'Hit Everybody With a Hammer'
Director Uwe Boll probably means it
By Andy Klein / Interview by Brent Simon
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Chinesee Outtake
Here Comes McBride
“Satire closes on Saturday night” goes the old adage about live theater. With modern booking practices, film satire is generally guaranteed not to close before Thursday ... if, that is, it gets booked at all. So what are the odds of two deliberately outrageous satirical comedies opening in Los Angeles the same week?
Nonetheless, while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (see Film feature) is hoovering all the change out of the pockets of America’s filmgoers, these two films will be among the dozen or so scrambling for what’s left. And, while both inevitably involve the Iraq War, they are very, very different.
On the one hand, we have War, Inc., which mows down its targets with studied precision. On the other hand, we have Postal, which is more like an Uzi being wielded by a palsied blind man, striking whatever’s in its path without discrimination and often without reason – exactly the kind of image the filmmaker would likely embrace.
The latter is the work of Uwe Boll – more or less rhymes with “reprovable” – a German filmmaker frequently bashed online (and even lately in The New York Times) as the worst director currently working. Detractors have spread rumors that he finances his films with Nazi gold; “Ed Wood for the new millennium” is not one of his harshest epithets. In his defense, it should be noted that he has specialized in movie adaptations of videogames – including BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark, and now Postal – and much of this hating comes from videogame geeks who feel he isn’t being faithful enough (whatever that would mean in this context).
“There’s a marketing thing implied,” Boll recently told our Brent Simon. “It’s like comic book movies. You have a big fan base – even if it’s sometimes an empty fan base that thinks, ‘Oh, he hurts our game and he’s an asshole,’ or whatever.”
Not a man to sit by and be idly insulted, Boll is thinking of issuing a mano a mano challenge to these detractors, much as he has already done to reviewers and Michael Bay. In September 2006, he bested five Internet and print critics in the boxing ring. More recently, he challenged Michael Bay to a fight, but Bay has demurred. “I got an e-mail first ... from his fan club, I guess. They said he will do it, he kicks your ass, and so I
said the fight was on. Then he wrote me – or, actually, his attorney wrote me – that he will not do it now. And I have to face legal consequences if I say anymore that he
will do it.”
Boll cultivates being a provocateur. Postal opens in the cockpit of one of the 9/11 planes, with the hijackers arguing about how many virgins they’ll be given in the afterlife. Six and a half years after the fact, you want to yell, “Too soon! Too soon!” Much of the action takes place at the Little Germany theme park, where Boll – playing himself as the park’s owner – admits the Nazi gold rumors are true and pays celebrity guest Verne Troyer with a handful of gold teeth. Six and a half decades after the fact, you still want to yell, “Too soon! Too soon!” (Troyer is later raped by a hundred monkeys.)
Boll explains, “The videogame is cultish and funny .... I mean, it’s totally absurd in a way. I felt that it was an opportunity for me to make something that was funny, but also to put a lot of my frustration in the script – the frustration about myself, and how I get bashed in the
Internet about my career and ... the frustration about the whole political landscape since September 11, like we’re all running in between fundamentalist terror and George Bush craziness, in big danger.
“And I wanted to make a comedy like my personal favorites, like Naked Gun or Life of Brian or The Blues Brothers. And I felt like this is all missing in the last few years ... . The Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell comedies have their moments, but overall they are all kind of clichéd, with happy endings where families are back and weddings are the best, and it’s all about being nonpolitical. I wanted to make a ruthless movie and hit everybody with a hammer.”
Published: 05/21/2008
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