Wassup Rockers
Starring: Jonathan Velasquez, Francisco Pedrasa, Milton Velasquez, Yunior Usualdo Panameno, Eddie Velasquez, Carlos VelascoWritten and Directed By: Larry ClarkRated RFirst Look Media
The title refers to a taunt leveled at Hispanic punk rockers by Affro-gangstas in South Central L.A. As interesting as this sounds, with Wassup Rockers, film-maker Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) took what could’ve been an engrossing dramatic look into racial tensions between different culturally oppressed ethnicities in an urban West Coast ghetto and turned it into just over an hour and a half of raw, unedited footage of high school kids skateboarding. Through much of the film, the deeply electrifying, frenetic thrash of hardcore punk is haphazardly slapped over uninspired, home video-like images of kids skating. Someone take the camera away from Larry Clark and lock him out of every film editing suite on the west coast. Wassup Rockers is worse than a missed opportunity – it’s a tragedy.
The film has a plot that reads like a list of locations. The kids start off in South Central before bussing off to Beverly Hills to skate. They have a run-in with a Beverly Hills police officer, which finds them running off to Hollywood for further adventures before making it back to South Central. It’s hardly an inspired plot, but even this could’ve been mildly interesting (or at least respectably mediocre) if handled competently. Larry Clark seems to have followed around these kids carrying the camera in one hand and a list of every cultural stereotype and cinematic cliché in Southern California in the other.
Looking for a story with rich white girls fawning over bad boy Hispanics? They’re in there. Rich white boys who find this offensive enough for violence? They’re in there, too. A humorless, terminally square police officer who might be racist? He’s in there. An effeminate, predatory homosexual artist-hipster? He’s in there. There isn’t an emotionally complex character in the entire film. With zero emotional depth to all of the characters, the film doesn’t offer any insight into what they’re going through over the course of the film.
And the acting doesn’t help. Somewhere in the first 15 minutes of the film, the realization sinks-in that not only are these kids not terribly good actors, they seem to be perpetually on the verge of laughing uncomfortably about the fact that there’s a camera pointed at them. What’s worse: they’re playing themselves. It takes talented actors to play a fictionalized version of themselves onscreen. This proves to be an insurmountable task for these first-timers. Larry Clark might deserve some credit for having the courage to make a film focusing on real people who’ve never acted before, but the fact that it feels authentic doesn’t make it entertaining and the fact that they seem to be having fun making the film doesn’t make them interesting.
In one of the few moments where the film seems motivated toward being charming (or really motivated in any direction at all, for that matter) a socially precocious young, rich Beverly Hills girl named Niki (Jessica Steinbaum: the only significant person in the film with previous acting credit) interviews one of the kids in bed before making out with him. As both an actress and a character, she seems genuinely interested in what his life in the ghetto is like and gradually gets him to open-up to her. It’s as awkward and uncomfortable a scene as one could safely imagine. The kid isn’t terribly articulate and her interest in him doesn’t improve matters, but the strange nature of the social encounter is the closest Wassup Rockers gets to any genuine emotion. VS
Russ Bickerstaff is a local poet and writer. His poems can be heard regularly at Linneman's Monday Poetry Night.
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