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Planned suburbia, teenage wasteland: "Tomorrow's city... today." The scene is a newly unwrapped Colorado community where the uprooted kids, left to cramped recreational centers and half-finished condos, head toward a homegrown apocalypse. The juvenile (Michael Kramer) comes home swollen from a fight, his mom deals with it by giving him five bucks ("combat pay"), in his room he medicates himself with ham-sized headphones and Cheap Trick lyrics. Bosch's hellscape is projected on the classroom slideshow for the druggy "lost cause" (Tom Fergus) to trip to, the veteran troublemaker (Matt Dillon) leads the sessions of moody time-wasting: Swilling vodka, setting off firecrackers, pointing revolvers at cans and each other. The Cars, The Ramones and Van Halen are the beats of choice (Jimi Hendrix is "old crap"), Cadillac lots and tennis courts pockmark the landscape though there's still plenty of empty spaces to reflect the rampant adolescent alienation. (One wide shot of the prairie—two couples on opposite sides of the frame, dwarfed and silhouetted by lead-gray clouds and slanting dawn light—is out of Malick.) Between Los Olvidados and Gummo, the keen Jonathan Kaplan on the crossroads of youthful anarchy and capitalistic rot. "Which problem? The problem with the kids, or the problem with resale values?" The PTA meeting goes nowhere while rebellion brews outside, the adults are chained in the school as Lord of the Flies explodes in the parking lot. Kaplan's j'accuse is scrawled on a tenement complex's brick wall ("wide streets, narrow minds"), a generation's extinguishing cry of revolt is a correctional bus heading into the Eighties. "Ooh child, things are gonna get easier..." Cinematography by Andrew Davis. With Harry Northup, Pamela Ludwig, Vincent Spano, Andy Romano, Ellen Geer, Richard Jamison, Julia Pomeroy, and Lane Smith.
--- Fernando F. Croce |