This is a pretty cool film–a too, too bright California noir set in a metropolitan SoCal high school. Imagine Dashiell Hammett writing a script for the UPN’s “Veronica Mars” with Fritz Lang directing and you get a pretty good idea of what writer/director Rian Johnson is up to. The language is dense, performatively so, and the storyline can be confusing (but no more confusing than the first time I watched The Maltese Falcon). What I liked was the audacity of the project, the verve in which the actors (particularly Joseph Gordon-Levitt–will no one on this blog watch Mysterious Skin!!!!–, Lukas Haas and Noah Fleiss) attack their roles, and the filmmakers’ keen visual sensibility. It’s not perfect (though it may be the best grad school film project ever to grace the big screen). In fact it is rough around the edges. Still, I recommend it!
I’m with Jeff–cool to look at, cool to listen to. I was particularly taken by how this was NOT a pastiche of Hammett but a full-on, smart-as-nails, tough-as-a-whip inhabitation of his style and sensibility… but in high school. I wish more people talked about “yeggs.” I think the world would be a better place for it. It is maybe a little long, maybe a little too taken with its plot’s convolutions, but really damned interesting to watch.
sunhee gave up after half an hour, i watched till the end but this left me cold. i much prefer the preview to the actual film, which seems to think that the idea of a noir set in a high school is enough for a film. in the preview the dialogue was sharp and had an angular rhythm; in the film it wears thin after 10 minutes. the preview is deft and snappy; the film is increasingly turgid and plodding. what’s that word john likes to use? ah yes, conceit. this film has a conceit, and it has very little else. next, i think the filmmaker should try a 30s style screwball comedy set in a survivalist compound. or maybe a kickboxing extravaganza set in a florida retirement community.
lukas haas is very good (someone should make a film with him and elijah wood having a baby-face creep off). that’s about it.
i rented this because some cyber-perambulations convinced me that it was a good film to watch after oldboy to understand the dark world of the virginia tech shootings. my approach to reality is always filtered through fiction.
american high school films always astonish me. i realize this specific film is not exactly representative, but, still, i admire all of you who made it out of an american high school. it looks like it must have been unadulterated misery. the locker system seems to me nightmarish all unto itself. why is it that american kids must have lockers? can’t you bring your shit back and forth like the rest of us out there in the unwashed world?
anyway, i liked this. the staginess is fine by me (it resonates of david mamet), and the language is pretty amazing. i like joseph gordon-levitt very much, especially after having seen mysterious skin!!!. i agree that this is visually arresting, and the soundtrack is mesmerizing — especially the slightly avant-guardish horn bits.
how lonely the life of the american high schooler must be! seriously, how did you guys survive?
gio, i have it on good authority that mike staved the bullies off at the beginning of each year by taking a dump in the shower and stepping on it. jeff was, i’m pretty sure, a bully himself–his current emo persona is just a cover. and hence the tense relationship between middle-aged jeff and middle-aged mike. mike plays it tough online but in person he’s very nervous around jeff.
me, i almost got murdered once in high school in south india, but yes, that apart, it was a piece of cake compared to the filmic american experience (though, alas, it also involved far less sex and drugs than the american experience seems to offer).
no sex or drugs in my high school. barely any alcohol, either, though it was perfectly legal. and no cars! it’s not only the lockers. it’s the cars.
yes, we only had elephants. and my parents couldn’t afford one, so i had to ride to school on a shabbily disguised buffalo.
(“loooxoooory! at least you had a buffalo!”)
excuse me, for talking to myself.
English boarding school. ‘Nuff said.
i actually went to an ex-english boarding school in darjeeling for a number of years. it was originally set up in in the mid-19th century for children of colonial types in bengal (probably ones who couldn’t afford to send their kids back to the home country). they only began to let indian students in in the late 1930s, and i believe didn’t have an indian headmaster, i mean rector, till the 1970s. by the time i got there it was nothing but us indian types but the school still had very pukka english pretensions. which means we were beaten up regularly but since there weren’t any actual englishmen on staff, not subjected to institutional pederasty.
sorry, ‘nab.
I’d take a shabby buffalo over an English pederast any day of the year.
There are countless movies about English boarding schools. Do these ex-colonial schools feature in any Indian movies?
Also, Arnab, given the thread about Western movies about Africa, do you have any particular likes and dislikes among Western movies which deal India? And the whole category of movies about Anglo-Indians? “Bhowani Junction”? Did they ever make a movie of the novel “Staying On”?
my school, st. paul’s, has been the setting of some big bombay movies–most recently, main hoon na with shahrukh khan (though it masqueraded as a residential college there). there’s also an atrocious yet interesting (from a cultural criticism point of view) blockbuster from the 90s that is set in a boarding school that is supposed to be in india but is actually some big english country estate. the film is called mohabbatein (also with shahrukh khan). there was a rash there for a while in the late 90s of films being set or filmed in england and other places in europe. the boarding school in that film, which was made at the height of the hindutva phenomenon in india, was imagined as a kind of “hindu culture” boarding school–since most actual boarding schools in india (though not all) have anglican/missionary roots. there are some other boarding school movies, but on the whole i think these schools are so associated with an upper class experience (i was there on a military scholarship) that they probably have not been intuitive locations for mass market hindi films. and when they or any other regular school have showed up they’ve shown no resemblance to what actual indian schools are like.
i’ll start a separate topic on western films about/in india later (unless someone else wants to start one first).
You are too modest, Arnab. St Paul’s is AKA “the Eton of India.” By coincidence, I also went to St Paul’s, though mine was in London. But why are your alumni known as “Old Paulites” while mine are known as “Old Paulines”? And does your school pursue you for money across thousands of miles and dozens of years?
Do start a thread on western movies about India. If nothing else, it will allow us to discuss “Octopussy” and the humiliation of the great tennis player, Vijay Amritraj.
We had lockers (I vaguely remember using them but do not remember them as sites of cultural tension and/or fascistic bullying)? I mostly tried to avoid the athletes and the agriculture types but high school for me was less sensational and far less brutal than the myth of high school continually replicated in the movies and on television (“Freaks and Geeks” is about the closest analogy I can posit and I hovered somewhere between the two categories). Still, I have few fond memories of the place; nothing negative just nothing to get excited about (no Paulites or Paulines; just a bunch farmers and middle class children of white collar state employees). I will admit my twentieth reunion (which, sadly, occurred in 2000) was a lot better than I imagined it would be. People mostly looked healthy and prosperous and congenial, though the class transexual (with whom I shared the stage in our senior production of a Thornton Wilder play) did not–sigh–show up as she did at our tenth. My loss.
st. paul’s may once have been the “eton of india” but not for the last 50 years. that status has long passed to the doon school, founded in the 1930s and which has produced most of the major movers and shakers of indian politics in the last few decades. i was at st. paul’s during the last years of its fading glory. then the gorkhaland agitations began in darjeeling and everything in darjeeling went to hell for a while. the school has very little reputation outside of bengal now. in fact, it barely has a website and no organized money grubbing office.
i assume we are called old paulites because it makes sense, and you lot are called old paulines because you wore skirts while the masters buggered you?
I did have a bully physically thrash me, and I experienced a pretty damn healthy dose of quasi-mental abuse throughout the junior high years (from about age 11-14?), being both fat and relatively smart, which together is akin to having some kind of airborne leprosy. Awful.
Yet my high school–and even those “brutal” years of pre- to early adolescence–seemed far worse for a kind of deadening of the curiosity, a bludgeoning bureaucratic banality in the education *and* the social life. It’s hard to make tedium interesting in films, or even novels, so there’s a turn toward a more narratively-engaging social alienation. And such films sell because every damn kid/teen, even Sammy Popular (who beat me in junior high) imagine(s/d) himself an outcast and exile, a lone wolf patrolling amongst the sheep-like herds. Hence John Hughes’ enormously bland “sociologies,” or even the thin delights of Mean Girls. I admit to loving Heathers, but even its corrosive spirit seems exaggeratedly, interestingly nasty. I liked Brick not because it allegorized something substantive about American high schools but because it avoided the typical allegories and found a new way to imagine the mythologies of alienated youth.
The most resonant representation of high school for me might actually be Van Sant’s Elephant–which still relies on the atypical exaggerations of a brutally-alienated youth–but otherwise, as the camera wandered the halls, it did seem pretty damn familiar. And, yeah, “Freaks” caught up something about social interactions and cliques that seemed more dead-on, emotionally real than other such stories.
But the best sense of the experience of high school might emerge in Office Space. I think my students love that movie because it is closer to their (recent) experiences of schooling than their fears about potential work in their futures. . . .
gio, i don’t know if you’ve seen richard linklater’s dazed and confused? it is a high school film set in the mid-70s, and is a bit of a cult sensation. well, i watched it last night, and it was like i was watching footage of an alien civilization from another star system.
i did understand that in the 70s all high school girls were very beautiful, there was only one black and one jewish kid per high school, and that every moment had a song playing behind it. oh, and that parker posey and ben affleck have always been annoying. but the dynamics, structure, politics etc. of high school life i understood nothing of.
thanks for the anthropological tip, arnab. don’t remember if i’ve seen it or not — i live in a world in which things renew themselves with every lunar cycle — but i’ll certainly watch it (again).
questions for the americans kids on this blo/ck/g: did you guys do any, like, school work in your schools? or was it all just complex socializing, with school being just a pretext/location? they killed us with work. and i hear from my nieces and nephews that it’s the same now. they study 6-7 hours a day after coming home from school and still manage to fall behind.
School work? Not so much really. I took a number of AP courses but it would be years before I truly got a handle on the whole studying/writing thing.
Dazed and Confused is one brilliant piece of filmmaking! The central character (the fourteen-year-old Mitch Kramer) is graduating from junior high school the same year I did (1976) so the film does feel genuine in terms of time and place (Austin, here, stands for almost every middle/upper-middle-class suburban enclave and, yes, such environments were definitely white, white, white with the ocassional sports hero–read African-American–moving in and out of the picture). I know a few Jewish kids attended my high school but I’m not sure I knew it then . . . the nearest synagogue was 30 minutes down the road. The keg party towards the end reminds me exactly of numerous parties I attended, and I won’t even describe the ubiquitous herb usage during the mid-seventies (let’s just say this film is closer to the world I inhabited in the seventies than anything I’ve encountered on the big screen). Yes, the film does offer a coherent narrative with nice and tidy character arcs (it’s privileging of the campus elite does not match my experience, which was a lot more like a less mature version of Anthony Rapp’s character Tony Olson) but this is about as close to the “reality” of my high school years as anything else out there . . . anthropologically speaking.
it’s in my queue, jeffy poo.
Assassination of a High School President has a sharp visual eye and a fantastic actor in lead (Reece Thompson, also fine in the small but engaging Rocket Science), but it is not a particularly good film, not much fun to watch at all. While Brick, for better or worse depending on your sensibilities(see above), takes the problem (and possibilities) of the noir style as its complete reason for being, Assassination uses a far thinner slice of hardboiled patter and a lot of conspiracy pastiche (endless, and rather irritating, references to Woodward & Bernstein & Pakula) for what is essentially Another Teen Movie. And it also had Bruce Willis, hamming it up. Some folks seem to love this, but I was underwhelmed: it’s undercooked.