Review – Bomb It

This documentary about graffiti artists does a couple of things right. First, it employs an international perspective, exploring the similarities and differences between artists in the States, Japan, South Africa and elsewhere. Second, parts of the movie show the painters at work. Indeed, the extra footage on the DVD of three murals coming into being is actually more interesting than the movie itself. That’s at least in part because when they start interviewing these folks many of them turn out to be as tedious as their art is interesting. We get plenty of the usual reminiscing about days gone by, a lot of “I remember painting this” and “I almost got my ass kicked doing that.” And of course the ever popular “I invented graffiti,” a claim that simultaneously assumes that anyone can truly be said to have invented a fundamental human impulse and that the interview subject was present the first time someone tried it, which would of course make the artist several thousand years old. Beyond the usual pitfalls, however, this is a reasonably comprehensive and competent production. Mildly amusing