Wassup Rockers.

"Wassup Rockers is a 'quintessential' LA story, as they say, and possibly of more interest now with the success of Crash, which deals with some of these issues in much cornier and less true ways," write John Payne and Caroline Ryder in a feature for the LA Weekly for which they spend quite some time with director Larry Clark and his "skater-hipster" stars.

"Has Larry Clark gone soft?" asks Justin W Ravitz in the New York Press. "Not exactly. It's just that this goofy posse of discovered non-actors, essentially playing themselves, couldn't possibly inspire a teenage-wasteland nightmare.... Instead, this fictionalized, meandering road trip gently unearths a tiny youth sub-culture that's fascinating largely because of its indomitable optimism."

Steve Erickson in Gay City News: "Clark takes an unexpected leap into a previously unknown realm - empathy for his characters. It's the first Clark film I haven't hated." Usually, his films "objectify and demonize youth, combining moralism and prurience in a way that feels deeply American."

"However you respond to Wassup Rockers, it is completely alive, unlike any number of teenage Hollywood movies with their stale formulas and second-hand puerility," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. But not before getting a few issues out of the way: "A filmmaker, photographer and besotted observer of sex and death on the adolescent fringe, Mr Clark pointedly photographs young flesh with the drooling concentration of a chicken hawk. Although he might say his purpose isn't to turn viewers on but to capture the intense physical reality of adolescent experience, there is more erotic energy floating through his films than in a hundred laboriously obtained orgasms from a pornographic loop. Watching his films can make anyone over 30 feel like a dirty old whatever."

"I just wanted you to meet these kids who you never see in movies," Clark tells Jessica Winter in the Village Voice. J Hoberman: "bod-caressing camerawork aside, it seems as though Uncle Larry's underlying fantasy might be a neorealist remake of A Hard Day's Night or a goofball West Side Story."

More from Noel Murray in the AV Club: "It may be truer to the lives of his amateur cast to watch them engage in mumbly, inarticulate conversations between rounds of failed skate tricks, but it isn't especially cinematic."

"[T]he film is not nearly as volatile or as engaging as Clark's previous works, Kids and Bully," writes Elizabeth Mixson for Res. "Despite its faults it is an enjoyable, informative, shocking and, at times, heartbreaking film."

Update: IndieWIRE interviews Larry Clark, Cassavetes fan.

Posted by dwhudson at June 23, 2006 3:36 AM