-The Bang Bang Club is a good movie. The guy whose memoir the movie’s based on is thoughtful and an amazing photographer.

-The Playstation Network needs a better customer service ethic.

-I met Dash Shaw once when he was my college buddy’s roomate. Now he’s a famous graphic novelist.

-China’s government and film industry want more coproductions with American companies. Looks like they might get their wish.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

After I saw The Bang Bang Club, a movie about combat photography in South Africa (reviewed here), I sat down with Greg Marinovich, whose 2001 memoir of the same name is the basis for the film to talk about the risks and highs of combat photography, the impact of amateur video on photojournalism, and his next book project. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You mentioned that you, Ken [Oosterbroek] and Kevin [Carter, both photographers with whom Marinovich worked in South Africa] all did some military service. How did that experience impact your work as photographers?

We had such different experiences. Ken did his miltiary service and then continued to do…service in the townships. I processed old pictures of his after his death. He had piles and piles of rolls of film, black and white…They were fifteen years old. He’d never gotten around to processing them. So João [Silva, the New York Times photographer injured in Afghanistan last year, who is a long-time friend of Marinovich's], myself ,and Gary Bernard took to processing these. Because they were so old, we did lots of tests. You’re a photo buff, you know how much fun this was. And some of the pictures were from his time as a conscript in the townships. He’s got pictures of his fellow conscripts pulling down UDF posters in the townships, these guys in uniforms and armored vehicles…João missed military service. I don’t know how. He was telling me that he remembers his parents going to see a general in Praetoria. He’s not sure if money changed hands, or how, but he was not conscripted…Kevin got into a lot of trouble in the military, essentially by trying to combat the racism of his fellow conscripts. And I reckon thinking I didn’t have to work within the system. I was wrong. I had two years of absolute misery and chaos and accusations of being a communist and all that kind of stuff.

But did those experiences influence the kinds of pictures you shot, the things you looked for?

[The war in which Ken saw combat] was a border war. It was a guerilla war on the border war with armed people and against armed people, whereas what was happening in the 90s in the townships, was most of it unarmed, a lot of it unarmed. The combatants were essentially unarmed, one in a hundred people would have a weapon. So I don’t think that would have had an influence. It wasn’t a war in the sense of any kind of guerilla or formal war. It was, how does one describe it? How does one describe five thousand people coming out of a hostel in a traditional zulu regiment, some of them armed with weapons, but the rest of them with sticks, and machetes and stuff? I don’t think any kind of military training would prepare you for that. Read more

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I spoke with Greg Marinovich, the author of the memoir on which this movie is based, and its main character, yesterday. Our conversation is available here.

I heard that photographer Tim Hetherington had been killed in Libya last week as I was walking into a critics screening of The Bang Bang Club, which opens in Washington, DC today and has been playing in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago since April 22. Hetherington’s death will probably prompt a great many people to watch Restrepo, the excellent documentary about an American platoon stationed in Afghanistan that he directed with journalist Sebastian Junger. But viewers who are curious about how photographers and videographers capture the kinds of images that make Restrepo so powerful, and the ethical and emotional complexities of photographing combatants, ought to check out The Bang Bang Club too. It’s an occasionally uneven movie, but often a beautiful one, and serious about the practice of journalism in a way little popular culture ever is.

The movie’s title comes most recently from a 2001 memoir by Greg Marinovich and João Silva, itself drawn from a joking nickname for the group of photographers who covered the undeclared war in South Africa in the leadup to the end of apartheid. Ryan Phillipe is Marinovich, South African actors Neels Van Jaarsveld and Frank Rautenbach play Silva and Ken Oosterbroek, and Friday Night Lights‘ Taylor Kitsch rounds out the group of photographers as glammed-up Kevin Carter.

The acting is imperfect: Malin Ackerman is clearly trying to establish her credentials as a serious actress by playing Star photo editor Robin Comley, but she’s mostly eye candy (as are the other female characters). Kitsch is very funny in one drug-addled scene, but it takes more than prettily downcast eyes to convey Carter’s combination of addiction, financial insecurity, and emotional strain. But Van Jaarsveld manages to be simultaneously belligerent and vulnerable as Silva. And Phillipe’s performance is a reminder, along with his tense FBI agent in Breach and his tormented soldier on the run in Stop-Loss, that he can be an unusually morally serious and thoughtful actor without being a dull one. A scene late in the movie where he runs back and forth across a road in the middle of a firefight to buy Cokes from a tuck stand is an impeccably staged action sequence, an exhibition of recklessness and humor. Read more

In the movie industry right now, one of the biggest challenges for the Motion Picture Association of America is balancing between theater owners, who are desperate to keep getting people in seats, and content providers ranging from Amazon to Netflix to Comcast, who by expanding the video-on-demand and streaming market, are making theaters increasingly irrelevant. It’s one of the reasons there’s such a huge push for 3-D, and for innovations like the ones that turn movies into theme park rides for movies like Super 8.

I think the problem for theaters is a matter of perception, rather than innovation. An adult, one-day ticket to Disney World is $82. But we’re conditioned to believe that Disney World is a special treat, perhaps a one-in-a-lifetime experience that’s worth the extravagance. Movies are reasonably competitively priced in comparison to Disney World tickets: if you spend $11-$20 for two hours, you’re paying $5.5-$10 per hour in comparison to the $10ish per hour you’ll get if you spend 8 straight hours at Disney World. But we’re conditioned to think of the movies as much more routine entertainment. What theaters need is a combination of innovation, good story-telling, and a Disney-level advertising campaign. No one’s going to beat back the demand for quicker and more multi-platform delivery, and that’s probably not a winning battle for theaters. They need to make the affirmative case for their medium.

This looks like a good exploration of the dark side of geek culture, but it also seems like an argument for why someone should make a movie adaptation of The Secret History: