Ray Pride

Weird and weirdly likable, "Wassup Rockers," the latest teen-centric movie from photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark, is a sweet-hearted comedy (with dark interludes) refashioning "The Warriors" and John Cheever's "The Swimmer" with a pack of punk-rock-playing South Central skate kids whose expedition to skateboard in Beverly Hills turns into a journey home across miles of Los Angeles to save themselves from racist cops, cute teenage girls, exploitative fashion photographers, drunken, lonely middle-aged actresses and movie-star homeowners with guns.

Clark, 62, son of a baby photographer, is known for books like "Tulsa" and "Teenage Lust" and movies like "Kids" and "Ken Park." His daughter just turned 20, his son is 23, and he has a 30-year-old daughter from what he terms "the outlaw years." In "Wassup Rockers," his brown-skinned brat pack, whom he met several years earlier, then constructed a loose story around their personalities, just wants to have fun. Everybody judges them in the story, from black kids teasing them for their tight clothes, "Wassup rockers?" to cops calling them Mexican when they're mostly Salvadoran. Yet they're fairly innocent. One character drinks and there's talk about sex but drinking and drugs are pretty much out of the picture. They just want to be kids and have fun. "They just want to be kids and have fun," Clark agrees. They weren't smoking pot, they weren't drinking, they were just having fun being kids. I thought that was odd!" He laughs. "What's going on?"

Again, Clark's captured a moment between childhood and adulthood. "It's a moment. I wanted the moment where you're growing up, you're an adolescent, you're interested in girls but you're still a child. I'd take them skating and they would be y'know, adolescents. Then we would walk through a park and they would see a merry-go-round and they wouldn't let the other guys get off until they got sick. They got me on it, everybody's sick, and five seconds later they're playing hot potato. It was this constant energy, acting like little kids one minute and then acting like teenagers the next. It was a really interesting time, a time I wanted in the film."

The mix is brash--"Warriors," "Swimmer," even Greek trek stories like "Anabasis" by Xenephon. "Or `The Odyssey,'" Clark adds. "'The Swimmer' wasn't really in my consciousness, I was thinking more of `The Warriors.' Then after I did it, I was thinking about `The Swimmer,' because I always liked that movie with Burt Lancaster, swimming across [the suburbs] pool by pool. And he did interact with people, the backyards were a big part of it [as in `Wassup Rockers']. But I'm mixing up genres like mad here, y'know. As it turns out, the first four minutes of the film is a documentary, of when I first met the kids. I'm interviewing Jonathan and he's telling stories that we then re-create in the film. This wasn't part of the film until we were in the editing room. I said, let's try this. It worked so well because it starts as a documentary, then I'm recreating their lives, they're really playing themselves, only six months younger. The expected thing would have been to stay in South Central, but I wanted to get them out of there and have them interact with white people. South Central is all black and Latino, there are no white people there. I would take them out skating, and the ghetto is really different. Life there, the way you act there is very different. So when I'd take them skating, we'd talk about white people and the way they were, they'd see them do strange things. `You'd never see that in the ghetto!' So I had the idea to send them on this crazy adventure, which turns into an action-chase-slapstick whatever it turns into!"

The world of fashion and Hollywood turn out to be villains, the real exploiters. "The fashion world, I thought `well, if these kids come over the wall into a fashion party, bloody nose, black eyes, all ripped up from the fight.' And what would the fashion world think? They would think, `My next campaign!' Early on, the kids would dress like that because they were poor, with the ripped-up jeans and the old clothes, and they were always writing stuff on their jeans, I'm saying, you kids have got such style. I explained to them how they would be ripped off by the fashion world. Skater clothes, the skater clothes that fashion people are selling now are big business, people who've never skated in their life. They'll see the way you're dressed and they'll start designing clothes like you're wearing and make a lot of money. And so now in the last year, you see all these jeans that look like [these] that sell for 300, 500, 700 bucks by fashion designers and someone asked me last week, `If these kids are so poor, why do they wear $300 jeans?' Y'know, I said, `That's stupid. You're stupid.'" Clark laughs again, grinning.

"Wassup Rockers" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2006-06-27)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
The great, graceful Taiwanese film master Hou Hsiao-hsien's 2005 "Three Times" works wistful magic in three stories played by the same pair of actors
(2006-06-21)

With Withnail
The wry, witty and pungent "Wah-Wah," Richard E. Grant's debut as a writer-director, should surprise no one who's seen his performances in movies like "Withnail & I" or his quippy, gossipy film diaries
(2006-06-13)

Tip of the Week
Of the many things to admire about Canadian prairie auteur Guy Maddin and his baroque visual escapades, one is his willingness to make short films of fevered stylistic invention
(2006-06-13)

Tip of the Week
The Opening Night Program of the 18th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, shown at the Siskel Film Center, produced by Chicago Filmmakers, has two distinct highlights
(2006-06-06)

Edifice complexities
(2006-06-06)

Patriotic Gore
(2006-05-30)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-30)

Summer Guide Movies: June
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: July
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: August
(2006-05-24)

Rush Hour 3
(2006-05-23)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-23)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment