On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: BANKSY’S COMING FOR DINNER.

Imagine that you have 17 hours to shoot a movie about art’s most anonymous hero. You can’t show his face. You even have to mask his voice like some mob informant. You have one shot at this so you’d better get it right. This is the first time he’s ever done this and it might be the last. If you pull it off, it could kick start your career. If you blow it, it’s over.

Banksy?

Director Ivan Massow accepted his own challenge to film a documentary about a dinner with graffiti artist Banksy and an assortment of British celebrities who you probably wouldn’t cross the street to meet.

Charismatic grande dame Joan Collins is our hostess on the grounds of her gilded estate, complete with a herd of deer and the occasional peacock: a fitting anti-setting for an artist who'd probably stencil a heroin spoon instead of a lobster fork. Maybe he’ll tag her pool house on his way out.

He, of course, is Banksy. If you just thought, “Who’s that?,” then you’ve picked the wrong movie. The film assumes you already know something about him (even if the rest of the cast may not). You’re fascinated by his public art and intrigued by his mystique. His anonymity makes the thought of even the tiniest glimpse behind the veil as desperate as a last breath.

From the cover art of his riff on the famous Susan Meiselas photo of a Nicaraguan soldier throwing a Molotov cocktail in a Pepsi bottle – restar assault rifle and mas bouquet of wildflowers – you’re hooked. You can’t wait to watch it, to watch him. As a walking blank canvas, he passes each of us a brush to paint in the details we’d like him to be. The young girl dreams of him as a prince, the woman fantasizes of him as a lover, the teenage boy knows he’s gay, the 20-year old thinks he’s the reason he can’t get laid.

But not so fast. Our desire to fill in the blanks with Banksy may get the better of us. BANKSY’S COMING FOR DINNER makes much of the fact that “no one” knows who Banksy is. He could be you or me or the person sitting next to you on the bus. Of course, this begs the question, how do we know it’s Banksy in BANKSY? If the film fed us enough art, humor or clues to the mystery, we might not care.

On the other hand, the fun of a switcheroo movie like, for example, THE FRESHMAN is having a laugh watching a bunch of pretentious snobs tricked out of their money. Ha if they only knew! Well if it’s not really Banksy in BANKSY, you’ve just paid for an expensive dinner with strangers -- and you’re the main course. So dig in. As the final scene will remind you, it’s the experience, not any one star, that’s your focus.

One wonders if we will get a better glimpse of Banksy in the much hyped EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP after its premiere at Sundance this year?

-- Carol Canfield
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Carol Canfield is a new contributing writer for On Demand Weekly.