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You might remember Ron English from Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me: he’s the scruffy artist who repainted Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night as golden arches and midnight drive-through windows. English’s crusade against the semiotics of consumption transcends parodying McDonald’s logos, as Pedro Carvajal’s new documentary shows. Besides marrying pop-culture icons with art history’s masterpieces (e.g., redoing Leonardo’s Last Supper with Mickey Mouse as Jesus), English has "liberated" more than 1000 American billboards. Spoofing Apple’s "think different" advertising campaign, which featured photos of Albert Einstein, Frank Sinatra, and Amelia Earhart shilling posthumously for Macs, he covered the billboards with his own images of Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Bill Gates. If one believes the self-proclaimed "illegal artist," he both invented Jackass and made Joe Camel extinct. Whether you like Carvajal’s panegyric will depend on what you think of English: his antics, like Michael Moore’s, can become annoying even if you sympathize with his politics. (78 minutes)
BY MATTIAS FREY
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