Post by Dracula on May 28, 2016 20:05:16 GMT -5
Green Room(4/30/2016)
I have kind of a funny relationship with punk rock, but then so do a lot of its fans. There is quite a bit of punk rock music I enjoy. In fact The Clash’s “London Calling” may just be my all-time favorite album of all time. However, I have absolutely no use for the basic philosophy and ethos that punk rock is based upon and if I met an actual “punk” in real life I’m almost positive I’d hate them. Anarchy and wild behavior is fun to talk about and fantasize about but there’s really nothing more annoying than someone who indulges every destructive impulse they get. Of course there are a lot of musical genres that people can enjoy without imitating the ethos that surrounds them: you don’t need to be “hood” to enjoy hip-hop, you don’t need to be a heroin addict to enjoy grunge, and you don’t need to be a dancer to enjoy techno… but those genres don’t tend to be watched over by a vanguard of enthusiasts who are dedicated to policing their ranks of “posers.” That always seemed kind of strange to me as someone who tends to view pop culture as a window into the human experience rather than as something that one uses to express one’s own identity. I bring all this up because punk rock is the milieu, though not really the subject, of the new thriller Green Room from Blue Ruin director Jeremy Saulnier.
Green Room follows a modern punk/hardcore band called The Ain't Rights who are touring the country in a van and living off so little money that they siphon gas from other cars in order to make their trips. They’re just about at the end of their rope when they arrive in Oregon to play a gig for a local scenester named Tad (David W. Thompson) only to find out that their show has been cancelled. Feeling guilty, Tad offers to set them up with a quality gig which will get them enough money to return home, the one catch is that the bar they’ll be playing at is mostly patronized by racist skinheads. The band has had a run-in or two with nazi-punks before and feel they can easily enough stomach their company for an afternoon as long as the gig pays and they can avoid talking politics. Once they arrive their set goes pretty well despite a couple of rocky moments, but when they return to the club’s green room they stumble upon the body of a woman that one of the skinheads has murdered. Thus begins a standoff between the band and an older skinhead named Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart) who owns the club and seems to be leading this “movement” of rowdy skinheads with the band forced to lock themselves in the club’s green room until they can find some way to escape with their lives.
Green Room is being marketed as a horror movie, and while some of the more brutal violence in it would be at home in that genre it would probably be better classified as a grisly little thriller along the lines of something like Deliverance or Straw Dogs. The fact that this plotline deals with modern racist skinheads would seem to suggest that it has something to say about the nature of hate or about race relations in America, but I don’t think that’s really the case. There’s a certain genre morality that can be gleaned from the fact that these characters are essentially being punished for momentarily tolerating the company of white supremacists, but for the most part I think the film would be largely unchanged if the bad guys here had been a biker gang or something, the racism mostly just seems to have been added so that the audience will instantly view them has villains and to be on board with the movie once said villain start being brutally killed later in the movie.
To me that feels like a bit of a cheat. In a movie like this we should be rooting for our heroes because they are likable and because you genuinely want to see them make it out of their predicament, not because their tormentors wear Doc Martins and shave their heads. Unfortunately we don’t really get a whole lot of time to get to know these people before they’re tossed in the pressure cooker. The movie starts off well enough in its depiction of this band’s life on the road and the brief glimpses we get of what it’s like to be a dead broke rock band on tour are enticing. I maybe would have liked to see this section play out a bit longer in order to give you a little more time to get to know these bandmates individually. Hell, I maybe would have rather seen an entire movie about their rock tour sans the genre twist. Alternately I might have found some interest in a more sober and straightforward examination of the world of this white supremacist punk bar. In some ways the movie reminds me a bit of The Purge in that it’s a film that finds a potentially interesting setting and concept and then simply devolves into a run of the mill siege movie.
As it stands, the movie is largely dependent on its execution as a pure genre piece which to me was certainly strong but not strong enough to make up for its general hollowness. The film’s cinematography is good, although I must say it was slightly compromised for me by the fact that the theater I watched it in wasn’t dark enough to really give the right atmosphere, not that that’s the movie’s fault. Saulnier also does give certain scenes a reasonable amount of tension but not to any earth shattering degree and I was oddly unmoved and unshocked whenever one of the film’s protagonists was felled. Overall it just seemed well made but forgettable, which in retrospect is pretty much what I thought of Blue Ruin. I do think Jeremy Saulnier has talent and I do look forward to what he does next, but next time he picks a color and a word that begins with “R” I hope he can produce something a bit more meaningful to do it with.
** out of Five
I have kind of a funny relationship with punk rock, but then so do a lot of its fans. There is quite a bit of punk rock music I enjoy. In fact The Clash’s “London Calling” may just be my all-time favorite album of all time. However, I have absolutely no use for the basic philosophy and ethos that punk rock is based upon and if I met an actual “punk” in real life I’m almost positive I’d hate them. Anarchy and wild behavior is fun to talk about and fantasize about but there’s really nothing more annoying than someone who indulges every destructive impulse they get. Of course there are a lot of musical genres that people can enjoy without imitating the ethos that surrounds them: you don’t need to be “hood” to enjoy hip-hop, you don’t need to be a heroin addict to enjoy grunge, and you don’t need to be a dancer to enjoy techno… but those genres don’t tend to be watched over by a vanguard of enthusiasts who are dedicated to policing their ranks of “posers.” That always seemed kind of strange to me as someone who tends to view pop culture as a window into the human experience rather than as something that one uses to express one’s own identity. I bring all this up because punk rock is the milieu, though not really the subject, of the new thriller Green Room from Blue Ruin director Jeremy Saulnier.
Green Room follows a modern punk/hardcore band called The Ain't Rights who are touring the country in a van and living off so little money that they siphon gas from other cars in order to make their trips. They’re just about at the end of their rope when they arrive in Oregon to play a gig for a local scenester named Tad (David W. Thompson) only to find out that their show has been cancelled. Feeling guilty, Tad offers to set them up with a quality gig which will get them enough money to return home, the one catch is that the bar they’ll be playing at is mostly patronized by racist skinheads. The band has had a run-in or two with nazi-punks before and feel they can easily enough stomach their company for an afternoon as long as the gig pays and they can avoid talking politics. Once they arrive their set goes pretty well despite a couple of rocky moments, but when they return to the club’s green room they stumble upon the body of a woman that one of the skinheads has murdered. Thus begins a standoff between the band and an older skinhead named Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart) who owns the club and seems to be leading this “movement” of rowdy skinheads with the band forced to lock themselves in the club’s green room until they can find some way to escape with their lives.
Green Room is being marketed as a horror movie, and while some of the more brutal violence in it would be at home in that genre it would probably be better classified as a grisly little thriller along the lines of something like Deliverance or Straw Dogs. The fact that this plotline deals with modern racist skinheads would seem to suggest that it has something to say about the nature of hate or about race relations in America, but I don’t think that’s really the case. There’s a certain genre morality that can be gleaned from the fact that these characters are essentially being punished for momentarily tolerating the company of white supremacists, but for the most part I think the film would be largely unchanged if the bad guys here had been a biker gang or something, the racism mostly just seems to have been added so that the audience will instantly view them has villains and to be on board with the movie once said villain start being brutally killed later in the movie.
To me that feels like a bit of a cheat. In a movie like this we should be rooting for our heroes because they are likable and because you genuinely want to see them make it out of their predicament, not because their tormentors wear Doc Martins and shave their heads. Unfortunately we don’t really get a whole lot of time to get to know these people before they’re tossed in the pressure cooker. The movie starts off well enough in its depiction of this band’s life on the road and the brief glimpses we get of what it’s like to be a dead broke rock band on tour are enticing. I maybe would have liked to see this section play out a bit longer in order to give you a little more time to get to know these bandmates individually. Hell, I maybe would have rather seen an entire movie about their rock tour sans the genre twist. Alternately I might have found some interest in a more sober and straightforward examination of the world of this white supremacist punk bar. In some ways the movie reminds me a bit of The Purge in that it’s a film that finds a potentially interesting setting and concept and then simply devolves into a run of the mill siege movie.
As it stands, the movie is largely dependent on its execution as a pure genre piece which to me was certainly strong but not strong enough to make up for its general hollowness. The film’s cinematography is good, although I must say it was slightly compromised for me by the fact that the theater I watched it in wasn’t dark enough to really give the right atmosphere, not that that’s the movie’s fault. Saulnier also does give certain scenes a reasonable amount of tension but not to any earth shattering degree and I was oddly unmoved and unshocked whenever one of the film’s protagonists was felled. Overall it just seemed well made but forgettable, which in retrospect is pretty much what I thought of Blue Ruin. I do think Jeremy Saulnier has talent and I do look forward to what he does next, but next time he picks a color and a word that begins with “R” I hope he can produce something a bit more meaningful to do it with.
** out of Five
