You may know the co-directors of The Notorious Mr. Bout for their prior individual projects, the likes include Maxim Pozdorovkin’s co-directed project HBO alongside Mike Lerner, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, and Tony Gerber’s acclaimed collaboration with Jesse Moss, Full Battle Rattle, but together Pozdorovkin and Gerber have created a surprisingly funny depiction of international crime by profiling famed arms dealer and novice documentarian, Viktor Bout.
Utilizing a treasure trove of footage shot by the Merchant of Death himself, the filmmakers reimagine the glorified public image bestowed upon him by the bloodthirsty mainstream media by deeply investigating his entire mercantile career via interviews with his best friends and biggest enemies. The Notorious Mr. Bout has been picked up for distribution worldwide by Kaleidoscope Film Distribution, sadly excluding Us screens, so domestically they still seem to be waiting it out. The film premiered earlier this year in Park...
Utilizing a treasure trove of footage shot by the Merchant of Death himself, the filmmakers reimagine the glorified public image bestowed upon him by the bloodthirsty mainstream media by deeply investigating his entire mercantile career via interviews with his best friends and biggest enemies. The Notorious Mr. Bout has been picked up for distribution worldwide by Kaleidoscope Film Distribution, sadly excluding Us screens, so domestically they still seem to be waiting it out. The film premiered earlier this year in Park...
- 11/3/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spoof: Gerber & Pozdorovkin Indulge Bout
You probably know him by his wildly exaggerated media coined title, the ‘Merchant of Death’, or you might even remember Nicolas Cage’s war mongering Hollywood fictionalization of the man in Lord of War, but the real life Viktor Bout, though undeniably complicit in the black market arms trade, may have been more a business savvy buffoon than the master of ballistics he’s thought to be. Collaborating for the first time, directors Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin paint a very different picture of the man than we are used to seeing. Harvesting a wealth of hilarious and humanizing home movies shot by Bout himself and his wife, Alla, the filmmakers reveal a man not obsessed with weaponry nor money, but one whose joy springs from time spent with his adoring network of family and friends, as well as from the simple pleasures of tourism,...
You probably know him by his wildly exaggerated media coined title, the ‘Merchant of Death’, or you might even remember Nicolas Cage’s war mongering Hollywood fictionalization of the man in Lord of War, but the real life Viktor Bout, though undeniably complicit in the black market arms trade, may have been more a business savvy buffoon than the master of ballistics he’s thought to be. Collaborating for the first time, directors Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin paint a very different picture of the man than we are used to seeing. Harvesting a wealth of hilarious and humanizing home movies shot by Bout himself and his wife, Alla, the filmmakers reveal a man not obsessed with weaponry nor money, but one whose joy springs from time spent with his adoring network of family and friends, as well as from the simple pleasures of tourism,...
- 11/3/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
I enjoyed Andrew Niccol‘s Lord of War when it came out in 2005. It was a fast-paced, enjoyable ride down the rabbit hole of the illegal arms trade, but I had no idea Nicolas Cage‘s character Yuri Orlov was based on a real life “Merchant of Death”. His name is Viktor Bout and he wasn’t even arrested until three years after Hollywood sensationalized the myth of his businessman seen as an international criminal throughout the media. As directors Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin sought to tell a tale within this sector of gun smuggling, he of course would prove the logical subject to focus on. The fact he was an amateur filmmaker who documented his travels via home video only made the prospect more intriguing.
Their documentary The Notorious Mr. Bout begins with the 2008 sting operation that brought the titular Russian down. There he sits in grainy black...
Their documentary The Notorious Mr. Bout begins with the 2008 sting operation that brought the titular Russian down. There he sits in grainy black...
- 11/3/2015
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
“Who’s Mr Bout?” is the first thing anyone asks on hearing the title. Think Nicolas Cage’s unscrupulous arms dealer in Lord of War (2005) and you have the answer. However, whereas Cage’s fictitiously-named Yuri Orlov, who is based on Mr Bout, the ‘Merchant of Death’, is slightly insane, the real-life character in directors Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s documentary comes across as anything but – initially, more jolly capitalist cashing in on a lucrative shipping market in post-Soviet Russia than abject rogue.
The film is pieced together with homemade video from filmmaking enthusiast Viktor Bout to build a picture of him at home and in ‘the workplace’. It then follows the timeline of events until his arrest in Thailand in 2008, following a Us government sting operation that all seems too ‘easy’ to be true. There is also ‘present-day’ commentary from his loyal wife, Alla, as she bravely faces...
The film is pieced together with homemade video from filmmaking enthusiast Viktor Bout to build a picture of him at home and in ‘the workplace’. It then follows the timeline of events until his arrest in Thailand in 2008, following a Us government sting operation that all seems too ‘easy’ to be true. There is also ‘present-day’ commentary from his loyal wife, Alla, as she bravely faces...
- 8/16/2014
- by Lisa Giles-Keddie
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Thanks to the increase in access to small scale non-fiction films through the barrage of streaming services viewers now have access to – Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Mubi, Vudu, etc – people are watching more documentaries than ever before. You can literally turn on any web ready device of your choosing and be watching any number of top quality docs within a number of seconds. It’s nothing short of incredible. But, with ease of access comes an over saturation of content used to fill in the curatorial gaps. For every Marwencol, Senna, Gimme Shelter or The Act of Killing, there are heaps of ordures cinéma clogging up precious bandwidth. And let’s not forget, cinemas themselves are enjoying a renewed trust in the non-fiction form, exhibiting over 100 documentaries on the silver screen last year and banking over $50 Million at the box office in the process, not including the hundreds of...
- 7/28/2014
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
"Lord of War" may not have been Nicolas Cage's shining moment, but it probably looked great on paper. The movie sees Cage jet-setting all over the planet with suitcases full of money, and making high-stakes weapons deals in exotic countries. The film is based on the life of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, and while "Lord of War" may have been a so-so movie, Bout's real life exploits are anything but average.
A new documentary about Bout -- "The Notorious Mr. Bout" -- has made its way to Hot Docs, and it's well worth a look. It may not be as flashy as Hollywood, but it does fill in the blanks on this unimaginable and surprisingly human story. Viktor Bout doesn't love it, but his nickname is "The Merchant of Death." According to authorities around the world, he has earned every letter of this macabre moniker, but Bout thinks...
A new documentary about Bout -- "The Notorious Mr. Bout" -- has made its way to Hot Docs, and it's well worth a look. It may not be as flashy as Hollywood, but it does fill in the blanks on this unimaginable and surprisingly human story. Viktor Bout doesn't love it, but his nickname is "The Merchant of Death." According to authorities around the world, he has earned every letter of this macabre moniker, but Bout thinks...
- 5/2/2014
- by Mark Wigmore
- Moviefone
The Pussy Riot documentary, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, had its world premiere last year at Sundance. The doc was co-directed by Russian filmmaker Maxin Pozdorovkin, who now is teamed with a different director (Tony Gerber), but returned to the same festival with another documentary that explores a polemical legal case. Meet Viktor Bout. Russian. Businessman. Video aficionado. And, apparently, the notorious Taliban-supporting arms trafficker who inspired the Nicolas Cage movie Lord of War and conspired to kill Americans in 2008. The Notorious Mr. Bout asks simple yet precise questions: Who is Bout? What lead to his 2008 arrest by the DEA? Is he really the so-called "Merchant of Death" who supported terrorists and deserves to be incarcerated? To find these answers, the documentarians present...
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- 1/28/2014
- Screen Anarchy
Before he directed award-nominated movies like Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult, Jason Reitman’s debut feature film was the bitingly sarcastic Thank You For Smoking, a tale of a unscrupulous spin-doctor for the tobacco industry. Being a self-described “Merchant of Death,” Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) becomes the target of pretty much everybody from his own family to a U.S. Senator. During the course of the film, Nick is kidnapped by unknown assailants who strip him down to his skivvies and cover him with dozens of nicotine patches. Soon, Nick loses consciousness and later wakes up in a hospital, miraculously alive due to his personal high tolerance for nicotine that he gained from years of smoking cigarettes. While the movie moves along to a sharp political and ethical point in the end, this scene got us thinking, just in case we needed to quit smoking and burn through the four-week patch program in a...
- 9/5/2013
- by Kevin Carr
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
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