VBS: Gonzo Docos!

VBS.tv, the video arm of the Brooklyn-based hipster magazine, VICE, is quickly bringing back the true concept of Gonzo to modern day docs. While larger television news networks are busy covering the snowpacolypse, VBS is covering international events that ACTUALLY MATTER. Shane Smith (VICE co-founder), Suroosh Alvi (VICE co-founder), and Spike Jonze (director of Where the Wild Things Are) are putting out some of the rawest documentaries I’ve ever seen! Have you seen the Liberia doc, yet? The Chernobyl doc? The Katrina doc? The Swansea Love Story? These guys are doing what Hunter S. Thompson was doing for journalism in the '60s and '70s. Except now we have the internet, and VBS is bringing the gonzo to their crazy-ass online documentaries.
Spike Jonze, the creative director at VBS said it perfectly in a NYT interview, “VBS has freedoms that larger outlets don’t enjoy. It is a small media company that can go off and do what it wants. We can just do things that we are interested in, and we don’t have to pretend to be objective or have some angle on what we are looking at.” That's the type of shit I love! And VICE is really doing it. Let’s just hope their new parent/ partner, Viacom and CNN, don’t corrupt them along the way.

Anyway, I made this North Korea doc a Stoner Sunday ZVOD because watching these "Gonzo Docos" is easily becoming one of my favorite stoner activities (right up there with the Google Documentaries). This ZOOMDOUT VIDEO OF THE DAY is entitled: The Vice Guide to North Korea.

Real quick: In this complicit doc, Shane Smith and the camera man manage to bribe themselves in to North Korea. When they finally manage to enter North Korea, they’re confronted with the impossible task of shooting a documentary in a country that would imprison a person for attempting to do so.
I still don’t know how the hell they did it. I’m still baffled by the fact of it. There was a guard, a guide, and a secret police with them the whole time, closely inspecting their every move. But enough text, enjoy! 0_0

Stoner Sunday—ZOOMDOUT VIDEO OF THE DAY (02.28.10): The Vice Guide to North Korea

“This is a time machine, this is 1950s Soviet Union. So they see me as a Yankee imperialist aggressor, and I see them as the land that time forgot.” ~Shane Smith

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 (Check out the insanely synchronized North Korean choreography in this part of the doc!)

http://zoomdout.com/