TIFF Report: Wassup Rockers Review

Wassup Rockers is the most completely mind-blowing Larry Clark film I could ever possibly imagined having seeing. It is insane. Now, before you run out and get your tickets for this, I'll probably have to spoil the surprise as to why it is such a unique Larry Clark film.

There isn't even a hint of nudity.

Well, okay, there's the briefest of hints – but that's all there ever is. Though the film opens teasing you into thinking it's Clark in full on sleaze mode with the camera voyeuristically pouring over the bare chest of 14 year old protagonist, Jonathan, as he muddles his way through a role call of his gang/band, if anything your expectations of the film mask the most interesting thing about the first scene – that I, certainly, became confused if Wassup Rockers was a documentary or not. (It's not).

If anything this expectation makes the first half of the film unbelievably boring, as it is little more than an hour or so of Jonathan and his cronies talking nonsense and occasional skateboarding scenes. Dialogue has never been Clark's strong point (Bully contains some of the most painfully inane exchanges I've ever had to sit through) but you could argue here it works better in this pseudo-documentary styling – we wouldn't expect much more from the kids they so obviously are. The skateboarding scenes, while they might be interesting to an art house audience, or something, are less technically impressive than a Tony Hawks cut-scene on the Playstation, never mind the small tricks that are displayed. All to a slightly too heavy LA hardcore punk soundtrack.

So it's round about this point that you're pretty bored, and you're wondering about how unlike earlier Larry Clark films, where everyone looked sweaty and pissed off, no one really looks that sweaty or pissed off (he did use the same cinematographer, Steve Ganier, for Bully, which proves that Larry Clark has some control and interest in the 'look' of his films, just not the amount of perving). But then things honestly start to get interesting.

The boys decide to go on a trip to skate on a staircase in Beverly Hills, where, by virtue of a succession of unlikely mishaps, have to make their way home, kind of like the Warriors (but not really). It's at this point you honestly begin to wonder if Larry Clark has gone a bit mad. For one, the scrapes are roughly the kind of thing, say, Harold and Kumar had to deal with on a trip to White Castle, including being attacked by rich Beverly Hills bullies (not exactly social commentary), fending off a gay rapist (funnier than it sounds, but not funny enough), and being shot by a facsimile of Charlton Heston (so cack-handedly done to appear as biting satire, it's really quite funny after all). I mean, one of the kids gets bitten on the arse by a Jack Russell when running! You half expect him to then slip on a banana peel, and then maybe look one way, then the other while carrying a big plank of wood, smacking his compadres in their faces repeatedly.

So you're watching it, and you're thinking, this is really odd and funny and so totally not a Larry Clark film. Hell, I'm actually enjoying this! After that boring first hour that wasn't a Larry Clark film either but it pretended it was but I didn't once see a willy (or a fanny). Then for some reason, it changes again!

To be honest though, not that much. Suffice to say (listen I'm not spoiling it to say that) they mostly make it out of Beverly Hills okay, and, in a stark contrast to the suitable, if personally I felt a bit jarring, hardcore punk the audience has had to put up to, the boys fall asleep on the train to the sounds of 'Take Me Somewhere Nice' by Mogwai. And it's oddly beautiful, as you look at their tired little faces and the scenery as it whizzes by. And so you think a bit about how roughly, this film was kind of about race relations in LA, but you kind of hope it really wasn't based on the politics (white people are silly or evil, Hispanic types (non specific) have a secret communication network and are lovely, black people will shoot you till you are dead) and how it was a bit about the pressures of children turning into men more and more quickly (you see Jonathan playing with action figures after (presumably) sexing up his girlfriend), but how it was actually just a really boring skate video for an hour, then a rip roaring summer comedy, all filmed in a pseudo-documentary style. Then you realise he's going to cut out the line in 'Take Me Somewhere Nice' where Stuart Braithwaite sings 'What would you do, if you saw spaceships, over Glasgow' And it pisses you off a bit because it's your favourite line and in the end you decide you didn't like the film at all.