The most hated man in cinema
A controversial new movie lampooning 9/11 has earned German director Uwe Boll a unique title...
Bad taste: director Uwe Boll with some of the cast on the set of Postal
“A director so incompetent that the very description of director seems too praiseworthy,” said website Movieboy.com of Boll, a maker of tacky sci-fi and fantasy movies.
“Uwe Boll is such a bad director is must be intentional,” suggested the San Francisco Chronicle. There is a popular website called UweBollIsAntichrist.com.
People don't simply dislike Boll. They look on his work as an affront to cinema itself. Until now the bulldog-like German's notoriety has been largely confined to the geekosphere.
On May 23, however, he will graduate to an entirely new level of opprobrium with the release in the US of his latest project, a calculated-tooffend ‘shock-comedy' called Postal (in an attempt to garner publicity, Boll has announced Postal will go head to head with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
Already Postal, adapted from an equally controversial 1997 video game, has become infamous in cyberspace thanks to a teaser trailer in which we see one of the hi-jacked 9/11 planes slamming into the World Trade Centre from the viewpoint of a window cleaner.
In the film itself, the hijackers are shown bickering with Osama bin Laden over exactly how many virgins they will be entitled to in heaven as the jet screams towards the skyscraper. And this is just the opening sequence.
After that, Boll promises, Postal gets really offensive.
Like all provocateurs Boll claims his tastelessness is in service of a higher purpose. “I believe the world is in need of a movie that istougher in its mockery of the globe than South Park ,” the director wrote in press release entitled ‘Why I Produced and Directed Postal by Dr Uwe Boll (he holds a PhD in literature).
“Our world is out of balance and Postal will reflect just how f **ed up we are.”
Whatever his motivation it is clear that Postal – American slang for a random killing spree – will raise the hackles of the moral majority.
The film may be pitched as satire, but in truth it feels more like an attempt to tick off as many people as possible: one of the main female characters is called ‘Bitch', there are a parade of gags about Auschwitz and 9/11.
To those who accuse him of slopping out bad-taste jokes, Boll has a blunt answer: “If you are offended by the movie it is not the fault of the movie, it is your fault,” he says. Boll insists he is indifferent to the vitriol hurled at him.
Eighteen months ago, though, he decided it was time to hit back – literally – at his critics. In June 2006, he issued an open invite to journalists who had castigated him in print: let's settle our disputes man-to-man in the boxing ring. This was widely taken to be merely another Boll stunt.
But, having wangled sponsorship from an online betting agency, he actually hired a boxing ring for the purpose of slugging it out with detractors.
Figuring they would be participating in a harmless wheeze, three journalists took him up on the invite. What they met in Vancouver, was the director in shorts and boxing gloves, ready to beat them to a pulp. One of the journos, a writer for the website Ain't It Cool , was stretchered off in an oxygen mask (a video of the fight shows him pulling the mask off to vomit all over the floor). “'Cmon, this wasn't 'I'll pay for you to fly to Vancouver and we'll have a nice meeting,” said Boll, surveying the bloodied canvas.
If Boll has a unique talent it is probably his ability to inspire universal loathing. Cineastes dismiss B-movie directors as a matter of course but fan-boys, recognizing a fellow underdog, tend to shower them in love. Even Ed Wood, the 1950s director routinely held up as the worst film-maker in history came, like Van Gogh, to be cherished over time. Wood’s most famous fan, Tim Burton, went so far as to make him the subject of an affectionate biopic. Boll, in contrast, has managed to irritate even the dweebs.
Blame that on his irreverent adaptations of their favourite video games. Geeks do not, on the whole, object if a genre film is badly acted, poorly scripted or badly funded – but they do care if the source material is treated with a lack of reverence.
In his re-tellings of cult games Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne and House of the Dead, Boll doesn't so much give short shrift to the originals as lay into them with a jackhammer (all three regularly rank in the top 100 worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database). The LA Times' review of Alone in the Dark concluded with the observation that “Boll has actually managed to dumb down a video game”.
“I don't buy the comparisons with Ed Wood Because I don't believe that Boll loves what he's doing,” one prominent film blogger said of Boll recently.
“I think that he loves the attention. He loves the glamour.
But I don't think he loves movies.”
- Ed Power
