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AFF review: “Raging Boll:” Who can blame him? Or his critics?
German director Uwe Boll was once a movie nerd. As the documentary “Raging Boll” shows us, Boll used to sit in his room in his parents’ house, obsessively making scrapbooks of every movie he saw, and he saw every movie he possibly could. He wrote criticism. He got a doctorate in literature. So far, so geeky.
Then, around 1991, he started cranking our movies himself, gaining a reputation for making fairly terrible, often seriously misguided and tasteless-bordering-on-offensive genre movies, some of which were based on video games.
He also gained a reputation as the world’s worst director, a reputation stoked by Internet commentators, who well and truly hated the man — there were death threats, petitions to demand he stop directing, YouTube rants, comparisons to Ed Wood, that sort of thing.
Then he made the mistake of responding to his critics. Oy vey.
Directed for first-time helmer Dan Lee West (who claimed after the screening that he’s more of a writer), “Raging Boll” paints Boll as a guy who is nothing if not honest. Boll, often seated in front of the camera, talking, as in an Erroll Morris doc, doesn’t really consider himself an artist, coming off as more of a guy who just likes to direct movies and gets people to invest in them. (German tax laws make this sort of private investment in a German movie less risky than it would be in the United States, though this is not discussed in the documentary.)
Alternating between seeming bewildered and angered by the critiques, Boll is convinced that “eenternet nuhds and wannabe filmmaekahs” are the folks most angered by his success and he probably has a point, given that it tough to see is films (scenes from which there are not enough of in “Raging Boll”) and not think that you, or anyone, could do as well.
In June 2006, his production company issued a press release stating that Boll would challenge his harshest critics each to a 10-round boxing match. In September of that year, he fought four of them, including a 17 year old boy. As Boll said they were merely faces to him, we never learn their names. They also didn’t seem to train for the fight, which just seems unwise. (Though West said after the screening that the 17-year old is now Boll’s assistant).
Boll continues to make movies, though, as the off-camera interviewer notes, he seems in danger of becoming the very caricature his critics claim he is. Making lousy movies based on video games is one thing. Playing a Nazi guard in your exploitation movie called “Auschwitz” (completely with the tagline “Never Forget”) is quite another. (The trailer appeared on line earlier this year and no, I won’t link to it.) The former becomes a riff on the nature of what is important to the hardest core of Internet chat-mavens. The latter is just begging for attention, Marylin Manson style.
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