Wassup Rockers
ESCAPE FROM BEVERY HILLS
(This review of Wassup Rockers was not published in print because the distributor canceled its Atlanta opening)
In their skin tight jeans and scoliosis posture, the South Central, L.A. kids in Wassup Rockers could be any alienated band of outsiders from the Fifties juvenile delinquents to the British punks.
But the most fascinating feature of the Latino high school skate punks chronicled in Wassup Rockers is their hybridity, a blur of previous generations' musical and sartorial fascinations and their own; a mix of Dogtown skate punk; anemic, black-haired Ramones screw-up; and Latino cool.
With Quiceanera we seem to have entered a new era of Latino chic.
Charismatic pretty boy Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez) leads a gang of Salvadoran and Guatemalan cohorts: Milton (a.k.a. Spermball), Porky, Louie, Carlos, Eddie and Kico who prowl the streets of South Central as the Hispaniclicious subjects of Larry Clark's (Kids, Bully) adoration.
The antiestablishment pups play loud, furious punk in their garage bands and entertain themselves by doing kiddie playground rides until they puke. Some teenage obsessions bloom eternal.
But the Gang of Seven also pause in brief prayer at a sidewalk shrine to a murdered comrade. And they have a macho suspicion of fast girls. "She knows a lot. I don't like that," one whispers of the neighborhood floozy, though she has bedded all of them.
And their persecution is specific: they are hated because they are Latinos poaching on Los Angeles's carved up checkerboard of white and black. Clark and co-screenwriter Matthew Frost drew from the real life misadventures of this cast of nonprofessional actors, all South Central skate punks, allowing them to inject the film’s best insight -- the viciousness of anti-Latino racism -- with some authority.
The boys’ adventure begins when the friends take multiple city buses from their backyard hell to paradisiacal Beverly.
While skateboarding on the steps of Beverly Hills High School, the gang hooks up with a couple of beautiful, on-the-make rich white girls. Back at their Barbie dreamhouse digs, in one of the film's only gestures of actual intimacy, Kico (Francisco Pedrasa) and an earnest, half-dressed rich girl bond over a shared sense of alienation and
loneliness.
But the fun is busted up by the arrival of an Escalade full of hellbent preps decked out in blazers, pastels and short pants like some fashionably mod British street gang, who inspire the boys’ flight over a number of walls and into the hidden lairs of a host of Crazy Caucasians.
Jumping their first wall, the boys land in the courtyard of an uberqueeny gay man wearing cornrows and eyeing the boys like filets of juicy veal. Their next hop-over, finds a Clint Eastwood type with a rifle just itching to blast any renegade tail sorry enough to vault his fence. But Clark saves the real vaudeville for wall number 3, where collagen life support system Janice Dickinson is a drunk human Venus flytrap swaying on her high heels and threatening to swallow Kico whole with her cleavage.
Film has long relished the sight of Hispanic and Black thugs threatening Whitey, but Wassup turns the hysteria tables in its portrait of Hispanic kids terrorized by a succession of predatory Hollyweirds with their gaudy gated worlds of pink drinks, tacky-luxe decor and houses that look like the porno set pieces for photographer Larry Sultan's "The Valley."
But by the end of the film some of the simpatico reality effect has been seriously eroded by Clark's preference for characters pulled out of the radioactive MTV reality show trout pond.
Clark is a director like John Waters who luxuriates in cartoonish extremes. His sleazy white people are greaseballs par excellence, the kind of predatory gay men and lascivious older women culled from “After School Specials” and cheesy hetero porn.
But while Waters is interested in being outrageous for outrageousness’s sake and slipping a whoopee cushion under normalcy's hindquarters, Clark takes his extremes seriously, presenting them as gospel. Clark is at heart an exploitation filmmaker, and his heart beats faster for extremity of every kind.
Clark is so deeply on the side of his teen subjects he has lost all perspective and all sense of scale.
Though his desire is clearly to penetrate and go more than skin-deep, he can't always get beyond his endless wallows in the superficial.
(This review of Wassup Rockers was not published in print because the distributor canceled its Atlanta opening)
In their skin tight jeans and scoliosis posture, the South Central, L.A. kids in Wassup Rockers could be any alienated band of outsiders from the Fifties juvenile delinquents to the British punks.
But the most fascinating feature of the Latino high school skate punks chronicled in Wassup Rockers is their hybridity, a blur of previous generations' musical and sartorial fascinations and their own; a mix of Dogtown skate punk; anemic, black-haired Ramones screw-up; and Latino cool.
With Quiceanera we seem to have entered a new era of Latino chic.
Charismatic pretty boy Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez) leads a gang of Salvadoran and Guatemalan cohorts: Milton (a.k.a. Spermball), Porky, Louie, Carlos, Eddie and Kico who prowl the streets of South Central as the Hispaniclicious subjects of Larry Clark's (Kids, Bully) adoration.
The antiestablishment pups play loud, furious punk in their garage bands and entertain themselves by doing kiddie playground rides until they puke. Some teenage obsessions bloom eternal.
But the Gang of Seven also pause in brief prayer at a sidewalk shrine to a murdered comrade. And they have a macho suspicion of fast girls. "She knows a lot. I don't like that," one whispers of the neighborhood floozy, though she has bedded all of them.
And their persecution is specific: they are hated because they are Latinos poaching on Los Angeles's carved up checkerboard of white and black. Clark and co-screenwriter Matthew Frost drew from the real life misadventures of this cast of nonprofessional actors, all South Central skate punks, allowing them to inject the film’s best insight -- the viciousness of anti-Latino racism -- with some authority.
The boys’ adventure begins when the friends take multiple city buses from their backyard hell to paradisiacal Beverly.
While skateboarding on the steps of Beverly Hills High School, the gang hooks up with a couple of beautiful, on-the-make rich white girls. Back at their Barbie dreamhouse digs, in one of the film's only gestures of actual intimacy, Kico (Francisco Pedrasa) and an earnest, half-dressed rich girl bond over a shared sense of alienation and
loneliness.
But the fun is busted up by the arrival of an Escalade full of hellbent preps decked out in blazers, pastels and short pants like some fashionably mod British street gang, who inspire the boys’ flight over a number of walls and into the hidden lairs of a host of Crazy Caucasians.
Jumping their first wall, the boys land in the courtyard of an uberqueeny gay man wearing cornrows and eyeing the boys like filets of juicy veal. Their next hop-over, finds a Clint Eastwood type with a rifle just itching to blast any renegade tail sorry enough to vault his fence. But Clark saves the real vaudeville for wall number 3, where collagen life support system Janice Dickinson is a drunk human Venus flytrap swaying on her high heels and threatening to swallow Kico whole with her cleavage.
Film has long relished the sight of Hispanic and Black thugs threatening Whitey, but Wassup turns the hysteria tables in its portrait of Hispanic kids terrorized by a succession of predatory Hollyweirds with their gaudy gated worlds of pink drinks, tacky-luxe decor and houses that look like the porno set pieces for photographer Larry Sultan's "The Valley."
But by the end of the film some of the simpatico reality effect has been seriously eroded by Clark's preference for characters pulled out of the radioactive MTV reality show trout pond.
Clark is a director like John Waters who luxuriates in cartoonish extremes. His sleazy white people are greaseballs par excellence, the kind of predatory gay men and lascivious older women culled from “After School Specials” and cheesy hetero porn.
But while Waters is interested in being outrageous for outrageousness’s sake and slipping a whoopee cushion under normalcy's hindquarters, Clark takes his extremes seriously, presenting them as gospel. Clark is at heart an exploitation filmmaker, and his heart beats faster for extremity of every kind.
Clark is so deeply on the side of his teen subjects he has lost all perspective and all sense of scale.
Though his desire is clearly to penetrate and go more than skin-deep, he can't always get beyond his endless wallows in the superficial.
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