Austinist Movie Review: Wassup Rockers

Jonathan, one of the kids in Larry Clark’s latest teensploitation effort Wassup Rockers, is total girlbait. In the course of the day in which Rockers follows Jonathan’s crew of Hispanic punk-rock skaters through Los Angeles, Jonathan hooks up with his girlfriend, rejects the neighborhood slut, does the girl next door in the trunk of a moving car, sleeps with a rich Beverly Hills princess in her fabulous mansion, and gets hit on by a flaming fashion photographer who offers to make him into a model (and who looks very much like Project Runway’s Santino, for those who care). Jonathan is inarticulate, sweet, and very young, and he is so often exploited and looked down upon in the movie’s world that his sexual encounters come off as innocent and playful instead of dangerous.

Unfortunately, this innocence may be the source of the distinctly dirty feeling that we experienced when looking at Jonathan and his friends. Are we no better or worse than that cornrowed fashion photographer? In this movie, which is by turns awkward, irrelevant, and confused, Larry Clark may have strayed out of the DMZ he generally occupies between voyeurism and documentary. This is unfortunate because, unlike Kids, in which the main shocker was the news flash that kids have sex and do drugs, Wassup Rockers is trying to talk about race, class, and inequality. When you throw in Clark’s obsession with the sexuality of the young, beautiful, and doomed, the mix gets toxic and unlikely.

Like Kids, Wassup Rockers follows a day-in-the-life structure, in which the seven friends play music, skate, and mess around. The movie starts to fall apart a bit when the rockers get on a bus to Beverly Hills, intending to go skate at the high school, and start having encounters with Rich People. These are straight out of Central Casting: the white girl Jonathan sleeps with is over-manicured, Daddy-starved and over-sexed; her three male friends, looking like they’ve stepped out of an SE Hinton novel (God, we hate those Socs!), wear blazers and short pants and talk about making it to appointments with their personal trainers; and the party guests at a backyard soiree drink saketinis and chat limp-wristedly about how much better New York is than LA.

Clark is known for playing with realism and social documentary—mixing fact and fiction—and this cartoonish turn is an unwelcome development. It’s hard to tell whether he’s trying to be funny in these scenes, or what, but they definitely ring strange. As do the madcap chase scenes in which the kids try to get out of Beverly Hills by climbing over fences and through backyards. People start dying—members of their group, as well as some of the rich people they encounter—but the movie tries to keep being a caper, which just feels disrespectful.

A recurrent joke in this movie has a wide variety of bit characters, from black teenagers through white police officers, calling the kids “Mexicans” (they’re actually Salvadoran and Guatemalan). Their reaction to this mistake is played for a joke, like the time in Clueless when Alicia Silverstone tells Paul Rudd that she can’t communicate with the family housekeeper because she doesn’t “talk Mexican,” but it gets old really fast. The movie is trying to introduce us to these kids, show us that they’re people instead of the human trash that those evil rich people think they are. But it doesn’t do the work to help us get there, leaving us with little impression of the real thoughts of the characters.

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