Shadows and Rockers

The Two Action Adventure Movies of the Summer!

Summer’s here! In SF that means bust out the jackets and sweaters. It also means summer blockbuster movies to avoid! That’s right Indybay readers: do you wanna see the new megaexpensive Scientologist boredom-fest (By which I mean Mission Improbable 3)? Surely not! If you’re like me, you will relish in the fact that after the outrageous rents we pay, the rude hipsters we ignore, and the cold summers we endure, we still have quality movies here in the Bay Area! And some of those films we should see on the screen, before all the remaining movie theaters go the way of the Betamax video tape.

Case in point is Army of Shadows, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969 but only now about to be released for the first time in the US. For those who haven’t heard of him he made great French gangster movies like Le Samouri and Le Circle Rouge, known for their cold-eyed protagonists and steady storytelling.

Army of Shadows, however, is about the French Resistance to Nazi occupied-France in 1942 and 43, and it is very worth seeing. The story is about a group of resistance organizers, including two brothers who are so tight-lipped about their own clandestine activities that they are completely unaware of each others’ roles in the same group. It is early in the war and the Resistance barely has any weapons or is carrying out any sabotage operations, all they are doing is staying out of the clutches of the Germans and ruthlessly executing informers from within their ranks.

The film is sparse and chilly as it leads you through a series of tight situations and gasping escapes. Very little music accompanies the scenes, letting long silences heighten the pressure even more. At one point we painfully listen to a lone clock drone away the seconds while two prisoners silently and desperately plan an escape from Gestapo torturers, communicating only with their eyes.

It is fear, a tense rainy fear that permeates this beautiful movie about brave and honorable people spending every waking moment merely trying to survive. It is a rare treat of a strip of celluloid (recently re-printed from the original negative) that it is not to be missed. In this day of lightning-edits and constant banging music in every second of films it is a pleasure to watch long scenes unfold with a realistic, quiet soundtrack.

And besides, given the current ever oppressive political climate, it might do us all a bit of good to see a movie about a time and a place, not so very long ago or far away, when fighting the man meant a daily dance of survival and when the only good snitch was a dead snitch.

Army of Shadows opens June 23rd at the Balboa theater in SF, The Shattuck in Berkeley, and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

While I am a bit of a secret fan of the outrageously unrealistic expensive-car chase movie franchise Fast And Furious, Larry Clark’s new flick Wassup Rockers is my choice for best hot-pursuit film of the smmer.
In true Clark style, while working on a photo spread for a trendy European magazine he met two Latino skaters from South Central who had come to Venice to skate. The director began visiting the teenagers and their friends and wrote a story for them to act out as themselves, about seven friends from the L.A. ghetto who take buses to Beverly Hills to skate the famous high school steps there and are chased back across town by cops, preppies, and crazed rich neighbors.

Using real people in lieu of actors gives the movie an edge, but it also means some somewhat stilted dialogue scenes. Wassup Rockers works best when the protagonists are in action, skating and goofing and showing off, like in one hilarious scene where Milton, known to his friends as Sperm-ball, steals a cop’s hamburger from out of his patrol car to get him to leave the boys alone.

With a soundtrack of Spanish-language punk rock it is a wild jaunt of a story that ranks up there with The Wanderers and especially Hate as a great urban adventure film. When you leave the theater you’ll want to skateboard home.

Wassup Rockers, directed by Larry Clark, opens July 7th in Bay Area theaters.