Exit Through the Gift Shop: Street Art Finally Hits the Screen

"Exit Through the Gift Shop," the first and probably last film by underground street-artist Banksy, has a smashing last half-hour, but you have to swim through a lot of rather dull footage to get there. The film is a modest achievement, but it does provide some much-needed documentation of the street-art movement of the last 20 years.

The film began as a project of a semi-educated and apparently semi-retarded man by the name of Thierry Guetta. There's a fine line between eccentric and developmentally disabled, and Guetta skirts that line.

At some point in his young adulthood, Guetta began aimlessly filming just about everything he experienced. Wandering around with a videocamera, he started filming one of his relatives, a street-artist in Paris. Pretty soon, Guetta had recorded thousands of hours of footage of street artists around the world, but he had no capacity to edit the material in a meaningful way. He never even looked at the footage after he recorded it.

Eventually he crosses paths with Banksy, the Andy Warhol of street art, and the two collaborate on several projects that nearly get both of them arrested. I won't give away any more of the film, as the most interesting parts have to do with how the project changed hands, going from a Guetta to a Banksy project. All I can say is, thank heavens for Banksy, who deserves his reputation as the deepest and most intelligent of the street artists. There is a brilliant turning of the tables at the end, involving, of all people, Madonna. The ending is worth waiting for.