Who has seen the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop about street art, Banksy and Thierry Guetta? What are your thoughts on it?

I sat through about ¾ of it in a theater. The sound track was set at “Let’s deafen our audience” and the visuals were badly light and sometimes impossible to identify.

So I left. There was some truth to it, I guess, but also some fudging.

I would say it was a good idea that was really poorly executed. The idea of the self-reference that extends to both the audio and visual was ill-thought out.

Maybe it plays better to much younger ears and eyes?

I’ve seen it, always thought it was a mockumentary, watched it maybe halfway through, just didn’t touch me in any way. I’m not a fan of much “street” art, never have bought graffiti as being hip.

This film should get 5 stars for weirdness.

I have a gut feeling that this film is not real. The character Guetta is just too far fetched. Poor hapless Guetta. He had a seemingly uncontrollable need to film everything and never labeled his films as he just kept packing the films away in unmarked boxes. HA! I don’t think so. No one can be that weird. And Guetta’s weirdness steals the show by upstaging a lot of excellent real graffiti footage.

This question makes me regret that this docu has been sitting on my Netflix queue for months now. I could have posted an answer now. There is no God! ( cries in anguish )

I have it on my Virgin+ box, I’m a big fan of Banksy and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve watched it.

I enjoyed the film. Pretty sure it’s a mockumentary.

I enjoyed it, for all its oddity. The film itself explains what it is. It’s as real as it is. I wouldn’t call it a mockumentary. Borat is a mockumentary. Here, the recording of the subject matter becomes part of the story and all pretense of objectivity is lost, but that’s ok because it isn’t meant to be journalism. Ultimately I saw it as a strange partnership in entertainment, and to me it succeeded in entertaining.

@gondwanalon, do you really think there are limits to weirdness? I don’t. I found him utterly believable, even if he was invented or exaggerated. Fictitious does not necessarily equal false.

@Jeruba True, there seems to be no limit to weirdness in some peiple.

What is the main message in this film? Perhaps the message is failure. Failure to make a point. Failure to go anywhere. Failures in the life of Guetta. Failure in the real lives of those poor soles addicted to doing graffiti.

So how is this film a success in light of so much failure? Well I did think that it was entertaining and it kept me wondering what was going to happen next. And I kept thinking about the film after it was over. Finally in real life as in the film, people struggle for success yet failure still happens. Exit through the Gift Shop a successful film in these aspects.

As much as anything, @gondwanalon, I thought it was about pursuing your passion (or obsession), no matter where it leads. It didn’t seem to me that it placed a value judgment on that. In that sense perhaps it was objective, even if not in the journalistic sense. I did not see it as being about failure—I’d call that your value judgment.

I didn’t and don’t think a message is necessary. Art does not require a message. I thought the film might have aspired to be art; I’m not confident in saying that it was in fact.

@Jeruba
“A so called documentary should have a so called message.”
-me
“A documentary without a message is like a fable with no moral.”
-me
“Failures can be a good things if a lessons are learned from them.”
-me
“A man may fail many times but he is only a failure when he begins to blame others”
-Steve Prefontaine

Just watched the movie and it has a typical Banksy feel, subversion, take a medium and twist it to another purpose, exactly what I saw here. I really enjoyed it, how much is real, how much is art, how much should we care? ps the french blokes wife is fit

Have you seen it?
just last week, had been on my radar for a while, just too many things ahead of it.

…‘real’ story or a mockumentary?
inspired by real events sure, even based on real events perhaps, but if it was “real” I got too much of the impression it was designed to be so. The mocking, to my eye, was of the people who pay outlandish sums for the works and the “blind society” that’s been built up around something that is fundamentally fleeting, along with some other knocks of course – not sure if that’s enough to call it a mockumentary, as there was more to it than that, but I wouldn’t disagree if you did.

What were your thoughts on the movie?
thought it was a heck of lot of fun and got a kick out of it, wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it

On Thierry Guetta?
all I could do was laugh and ogle in that you’ve got to be kidding way where part of me wanted to give him a good back hand and the other was saying wow, just wow – partially because I can still recall the allure of his nightly escapades and just how much fun that can be.

Related just took this picture at the weekend in Rome