But Battle Royale is also a film about watching extraordinary and violent images and going, ‘OOOooo!!!’ Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama) chasing a terrified potential teen rapist and then stabbing him repeatedly in the crotch. A severed head with a live grenade in its mouth. The computer geek revolutionary, using tactics taken from his ’60s activist uncle, hatching a plot that evokes everything from WarGames (see here) to suicide bombers. A girl telling her father that ‘your bad breath even stinks over the phone’. The scene where a happy camp of girls cooking dinner and planning mutual survival switches, by way of the arrival of a boy and an ill-advised poisoning, into thrilling shoot-out mayhem involving all-time great images of cute young schoolgirls wielding big fucking guns.
And five main teen characters that stand for beauty among the chaos, whether they are our three aforementioned noble heroes, or two excellent bad guys in psycho Mean Girl Mitsuko (Shibasaki) and Ando’s hot teen version of the existentialist hit man in a black suit, Kiriyama.
But Kitano can’t help stealing the show. A face so full of the stoical acceptance of utter despair, and, in this movie, the beneficiary of what is, surely, the funniest, weirdest death in movie history. Because the film’s final revelation is disturbing: a man’s obsession with a girl that could be about nothing more than wanting an ideal daughter . . . but feels like something much sicker. Takeshi Kitano’s power as an actor stems from his refusal to give us an easy look at his motivations, and the pleasure he takes in his own mystery. Battle Royale would still have been a fine movie without him. But not such a sad, disturbing or meaningful one. Because his disillusioned teacher feels like nihilism in solid form, and reminds us that, when we lose all faith in our young, it’s we who become feral.
BRING IT ON
2000
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union
Dir.: Peyton Reed
Plot: Replace NATO with cheerleaders and we can find a solution to the Middle East. Yes we can!
Key line: ‘Courtney . . . it’s not a democracy. It’s a cheerocracy.’
I may be completely wrong. But I harbour a strong suspicion that, when readers decide to take issue with me over the movies chosen for Stranded, the film I’m going to get the hardest time about is this one.
Of course, any mainstream Hollywood hit feel-good movie made for and about young girls where no one dies, joins a gang, gets tortured by a corrupt policeman, has sex with a parent or spends valuable screen-time staring soulfully out to sea, and then compounds the felony by having a happy ending, is ripe for a good, hard kicking. But Dirty Dancing (see here) and Footloose (here) are old enough to get both nostalgia and kitsch let-off points whereas Bring It On is spankingly recent and quite patently the film that invented Glee’s perpetually sunny high school world where teens of all colours, sexualities and disabilities are part of its Rainbow Coalition liberal utopia, and teen angst is largely confined to worries about whether we really can put the show on right here in the barn. So it’s understandable that Coen Brothers fans aren’t bright enough to get it.
Many critics reckoned that Bring It On’s story was too formulaic and that it wasn’t critical enough of that peculiarly despised American minority, cheerleaders. You’ve got to worry about someone who watches a movie where the heroine makes impassioned rebellious speeches to her mother about her right to pursue a future of twirling batons rather than studying, and then points at a boy’s Clash t-shirt and asks, ‘Is that your band?’, and, because there isn’t a laugh-track and the girl isn’t humiliated by the boy in question, doesn’t pick up that this is a piss-take of the air-headed world of middle-class girls who see cheerleading as both status symbol and route to minor celebrity. The satire is gentle and affectionate, sure, but smart people – girls, teens, me – got it, so accept that those dire Michael Haneke movies are deskilling you and pay attention.
Bring It On is a perky, peppy comedy about the arcane world that is competitive cheerleading. It stars Kirsten Dunst as our adorable but somewhat shallow cheerleading captain Torrance, who is going to learn valuable lessons about race, class and the win-at-all-costs mentality. This all happens when she finds out that the routines that her school have constantly been winning the State Championship with have been stolen from a black cheerleading team from East Compton by departing captain Big Red (Lindsay Sloane), who got away with it because the East Compton school is too poor to afford the Championship’s entry fee.
After various attempts to right this wrong, while still encouraging her team to be the best they can be, it all ends cheerily when her Toros come second to the East Compton Clovers in the genuinely spectacular orgy of cheerleading that is the State final. She and Clovers leader Isis (Union) bond, the various girls get the various boys of their choice, and everybody dances for joy. It’s lovely, suggesting we could make poverty history and bring about World Peace if we all just balanced on each other’s shoulders a lot and learned the words of ‘Mickey’ by Toni Basil.
On the way, we get whip-smart dialogue spat out at The Social Network tempo, a subplot about male cheerleaders and homophobia, Torrance’s most amusing smartarse little brother Justin (Cody McMains) and top sight gags like the cheerleader auditions where various wannabes bring their personal angst with them or insist on trying out in the style of gangsta rapper, Broadway hoofer, stripper and ’80s robot dancer.
And then – Buffy, Tru Calling and Dollhouse fans still your beating hearts – there is the one and only Eliza Dushku. Obviously, political correctness prevents me from stating my true feelings about Ms Dushku in an entry concerning a movie about high school cheerleaders, even though she was actually 19 by the time she played punk rock gymnast Missy Pantone here. She’s the kind of woman who can make creepy older men even creepier, as she revealed in a 2003 interview when she was best known as dark slayer Faith in Buffy and its spin-off, Angel. It turns out that Buffy was a big hit in prisons, and Ms Dushku was getting disturbing fanmail including . . . ‘disgusting things you don’t wanna know about. . . . Way more creepy than Buffy.’
So you can see why I don’t want to add to her personal nightmares about the fantasies of old geezers ‘with a bottle of beer and a moustache and a big gut’ (I don’t have a moustache). Let’s just say I empathise with my homies on lockdown and leave it at that.
What I can tell you is that Ms Dushku is Albanian on her father’s side and was recently made an honorary Albanian ambassador by the Mayor of Tirana. Which is nice. And those who believe that her Bring It On flips and somersaults are the work of a stunt double are sadly mistaken. Eliza – I feel I know her well enough now to call her Eliza – spent a year as part of the Romanian Olympic gymnastics team in preparation for the part. And I hear she plays the bassoon to concert standard and is an accomplished tree surgeon.
Back to Bring It On – pausing only to mention that Clare Kramer, who plays Hell-God Glory in Buffy, is also on board as well as Buffy’s composer Christophe Beck on soundtrack duties – and its wildly optimistic but benign worldview. It’s subversive in a way that only cuddly pop movies can pull off. Not only does it go out of its way to deny every teen movie stereotype it can – the tattooed tough girl who likes cheerleading, the male cheerleader who isn’t gay or a joke, the poor black teen who isn’t a thug or a victim, the male love object (Bradford as Missy’s brother Cliff) who isn’t a total knob – it ends with a line that amounts to a complete rejection of American values.
After the competition is over, Cliff asks Torrance: ‘So . . . second place. How does it feel?’ Ms Dunst smiles an adorable smile and answers, ‘It feels like first.’ In the context of a film that you know has been watched by a generation of American children, that line feels as useful and rebellious a sentiment as any in this book. And that, in the end, is why I love this movie.
GINGER SNAPS
2000
Starring: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers
Dir.: John Fawcett
Plot: The period dr
ama that Merchant–Ivory will never make. Key line: ‘A bear will come after a girl on the rag. ’Cos of the smell.’
Ginger Snaps is not a movie whose motives are open to interpretation. John Fawcett and his co-screenwriter Karen Walton set out to make a feminist teen horror picture that used ‘the curse’ of being bitten by a werewolf as a metaphor for ‘the curse’ of menstruation. Mindful of male repulsion about periods, teen horror starlets who were routinely punished for having sex, and the bloody legacy of Carrie (see here), the pair fashioned something satirical, subversive, viscerally gore-splattered and perfectly in sync with the post-Buffy teen fantasy landscape. The result was a film that became a cult popular enough on DVD to spawn two (sadly inferior) sequels, and introduce us to a young actress who provides one of the finest performances in screen teen history.
Emily Perkins, who plays goth sibling Brigitte Fitzgerald, takes the threatening androgyny of Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures (see here) and Kristy McNichol in Little Darlings to an extreme. Draped in shapeless hoodies, t-shirts and cardigans, her very French-looking face a gaunt, sallow mask shrouded by long, lifeless, shaggy brown hair, she is an asexual creature of the night who portends dread and horror long before the action truly gets under way. She is the heroic polar opposite to every female teen character who has ever craved popularity, prettiness, fashion status symbols and male attention. Katherine Isabelle is very, very good as Brigitte’s sexy sister Ginger, who, you know, snaps, in both a mental breakdown way and a slavering jaws way. But it’s Perkins who rivets you to the screen, her hunched and ghostly sadness a visual message that, when things hit bottom, the only way to go is down. It’s a performance so powerful yet layered that it ensures that Ginger Snaps, despite its verbal and visual humour, remains palpably frightening.
Set in a Canadian suburb, Ginger Snaps concerns two goth-metal sisters who have had a mutual death pact since they were 8 years old. This makes them even keener fakers of their own glorious destructions than Harold Chasen from Harold And Maude (see here). The montage of theatrically fraudulent fatalities, made by the girls for a school project and back-dropping the opening credits, makes Ginger and Brigitte the innovative directors and stars of their own horror movie-within-a-horror-movie.
But, while Ginger is still dedicated to dying young and leaving that good-looking corpse, Brigitte is beginning to consider life as a career option. By way of contrast, their parallel pact that boys is rubbish and sex unthinkable is adhered rigidly to by plain Brigitte . . . but gorgeous Ginger is beginning to visibly waver. Their mother, played by the excellent Mimi Rogers, is curious to know why her girls of 16 and 15 haven’t had their periods. But it’s almost like an act of will on the part of the Fitzgerald sisters, who see menstruation as the death of childhood and the inevitable harbinger of tedious adult preoccupations like bumping uglies. Sadly, nature wins every time. Ginger’s backache is a portent of menstrual mayhem.
Meanwhile, as we’ve already seen pre-credits, something called The Beast Of Bailey Downs is turning the neighbourhood dogs into mutilated piles of squelchy entrails. Brigitte finds herself getting more intimate with one than she would care to when school Mean Girl Trina pushes her into doggy remains on the school playing field during a game of hockey, in revenge for Brigitte having called her ‘Standard cumbucket-ty date-bait’. I should mention, at this point, that Ginger Snaps has enough bad (meaning good) language to make a cinema full of Scorsese gangsters blush and write a stiff letter to their local MP bemoaning falling standards among young people today.
The Ginger’s-attack-by-werewolf scene is a mini-masterpiece. The sisters go to a children’s playground at night, hoping to find a dead dog in order to exact darkly prankish revenge on Trina. As they attempt to move the mutilated pooch, Brigitte thinks Ginger has splashed herself with canine blood. No such luck: the blood running down her thigh is ‘the curse’. A child’s sprung horse begins to rock, and, before the two can process the spooky atmosphere and scarper, an unseen monster attacks with an animal roar. Brigitte is thrown to the floor. Ginger is gone. Brigitte hears her scream from the woods and runs towards her. And the pair have to battle a huge, flesh-ripping man-beast-thing with nothing but fists and a stick.
The whole memorable scene is a deft blend of whiplash camera movement and low-angle composition, Steadicam shakiness, precise sound design and bravura editing, lent real menace by Perkins’s wild, terrified eyes and panicked breathing. Fawcett cheats a little monster-wise, whirling the camera around and cutting so quickly that you only occasionally fix on teeth, snout, muscular hairy body. But it does make you feel the fear and chaos, and it’s a helluva lot better than the vapid animations of standard CGI, which Fawcett rejected in favour of prosthetics and real fake blood.
From there on in, it’s all about being the wittiest female-coming-of-age-werewolf movie it can be. The blackly comic view of periods gives us a scene in a supermarket where Brigitte is helping Ginger buy sanitary towels. Brigitte looks up at the huge shelves piled with boxes of many colours, dwarfed by the reality of imminent womanhood. She chooses one. ‘This one has a free calendar,’ she suggests, weakly, as Ginger, in the early stages of her transition into werewolf, grips her gut and bends double in agony. The film also mercilessly rips the piss out of the self-obsessed angst of teen goths while simultaneously playing tribute by making Ginger and Brigitte so much better company than their peers.
While Brigitte begins to understand the fate that lies in store for Sis, Sis is shagging the school’s cute but sexist dickhead Jason and becoming a predatory dominatrix. Brigitte turns to gorgeous hunk Sam (the Christian Slater-esque Lemche) for help: Sam is that rare cinematic treat, the really nice drug-dealer. The possibility that Brigitte and Sam will find a cure for Ginger and ensure a happy ending disappears permanently when Ginger accidentally kills Trina in a fight and the sisters hide her in the family freezer.
Drug expert Sam does discover a cure, though: a herb called Monkshood. It stops Jason – who has been infected by having unsafe sex with Ginger, therefore introducing a handy AIDS metaphor – in his tracks when he attacks Brigitte. It’s all a bit late for Ginger, though. She’s killed the school’s guidance counsellor and janitor . . . plus she has a tail.
By the time Ginger transforms completely, the film has gradually and completely abandoned black comedy for claustrophobic, gross-out horror, and an inevitable denouement where only the brave and brilliant Brigitte can save the world from the rampant Ginger-Wolf.
Despite the movie’s success, Ginger Snaps is currently unavailable on DVD in the UK and has remained relatively obscure to all except horror devotees. One reason perhaps lies in the initial controversy surrounding its production. The April 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado that inspired Gus Van Sant’s extraordinary Elephant (see here) were followed immediately by similar events at the W.R. Myers High School in Alberta, Canada. And no one would have noticed or cared that this little horror movie was just being cast and prepared for initial shooting at exactly the same time as Canada was freaking out about teenage violence and its causes, except that Ginger Snaps was being financed by Telefilm, the Canadian government’s own movie-funding organisation. Tragedies surrounding children have a way of blotting out aesthetic arguments about satirical intent, so you’ve got to admire Telefilm for standing their ground and allowing this gem to get made at all.
By combining the kind of comically repulsive body horror favoured by David Cronenberg with a twisted take on typical high school movie conventions, Fawcett and Dalton have given us one of the best secret masterpieces of the teen genre. But it’s the performance of Emily Perkins that lingers; a truly modern heroine for troubled and turbulent teenage times.
GHOST WORLD
2001
Starring: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Brad Renfro, Ileana Douglas, Bob Balaban
Dir.: Terry Zwigoff
Plot: Growing up, and why it sucks.
Key line: ‘I don’t want to meet someone who s
hares my interests. I hate my interests.’
Ghost World is a movie designed to be a cult. It is packed with exciting counter-culture nerd ephemera, from gorgeous vintage clothing to obscure pre-war jazz and blues, from retro Bollywood to jokes about Fellini’s 8½, from Robert Crumb cartoons to a hatred of everything associated with contemporary globalisation. When Steve Buscemi’s Seymour says, after a depressing night at a blues theme pub, ‘It’s simple for everybody else. You give ’em a Big Mac and a pair of Nikes and they’re happy. I can’t relate to 99 per cent of humanity,’ you will either nod in resigned agreement or wonder why anyone would complain, and that reaction will determine whether Ghost World is for you. Needless to say, as a confirmed teenage snob who never grew out of it, it is so for me that I clasp it to my bosom like a bitchy best friend in hairgrips and Doc Martens.
Based on a funny and haunting graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, adapted for the screen by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World introduces us to two Heavenly Creatures called Enid (Birch) and Rebecca (Johansson) who live in an unnamed alternative wonderland which they sneer at like Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf in day-glo pop socks. They have just graduated from high school, and Ghost World’s difference from other teen movies is immediately established by the fact that their graduation party is a pathetic, quickly dismissed affair where neither finds true love nor destroys the student body with telekinesis. There is a lovely, funny shot of the two girls, shot from the back, straight armed and straight-backed, swaying gently in tandem to the terrible cabaret band.
The pair live for things that are rubbish, like ’50s themed diners with little jukeboxes that play hip hop, and to torment an outside world they treat with immaculate contempt. Their riot grrrl/twee-indie style is vital. The thrift-shop clothes and retro hairstyles establish the importance of never looking modern; to rebel naturally, one must dress like a toddler or a senior citizen, and preferably one from somewhere between the Second World War and 1964.
Stranded at the Drive-In Page 47