Remember watching the spring break coverage on MTV in junior high? The body shots, human taco contests and infamous three-way kisses? "The Vice Guide to Travel" feels a lot like a spring break special for pseudo-intellectual hipsters.
Vice Magazine, an arts and culture magazine with offices across the globe, released the travel DVD in October. The film is pure Vice: At best sassy and thought-provoking and at worst irreverent and offensive. One of the biggest critiques of Vice is that their writers use irony to mask reactionary politics and outright racism. The premise of the DVD is Vice correspondents going to not-your-average vacation destinations to do not-your-average vacation activities, like trying to buy a nuclear warhead in a Bulgarian black market or finding Nazi cannibals in Paraguay.
The first two of seven segments are hosted by Vice co-founder Shane Smith, who is really insufferable. Smith and Vice Berlin writer Pella Kagerman go to Chernobyl, the site of the most devastating nuclear accident in the world, to hunt mutated wild boar. They're pretty wasted throughout the whole segment, because being obliterated is apparently what saved the firefighters at Chernobyl from radiation poisoning. This is a pretty big lie on Smith's part, since all of the firefighters died from severe radiation sickness; but hey, being drunk out of his mind makes for a pretty exciting journalistic endeavor on Smith's part. As he wanders around the abandoned schoolhouse with machine guns looking for six-eyed boars, Smith waxes poetic about global politics, with such memorable lines as "if this is the future, we're fucked."
This is the kind of nihilism that pervades the film, like filmmaker Spike Jonze describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "gnarly." The point of the film seems to be painting the world as one rife with problems, with Smith's drunken epiphany at Chernobyl as the tagline. But the only solution that the creators seem to offer is getting pretty drunk and dressing well.
That said, there are some interesting segments on the DVD after one tunes out the editorializing from the hosts. In one section, Vice Toronto's Derrick Beckles goes Nazi-hunting in the jungles of Paraguay. He heads to Nueva Germania, a colony started around the turn of the century where a lot of Nazis fled after the fall of the Reich, including Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele. The only two Germans Beckles is able to find are two dirty-looking brothers that the townspeople think are cannibals. As the segment closes, Beckles gives some groundbreaking insight: "Granted, they may or may not be cannibals, but they are definitely fucked."
The closing segment is the most irreverent of them all. David Choe goes to the Congo searching for a dinosaur. Choe has three pygmy guides, who he decides to name after Terrence Howard, Benicio Del Toro and Ben Kingsley. Choe goes on to get really angry when he doesn't find a dinosaur after drinking some jungle brew and watching a sacred ritual: "I didn't come all this way to participate in some fucked up ritual and see some guy dance around in a costume."
There are some other great segments, like a trip to the world's largest illegal arms market, located in the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. With footage of little kids building 9mm handguns with their bare hands in a town that builds 1,000 guns per day, the viewer starts to see where the folks at Vice get their worldview.
There's some lessons that can be drawn from "The Vice Guide to Travel," perhaps best iterated in Vice's infamous "Do's and Don'ts" style. Do: get off the beaten path and away from tourist areas. Don't: adopt Vice's jaded perspective about how screwed up the world is - and avoid this DVD unless you think you can handle 45 minutes of cynical commentary.
