No.298 : We the Party (2012)

We the Party at the IMDb

I had mild hopes for this film having looked up the poster and some lesser reviews. Would it be a fresh and funny take on the issues of race, growing up and having a good time in a multi-ethnic Los Angeles High School? Sadly these hopes were dashed after five minutes when five diverse friends got together to make a bet : Who can lose their virginity by prom night? I appreciate teenage boys think only of getting laid but surely a slightly different take could have been offered when visiting this tired and overpopulated genre?

To be fair it isn’t the usual frat style film with gross out gags and a lot of nudity. This was a more leisurely take with the five lads going about their conquests in different ways. They all learned a little, gained some respect for the ladies and mostly got a little love.

The guys hold a pre-prom party and hand out flyers with ‘We the Party’ suggesting that they are hip dudes. We know they are not and the usual high school favourites of bully, jock, popular girl and stoner all have to be won over before the party is a success and our guys become bone fide playas.

There is a bit of learning too with an ethics teacher trying to get the kids to understand what is valuable in life - not cars and houses, but leaving a legacy like Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jnr. Our crew take this on board and one delivers his own take on the environment to great acclaim. I’d bet in the real world he’d have been soundly beaten afterwards but it was well scripted and performed.

The pace is sedate at best with long scenes that go nowhere accompanied to a smooth R&B soundtrack. Most of theses scenes involve fine young ladies in bikinis romping around in swimming pools so you can understand that they are playing to their audience of horny teenage guys - and me.

There isn’t much in the way of peril with the $20 a head bet never going to be disastrous for anyone. Some of it is however a bit on the nose with a long scene with a guy looking up girls’ skirts with a camera on his boot , complete with crotch shots, seriously misjudged.

There are some moral values employed with a school project centred around finding out the stories of homeless people. This sits awkwardly alongside the horny youth story line but you can’t say there isn’t something for everyone in here. The concert using their footage to a rap with an orchestral arrangement was great and it seemed all was going well until the prom money was stolen! Can it be recovered and will all of our cast, including the fat white girl in the body cast, find love?

Director Mario Van Peebles manages to get most of his extended family into the cast alongside a hardly seen Snoop Dogg who looked fetching in his pig tails.

Overall this was a decent slice of life with some good academic scenes set along side things more dubious. The young and mostly good looking cast did well with thin material and although everyone grew a bit I’m happy to say that I learned nothing. The soundtrack wasn’t my kind of thing but it was easy to get immersed in the beautiful people in sunny L.A and as a time passer you‘ll do a lot worse.

Best Bit : Pool Party  ’W’ Rating : 17/23.

No.231 : Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)

Where the Green Ants Dream at the IMDb

 This was German director Werner Herzog’s first film in English although the copy I saw was dubbed in German and had English subtitles - long way for a short cut!

The film is all filmed on location in Australia and deals with the cultural clash between some native Aborigines and a mining conglomerate who want to extract uranium from land the Aborigines see as sacred. Although an environmental warning, the film is also a parable of sorts and although the subject matter may seem a bit dry it was interesting enough to keep me engaged.

From the off you get a fair idea of where the film’s sympathies lie with a long tracking shot of piles of debris left over from previous excavations. It’s clear that a mess has been made of large swathes of the country and to reinforce this there is stock footage of extreme weather which either indicates climate change or an angry God - I’m going with the latter!

Mining engineer Bruce Spence (Gyro Captain out of the ‘Mad Max’ films) is in his office dealing with an old lady who seems somewhat out of place in the middle of the Outback. She has lost her dog in the mines and asks if it can be found. Bruce fobs her off, but she is a persistent old bird and her quest continues throughout the film, running parallel with the main narrative. I’m pretty sure the lost dog is a metaphor for something, lost innocence maybe, but it’s not made clear and as regular readers will attest, nuance isn’t my strongest suit.

Anyway, the new mine needs some bore holes and progress is halted when some Aborigines show up and block the bulldozers. The workers are keen to shove them off but Bruce, perhaps fearing bad publicity, engages with them to see what it would take to move them on. He has all the right permits but the Aborigines claim ancient title to the lands where, they claim, the green ants dream. In their folklore if the green ants are awoken the world will end. Frankly I was hoping this would happen but seemingly the budget wouldn’t stretch to it.

The mining bosses come in with a raft of offers but all are turned down. Bruce starts to see what he’s up against when he encounters another group in a supermarket huddled round the spot where a favoured tree once grew that was cut down for the store. The bosses decide to seduce the tribal leaders with a trip to the big city and shower them in tat such as a digital watch that no one can turn off - another metaphor?

On the trip home the Aborigines are impressed with a large aeroplane and a goodwill offer is made to supply such a machine to the Aborigines despite them having no airport or conceivable use for it. With this sweetener in place the action transfers to the court room where ancient claims are weighed against the law of the land. Will the miners be sent on their way and the Aborigines left with their land’s mineral wealth intact? What to do you think?!

I quite enjoyed this film but it was too indistinct in what it was trying to be. A factual drama? Part documentary? Social commentary? Fantasy parable? I’ve no idea. Lots of stuff was laid on thick with the evil suits clearly trying to screw with the local heroes. There were a lot of metaphors such as a lift that kept breaking down, perhaps suggesting that progress wasn’t all it was meant to be. I never figured out the relevance of the lost dog although the big green plane was a bit more obvious.

Bruce Spence was the only actor I knew in the film and he did a decent job of holding it together. Most of the Aboriginal cast were not actors but they all had great faces and presences. Things like their drinking problems were touched on but for the most part they were the innocents being treated badly by corporate interests and progress in general.

The film was pretty clear where its sympathies lay and this was shown via Bruce’s character who starts off seeing the Aborigines as a nuisance before gradually going more and more native himself. The politics were not of the subtle variety and there was a lot of mystical stuff going on, such as a key artefact being presented to the court that we, the viewer, weren’t allowed to see but overall there was enough to like to justify a recommendation - just.

Best Bit : Pit vigil with Pal
‘W’ Score 14/23