By Ali Arikan
Press Play Contributor
Film production and distribution comes in many forms these days. Hollywood is diversifying its traditional techniques, fully adopting video on demand, pay TV and sundry online avenues. But the real innovation seems to be emerging in places like India, the Arab world and Africa, out of necessity rather than greed. Nigeria’s Nollywood, in particular, is thriving, making use of such diverse methods as in-camera editing to cut costs. Another interesting aspect is the support of bootlegs granted by the Nollywood studios. In fact, Nollywood has adopted bootleg DVDs as the chief way of distributing its products, and to a certain extent, films from the West as well.
These practices are also common in another West African nation, Ghana. While its homegrown film industry is nowhere near as robust as Nigeria’s, bootlegs still play just as important of a role here. However, local artists tend to go a step further and recreate the actual one-sheets to promote their bootleg screenings. The result are distinctive artworks that are much more surreal and mysterious — and in most cases more interesting — than the films they promote. Awesome Robo recently ran a feature on this practice. Below, you can see some choice examples; the entire collection is available here:
Anaconda (1997): Dora the Explorer’s demise was neither informative nor pretty, but at least she went out sporting a giant green scaly phallus. We should all be so lucky.
Lionheart, better know as A.W.O.L. in the U.K. (1990): Starring Chris Rock and Billy Dee Williams’ love-child.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): Look! It’s the evil one recreated as a Christmas Panto show. “He’s behind you,” etc.
Catwoman (2004): I don’t even know.
Cujo (1983): Beware the wrath of the rabid cocker spaniel! 
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985): Starring Lord Richard Attenborough, apparently.
Hercules (1983): In which the titular hero feeds his insatiable appetite for fornication by rubbing himself up and down a pillar of stone.
Hostel (2005): I appreciate the serene, almost Buddhist look of the disembodied head.
Poltergeist 2 (1986): “I don’t understand this word ‘subtlety.’ It’s a film about demons, yes? Then, goddammit, the poster will have demons on it!”
Sleepy Hollow (1999): The immortal story of how a decapitated female bodybuilder wreaked havoc on a quaint New England town.
Interview with the Vampire (1994): “The fierce ghost eats human region.” That is all.
The Matrix (1999): In which Neo takes the blue pill and Morpheus turns into a ginger.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977): Nothing says international espionage like a red mullet.
Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog.
and as significant as the invention of drama or the novel,” Mead said of the PBS series, “…a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.” But although Brooks engages the PBS series head-on, he soon moves past it, into outrageous, prescient comedy. The hairstyles, clothes, technology and architecture are dated, but in every other way, Real Life feels like it came out last week.
In Real Life, an ambitious young filmmaker (Brooks, playing "himself") goes to Phoenix and dogs the middle-class Yeager family (headed by 
The biting script — which was co-written by 
It’s an argument that’s very friendly with quantum logic leaps that allow the Transformers toy line to be grouped with 
What really isn't considered or countenanced is the idea that the classical cinema style can actually ruin good films. Despite not being much of a Spielberg fan, I do like Minority Report very much. But I thought watching it was a fucking chore. The film — with its primary theme of humans vs. technology — was so classically fussed over, every scene perfectly flowing into the next one like auteur mercury, that it began to feel as if one of the film's servo-mechs had directed it. Too often Spielberg seemed so in love with this seamlessness that my eyes glazed over: Please god, let there be a jump cut, a weird angle, a burst of unexpected light — anything! Ah, but Minority Report was perfect, like they used to make 'em! What else could matter? Damn these new directors playing on the classical cinema lawn, and making such a mess! Pretty soon they’ll be making Lady Gaga videos!
It’s depressing that the ultra-conservative pro-classicists will not even consider that there might be something valuable occurring through these "chaos" films, planting the seeds of a new movement and establishing a new, valid way of seeing things for a new generation. Can it be possible that those young people born after the advent of 8-bit video games experience everything faster, harder, more intensely and more vaguely than the generations that came before it, on multiple levels, in both ecstatic and numbed-down ways? Whatever the explanation, classical cinema is not and never again will be their answer. It doesn't match the experience of a generation of Facebookers, Tweeters and Call of Duty players. It just doesn’t. No amount of hectoring will change that.
It’s already a tired remark but it’s no less true: in the pulsing sensorium of multimedia, the sit-down, stand-alone feature film becomes kind of quaint, unless somebody does something to jack it into the world as it is now. And that's what "chaos cinema" aims to accomplish. The style that many of you hate is probably the only thing (aside from that other thing you probably hate, 3D) persuading people to endure an increasingly god-awful cinematic experience. Here in New York City, I sat through nine full-blown commercials and just as many trailers, along with ads for the fucking theater I was sitting in — an entire 35 minutes of advertisements — so I could watch what turned out to be a decent "classical" film that would look no worse in my home theater, and cost me a hell of a lot less money.
Along with the musty taste of a museum, there is, without question, the sour tang of elitism in the reflexively pro-classical argument, as critics pretty much demand that filmmakers to do things this way, not that way. Meanwhile, outside critical circles, cinema is doing great, new, amazing things, bringing me joy by gleefully blowing away those sagging cobwebs of "classical cinema." 
And without this "chaos cinema," I wouldn’t have 
The French New Wave was an idiosyncratic movement that sought to revolutionize narrative structures, genres, characters, plots and film techniques. 
A year later, Jean-Luc Godard, a fellow critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, premiered his own debut feature, 
While the French New Wave directors were making a splash in the international film scene, a second group of directors were making their own movement in France. In 1958, 
Around 1967, the New Wave and Left Bank had become outdated forms of expression. By May 1968, many of the New Wave and Left Bank directors became politically involved in the student riots. In the aftermath of this political revolution, the band of filmmakers began to disperse and pursue different paths: Truffaut began making commercial films that appealed to the masses; Godard explored the limits of the “film essay” genre and the philosophical potential of film; Malle went on to make films overseas; and Resnais explored other projects beyond his political works of the ’50s and ’60s. Although these two movements were short-lived, the influences of these men and women were (and still are) incalculable. Had it not been for these two movements, the films of 
This is an issue dear to my heart. Film Salon readers might recall that earlier this year I wrote a piece griping about Battle Los Angeles, an alien invasion epic that used a shaky camera and fast cutting so promiscuously (to capture routine dialogue scenes as well as shootouts) that I found it nauseating and amateurish. You can also see it used in the recent, very chaotic Conan the Barbarian remake, which makes John Milius' 1982 original seem positively stately in comparision. The style has been around just long enough to be considered a bona fide mode, or a school, of filmmaking, one that could be seen in everything from Black Hawk Down and TV's 24 to Inception and Taken. And it does have its high-profile defenders, including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, the cohost of the new Roger Ebert Presents At The Movies, who has written a number of pieces defending Chaos Cinema's leading practitioners, including Michael Bay (the Bad Boys and Transformers movies) and Tony Scott (Domino,Unstoppable). (Scott, Vishnevetsky wrote, "is uninterested in the distinctions created by edits, uninterested in the images individually. He is only interested in the movie as a surface, bubbling, boiling, sometimes dead calm, sometimes a hurricane.")
Stork contacted me a couple of weeks ago asking if I'd be interested in running a video essay on the subject, and I said yes. I was simpatico with what seemed to be his premise. But I was unprepared for the ferocity of his attack on this sort of film. I've always exempted a number of chaos cinema works from my own rants, notably the Bourne trilogy and Fox's 24, where I think the style complemented the story's sense of paranoia and relentless momentum. But with a few notable exceptions, Stork's video essay pretty much condemns the style wholesale.
The piece has sparked heated debate among film buffs, with some applauding Stork for summarizing and condemning trends they've been complaining about for years, and others chiding the filmmaker for ignoring solid recent examples of more traditional action filmmaking (including Captain America and Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and otherwise writing off a style that can be valid, not to mention artful and necessary, if deployed in the right way. (One film blogger in my Twitter stream called Stork's attitude, "neoclassical get-off-my-lawnism.")
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