MOVIE REVIEW: EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
Starring: Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Rhys Ifans (narrator)

This is the weird real-life story of Thierry Guetta, a bumbling, eccentric French filmmaker and street-art groupie who gets it into his head to track down and make buddies with the infamous Bansky, the world’s best-known graffiti and stencil artist, and make a doco about him. Trouble is, Banksy (whose anarchic, piss-taking artworks decorate walls from the Middle East to Melbourne and sell for over six figures) is kinda like Zorro — no-one knows his true identity. Somehow, Guetta finds Banksy, but what happens is the masked, voice-modulated wall-bomber deftly turns the tables by flipping the camera onto his interviewer — making the movie about him instead!

Truly bizarre yet funny, the film also features other spray-can icons like Shepard Fairey and Invader, while documenting the sad little world of the filmmaker and his own aspirations to vandalise public property.

Alas, while cool, it’ll probably only serve to inspire another legion of baggy-panted, chroming-happy punks to tag a train with indecipherable scrawl, which really misses the point entirely.

Rating: 4.5


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