Uwe Boll is like 90 percent of a really cool story.  The renegade, self-made director and self-professed “most critically maligned filmmaker of his generation” has some serious anger issues.  This is the same dude that famously beat the shit out of four of his critics in a boxing ring and recently engaged a blogger at Wired in a war of words that led Uwe to write the following email:

chris
your review shows me only that you don’t understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what POSTAL is. you dont see courage because you are nothing. and no go to your mum and fuck her  ...because she cooks for you now since 30 years  ..so she deserves it.
people like you are the reason that independent movies have no chance anymore.
uwe boll
PS:  POSTAL is R RATED   . The MPAA understood the satire  -- you not -- you dumb fuck

Uwe is clearly a passionate gent.  The source of his vitriol, as he explained to us yesterday at the Toronto premiere of the above-mentioned Postal, is that the film business is actively trying to ruin him because he operates outside of the Hollywood system.  Rather than participating in the rampant nepotism of LA, Uwe pounds the pavement of his native Germany finding independent investors to back his films.  Dentistry offices are apparently a gold-mine, and to date he’s had over five thousand individual investors involved in his movies (his recent In the Name of the King cost 60 million to make).

Yet despite his workaday attitude and commitment to the craft, Uwe can’t seem to escape his critics.  He is relentlessly bullied by virtually every critic of note, and told us there are legions of haters that never watch his films and yet give them all one star on IMDB - ensuring he never ends up with a decent rating (even though, as he points out, “BloodRayne opened in the top five in Russia”).

So what’s the problem here?  Why can’t this guy catch a break?  This is, unfortunately, where the cool story ends: His movies are shit.  I sat through the Postal premiere actively trying to like it, but at the end of the day it’s just really not good (and as you might guess from the trailer, it’s also pretty offensive).  Though highlights included a fully nude Dave Foley in the opening minutes and Seinfeld’s very own Soup Nazi playing a painfully jovial Osama bin Laden, the film could not escape its shortcomings.  Stilted writing, excessive gross-out humour and miserable comic timing made Postal feel about twice as long as it should have been. 

There’s nothing worse than stupid comedy that’s actually just stupid, and that’s what Uwe’s serving up.  Though with heaping helpings of sex jokes and gross-out gags, Postal is probably Uwe’s best chance yet of seeing some real box-office returns for his efforts.

And herein lies the irony: This does not make Uwe happy.  Uwe wants respect.  And he’s still not getting it.  He makes video game adaptations because they seem like safe money to his investors, and casts washouts like Burt Reynolds because they put people in the seats.  He would appear, by all accounts, to not give two shits about the art form.  He is the foremost grinder in the industry, and yet he’s not there to make money.  At the end of the day, Uwe just wants some love.  Unfortunately, Postal’s not going to get it.