

In easily the most irritating report, correspondent David Choe visits the Congo in order to investigate the legend of Mokele Mbembe, the “One who stops the flow of rivers,” a local Loch Ness Monster. The biggest problem with this section is Choe himself., a LA-based graphic artist who has traveled widely in some dangerous areas and developed an intensely obnoxious personality. Taking advantage of the Congo setting, he stages his own personal “Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now” using Mokele Mbembe as his Kurtz. He hires African prostitutes to dance naked, lurks in the water, drinks local hooch to have a hallucinogenic experience, and cavorts during a ceremony in honor of the creature. Unfortunately, his actions come off as more sophomoric than witty. It does not help that Choe seems the sort of guy that would be hiring the prostitutes whether or not the cameras were rolling. He may or may not actually be a smug jackass, but he certainly goes to a lot of effort to appear like one.

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“The Last Aryans of Paraguay” – Nueva Germania, Paraguay

Vice’s Derrick Beckles and Jackass’s Johnny Knoxville took a trip to Paraguay in order to visit Nueva Germania, once intended to be the cradle of a new proto-Nazi culture. In the early 1900s, Elizabeth Nietzsche, the dim sister of Friedrich (best known for turning him into a living puppet of himself after syphilis degraded his mind, and misrepresenting his writings to support her own racist and anti-semitic beliefs), and her husband Bernhard Foster led a troop of fellow Wagner acolytes to create an “Aryan Paradise” in the jungles of Paraguay. It all went horribly wrong, and Foster killed himself while Elizabeth beat a quick retreat to Germany. Eventually such notorious Nazis as Josef Mengele also moved to Paraguay, seeking haven after the fall of the Third Reich. What Beckles and Knoxville find is a rundown pit, almost all the German pioneers having interbred with the indigenous population and moved out. The only remnants of the original settlers are the elderly, decrepit Schweikhart Brothers, two genial old men suspected of cannibalism. It’s an interesting glimpse at the death of a twisted dream.

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Recommended? For those who read magazines like The Economist and follow world events closely, there will be few revelations here, though there is some interesting footage. The majority of the populace, however, and certainly Vice’s target audience of hipsters, will find something of interest if they are not turned off by the tone and lack of depth.

DVD DETAILS

DVD Production Company: Vice Films (www.viceland.com)
Release Date: October 3, 2006
Extras: Hardcover book, bonus segments

The reports are presented in surprisingly clean 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The packaging is a highlight – Vice has included an entire DVD-sized hardcover book with additional articles and photographs, which I found as interesting as the video content. It’s a handsome package in an embossed slipcover, and one of the better DVD sets I’ve seen recently.

The disc also includes a number of bonus segments, including David Choe creating graffiti art in the Congo and a snowball fight on New Year’s Eve in Kabul, Afghanistan. Some of these are more interesting extended pieces, like an exploration of the poor conditions under which Bulgaria’s gypsies live, and a trip by actor/comedian David Cross and Vice’s Gavin McInnes to China, where Cross tries to purchase bootleg DVDs of Arrested Development and Mr. Show, and eats a dogmeat casserole. Others are less interesting, like goofy music videos set in Paraguay and Uganda, and tedious conversations with an insane person named Jasco White. All are presented in well-animated menus.

© David Austin