The reviews are in !!!! and it’s obvious everyone is in love with this cinematic masterpiece and having the best time at the movies ever! go see the movie everyone is talking about
Only in theaters in los angeles for less than a week!!!!
Dirty Hands: The Art and Life of David Choe
April 30th through May 6th
Laemmle’s Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood, 90046
see what all the critics are raving about!
“David Choe is clearly an asshole.--- Choe is not the most verbally compelling subject. His over reliance on profanity and a fundamentally slacker dude based lexicon make many of his commentary sections unfocused and repetitive.----- Consequently, much of the lighting and sound is spotty, and some captions -- done in an especially difficult to read font -- dissolve before they can be fully digested.”-current.com
“San Francisco-based distributor Upper Playground shouldn’t expect much coin from this one, since its appeal is limited to art vampires and graffiti bombers who’ll just illegally download the movie anyway. --- It looks like it should be screened in a basement littered with empty beer cans and ornate bongs.---- And there’s video of Choe punching himself in the nose so he could use his blood as paint. It’s all quite renegade, in that self-aggrandizing, subcultural way.”–boxoffice.com
“Choe's humor can be sly, but his expletive-rich ramblings often put the viewer on the wrong end of a one-way conversation. The film spends far too much time on his relationship woes.--- The resulting documentary is alternately illuminating and dull, energetic and repetitive. Fans of Choe's work — stylized, vibrant, ornate and vulgar — will appreciate the inside look at the self-described man-child, but his struggles to grow up are more tiresome than compelling.”-LA TIMES
“Dirty Hands deftly segues between Choe's personal and professional adventures, weaving together his family background, steadily ascending career, sexual addictions, criminal behavior, mental illness and fledgling attempts at becoming a born-again Christian to create a complex and open-ended portrait. Though nowhere as singular an achievement as Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, the agreeably rough-and-tumble Dirty Hands recalls that documentary's willingness to explore its subject's less-savory personal qualities to question how those traits both feed and undermine his distinctive art.-- If Exit Through the Gift Shop is a witty, subversive satire on the rock star–ification of underground graffiti artists, Dirty Hands is a sober, loving snapshot of one troubled soul within that milieu.”—LA WEEKLY
“it may not attract crowds of admirers, let alone the art establishment. Prospects for Dirty Hands are limited.--- director Kim doesn’t give us enough of a reason to see Choe as any more than a fratboy-style prankster, particularly since his post-jail persona does not seem that different from his earlier incarnation. (He still swears profusely, simulates urinating in public with his buddies, and draws pornographic pictures using nude female models posing in degrading positions.)---- Sadly, neither before nor after prison does Choe make an overt political statement or even a Duchampian critique of the elitist excesses of today’s art scene. Though Choe leavens his jaded, monotone detachment with tongue-in-cheek winks and nods, it is hard to ascertain his true position, which might be his own postmodernist ploy. But except for a colleague’s remarks about the unabashed sexism in Choe’s writings and pictures, Kim’s film is entirely reverential (the director is a childhood friend). Even Terry Zwigoff’s equally intimate Crumb (1994) maintained a more detached tone about the troubled pornographer-cartoonist, Robert Crumb.-----Despite an eyeful of some challenging artworks and an earful of interesting stories about the man behind them, Choe’s movie portrait produces only modest results.”-FILM JOURNAL
“If you just happened to walk into the pop-up art gallery in Beverly Hills where David Choe's "street art" is currently on display, it would be hard to sense the street cred behind the artwork. The spray-painted human figures, akin to George Condo's lycanthropic orgies, carry their severed heads so they can rim their own asses and turn fellatio into a masturbatory practice,---Dirty Hands contextualizes Choe's work, which could be seen as gratuitous transgressiveness, turning him into an unsettling hybrid character/icon of what is terrific and terrible about what we have come to call the American Dream: the genius American artist on prescription medication so he doesn't go to jail before making it to his gallery opening.--- In the course of Dirty Hands, which took eight years to make, Choe plasters graffiti whales throughout Los Angeles, punches himself in the face to use his blood as ink, cuts Christian crosses onto his forearms to guiltily prevent himself from shoplifting, is jailed in Tokyo for three months, buys a slave or two in Congo, and makes the case for an anti-academic, stream-of-consciousness, museum-without-walls art that feels so refreshing it's easy to ignore its political implications. But as with any kind of passionately irrational project, it easily breaks down when perceived through a non-egotistical lens. And as much as Choe's art claims to be about people who "don't give a fuck about art," it's mostly about his Peter Pan/Robin Hood self (the forever child-like Choe steals from the rich to give to the poor, which, in this case, is himself). Yes, one can ask how else may a poor Korean-American kid from the ghetto take ownership of his city but by defacing the very architecture that makes Choe's story a barely possible exception. But his spray paint turns out to be better at becoming personal profit than achieving something beyond angry sloganeering.”—Slant magazine
“This is an imperfect documentary of an imperfect man and in that sense, they seem perfectly fit for one another.” – chasingchan
