The Bang Bang Club

This year's Tribeca Film Festival kicked off in NYC last night with the star-studded premiere of Cameron Crowe's The Union. Screenings commenced this morning for a handful of other movies, and today I was able to check out Ryan Phillippe's The Bang Bang Club.

• Who's behind it? South African filmmaker Steven Silver both wrote and directed the piece. It's his first feature after a long career in documentaries — he wrote Gerrie & Louise, based on the life of a colonel in the South African Defense Force, and directed the Emmy-nominated story of a Jerusalem bus bombing in 2002's The Diameter of the Bomb.
• What's it about? Phillippe heads a cast that includes Taylor Kitsch and South African actors Neels Van Jaarsveld and Frank Rautenbach. The four men play photojournalists at a Johannesburg newspaper who head into townships to document the communities' violence during the height of apartheid and in the run-up to the country's first democratic elections in the early '90s. Malin Akerman plays their editor, Robin Comley, who serves as a mentor, then love interest, for Phillippe's Greg Marinovich. The four men come to be known as the Bang Bang Club for their work, which goes on to win Pulitzers and bring them great acclaim at a high price. Along with Robin, they play as hard as they work. The film raises questions of what exactly the role of a photojournalist is — to document, to help those suffering, or, somehow, do both?

To see what I thought of the movie, just read more

We just saw a preview of Trust, and here's yet another Toronto Film Festival selection: The Bang Bang Club. Ryan Philippe stars as a photojournalist who travels to South Africa in the nineties to document apartheid (Taylor Kitsch and Malin Akerman also star). The teaser starts as a serious drama befitting such subject matter — then halfway through, it flips into a raucous Entourage-like haze of girls and booze. Also strange: no dialogue. Hopefully they'll make some improvements in tone when the official trailer hits, but give this a look and share your take when you read more