Trailer here. (http://www.allocine.fr/webtv/acvision.asp?nopub=1&cvid=18414178&emission=&player=QT&debit=H)
Release Date: June 23rd, 2006 (NY)
Starring: Jonathan Velasquez, Francisco Pedrasa, Milton Velasquez, Usualdo Panameno, Laura Cellner
Directed by: Larry Clark (Kids)
Premise: Follows the real-life story of a group of South Central teens who ride skateboards and listen to punk rock instead of conforming to their neighborhood's hip-hop culture. Constantly harassed, they take buses to Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Hollywood, where they skate and catch the attention of the local rich girls, inevitably leading to trouble with parents, police and boyfriends.
Its Lords of Kenparktown
FEATURE - A White Guy in South Central
It began with an L.A. photo shoot and ended three years later with the film Wassup Rockers. In between, Larry Clark says he learned a whole lot about the ghetto.
By Daniel Robert Epstein, FilmStew.com
Larry Clark is one of the most controversial filmmakers of our time. From photographing young nude males and females, the Tulsa, Oklahoma native moved on to the scandalous celluloid offerings Kids, Bully and Ken Park.
But his latest film Wassup Rockers has no nudity and may offer up his most fully formed characters yet. Much like the way he pulled skateboarders off the street of New York City to act in Kids, Clark has done the same with South Central Latino kids for Wassup Rockers, shot in verité style.
In fact, it was during a French magazine photo in Los Angeles with Tiffany Limos, one of the stars of 2002's Ken Park, that Clark stumbled upon his newest set of kids.
"I was going to photograph her with the kids from Ken Park, but they weren't around," Clark recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. "So I thought, 'Well, let's find some skaters.'"
"We went down to Venice Beach and met Porky and Kiko," he continues. "Kiko was maybe 13, and Porky was 14. They just looked different. They wore really tight clothes, they had long hair and they looked poor and shabby. But they had style and looked interesting, different from the other kids they were with."
Clark ended up photographing the pair for four days with Limos, journeying in the process all across Los Angeles. When the magazine came out a few months later, the filmmaker hand-delivered issues to the duo, who were more interested in going skateboarding that day. Clark wound up riding with them every Saturday for a year, and started writing a script based on their story.
"The first half of the film is all recreations of their stories," he explains. "The second half of the film, I just made up. I'm really mixing genres, from documentary to recreation of real life to action chase adventure-crazy stuff."
Clark says that compared to New York, where everybody on the street sort of knows each other, the fabric woven among this same group in Los Angeles is strangely isolated. "South Central Los Angeles is a big part of L.A., but it's isolated by race," Clark observes. "It's all black and Latino. There are no white people there, which I found interesting. I'm the only white person that I've ever seen out there in three years.
"I also found that peer pressure in the ghetto was enormous," he adds. "These kids aren't into the street style with the gangsta baggy clothes, gangsta rap, cut off all your hair, act gangsta, smoke pot. They just wanted to be kids, listen to punk rock and play punk rock."
Although there is no graphic nudity like that showcased in some of Clark's earlier films, Wassup Rockers does have its fair share of sexual situations. And for once, the filmmaker had to figure out how to film them without being overtly explicit.
"There's that one scene where Jonathan and the Beverly Hills blonde girl start getting busy," he explains. "You know exactly what's going on just from the dialogue that I wrote. So your imagination comes into play and you're imagining exactly what they're talking about, which I found interesting. I found it artistically challenging to figure out how to do that. That was fun for me."
By virtue of the fact that Clark knew his stars for a year and a half before they started shooting, he says he was both energized and enlightened. "You can see the racial politics of the ghetto in the film," he suggests, "which you wouldn't know about if you weren't living there, if you weren't a Latino or black."
"The first thing that I wanted to do in the film was that I wanted you to see that they're good kids," Clark continues. "Usually, when you see young Latinos, they're stereotyped as gang bangers or drug addicts or something. I wanted you to see the real kids and what their life is like to grow up in this really difficult environment, where there are drive-by shootings all the time."
"Where these kids live, there's street gangs everywhere, and just walking to school two blocks away, you can get killed. So how these kids navigate this environment and how they manage to really live and to really have fun and live in the moment is reflected in the film."
Once Wassup Rockers moves from the reality-based to Clark's figments in the second half, the proceedings get noticeably wackier. Some rich white girls invite the protagonists up to Beverly Hills, where a sexual encounter and then a fight follow.
"When we hung out before the film, they were always commenting on white people acting different than people in the ghetto, which is true because in the ghetto there's a certain style that you need to effect for self survival," Clark recalls. "That gave me the idea to take them out of South Central."
By Clark's own admission, his films are progressing in the opposite esthetic direction of the general norm, from slick to rough around the edges. But there is still no U.S. release plan in sight for the aforementioned Ken Park.
"It doesn't have a release [date] because of clearance issues," Clark reveals. "The producers said all the music was cleared, but some it wasn't paid for. I had a crazy, nut producer on that, so we're still dealing with clearance issues."
"The film is very successful all over the world, but in America if you put out a film without all the clearances, they come after you," he adds. "So after Wassup Rockers, comes out, we're going to try to get Ken Park cleared. Now as far as censorship, we haven't gotten that far. It's not a question of censorship, it's a question of clearances. Once we get the clearances, we'll have another battle over censorship."
don't get too excited..
Quote from: MacGuffin on June 27, 2006, 03:02:13 PM
But his latest film Wassup Rockers has no nudity
...
I saw this last night, and the whole story seemed manufactured. The commentary on the dvd and the backstory of these kids was more interesting, but never really attention-grabbing.
Latino skaters in a hostile environment... doesn't that sound interesting? Maybe.
Latino skaters out of their element and artificially placed in preposterous situations... hmmm? No thanks.