Was going to post something rather insolent here last night but a lucky power outage stopped me.
Yeah context is muy important, and I would add that when I think of what I would term "powerful" films, I think of movies that have a detectable impact on a society, things like Triumph of the Will, Birth of a Nation, maybe something by Capra. In a lot of these movies the power is hard to detect for us though, because it's so far removed from our society, or we only see it indirectly through it's influence on other movies.
As to AHX specifically, I find it as powerful as a cold, wet noodle. My problem with this movie stems from the fact that it's so blatantly trying to be topical and real and important but on a basic, unacknowledged, cinematic level it's a vehicle for some personalities to strut about, and this fact interferes with that motive. If you look, you'll notice some of the story choices they made that really bear this point out.
-main tension of the film's issues is boiled down to a simple battle between a patently evil "racist devil" and and the pure-as-snow black educator for the souls of young people.
-unwavering focus on Ed Norton's personal journey
-Ed meets a nice, funny black and some mean racists in prison, changes his mind.
I think we have a dillemma here, where the fastest, bestest way for movies to engage us emotionally is to give us compelling characters or stereotypes in harsh, unambiguous situations, but these very things inherently detract from our ability to see things that required a more nuanced imagination. This is why movies are generally bad at telling things like history or sociology; they reduce the world to key actors and unambiguous motives.
A really powerful movie about a topic like race gangs has to reach deeper than this morally didactic thing, which boils down the issue to "racism is too much baggage, man." If it was as simple as getting everyone to meet nice blacks, so they could see that not all blacks are lazy drug-dealing criminals, well, gee, couldn't we have gotten rid of that "baggage" a long time ago? Instead, this movie basically feeds us the standard devices of a gangster-action movie (the points I mentioned above could just as well describe 'Unleashed') except less blatantly stylized, as if to say "this is a serious movie." The problem is that, while this gangster mold might be a good way to tell a compelling story about over-the-top characters, it detracts from what's really compelling about this idea of a widespread culture, by reducing it to the individual, personal level. This sort of gang youth subculture isn't really frightening at the individual level, only as a societal phenomenon, and choosing to focus on one racist character, and how after meeting some nice blacks he decides not to be a skinhead anymore completely ignores this.
In fairness, I must admit that good movies about youth gangs and race violence are very difficult to find. A few years ago, we selected this theme for our school's annual Political Science Dept. Film Festival. We considered this movie against all the reasons I mentioned above, but ultimately it was turned down for a much simpler reason; the deciding vote not to show AHX was cast by someone who had just gotten back from several years of post-doctoral research squatting with Flemish skins in Antwerp: he simply found the portrayal of skins (playing b-ball with rival ethnic gangs) too implausible and friendly. We wound up showing Romper Stomper instead. It's not perfect, but I would easilly recomend it instead of AHX. We also showed Alamo Bay and My Son the Fanatic, which are both even better movies, but only tangentially related to the subject of AHX.
Guess this post wound up being kind of insolent anyway. Sorry, didn't want to trash anyone's favorite movie or anything, but this movie is obnoxiously mediocre.
Last edited by linespalsy; 05-16-06 at 11:58 PM.
Reason: making post better and less sarcastic.
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