Movie Review: Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is so self-aware, so tightly built out of and around the mechanisms of art and film and pretension, that it’s almost impossible to describe it without making yourself sound like one of the characters within it, and that applies equally to this next sentence, true though it is: This movie is an instant classic, a shoe-in for Best Documentary 2010 Oscar, a documentary about documentaries, a work of art that encapsulates and explains works of non-art, an apologia and a manifesto rolled into one.

I saw it without having any preconception of what it was about, and despite this review, I encourage you to do the same. In film school, screenwriters are taught to make their endings surprising yet inevitable, and Exit Through The Gift Shop has such an ending, all the more disturbing and hilarious because it takes place in real life.
Read the rest of this entry »