Global Spin’s guide to five rental movies to bring you up to speed with world events. This week, a riot special. By Tony Karon and Ishaan Tharoor
Rude Boy
The future may be unwritten, but many observers of the past week’s events in London and other British cities sensed that its soundtrack had been laid down in the late ’70s and early ’80s by The Clash. Joe Strummer and his seminal punk band had their politics forged on the streets in the riot-torn London of that era, making common cause with their young black counterparts fighting the police and the racists of the National Front — and with their music, resulting in an enduring fusion of punk and inner-city reggae. That steaming cauldron of despair, violence, solidarity and hope was captured on film in Rude Boy, less a cinematic achievement than a present-at-the-creation chronicle of a scene in the making, fictionalizing the story of a Clash roadie in order to capture the band’s musical and political evolution as a work in progress. Filmed on tour with the band in 1978 and ’79, it captures such key moments as the emergence of Rock Against Racism, the movement that turned the punk scene decisively against the anti-immigrant National Front. For context and greater depth, Rude Boy should be viewed in conjunction with Julian Temple’s deeply insightful and moving Joe Strummer documentary, The Future is Unwritten - T.K.
La Haine
We’re not in Brixton any more. Mathieu Kassovitz won the award for Best Director at Cannes for his 1995 hit La Haine — “Hate.” It takes place in Paris’s ghettoized suburbs, seething after police apparently brutally injure one of the estate’s youths. Three friends with minority backgrounds—North African, West African and Jewish—spend a chaotic and tragic day together, ranging through bloc parties and riot squads. Shot in black and white, the film effectively gets at the frustrations and marginalization of France’s notorious banlieues without being too heavy-handed about it. The antics of the charismatic, roguish trio of friends won the film cult status and temporarily brought the plight of these communities—often the frozen enclaves of those from France’s former colonies—into the national discourse. Yet ten years after it was released, La Haine proved prescient, as weeks of fiery riots hit the country’s poor suburbs. –I.T.
This is England
The news that the racist English Defense League was taking to the streets in some parts of the country this week as a vigilante force against rioters brings to mind This is England, Shane Meadows’ harrowing look at Britain’s skinhead culture, which during the Thatcher years split between the apolitical element who remembered the scene’s roots in black music, and those drawn into the orbit of the anti-immigrant National Front. The film is told through the eyes of an 11-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) who falls under the influence of Combo (a marvelous performance of violent rage by Stephen Graham) and follows him through an odyssey of racist violence before humanity wins out. A searing look at the misdirected rage of the white working class as it finds itself thrown to the dogs by Thatcherist economics. – T.K.
Fish Tank
The mass looting and vandalism on Britain’s streets this week reflected a breakdown in social norms — young people (and some not so young) seeing no reason or need to heed society’s rules because those rules seem stacked against them. Andrea Arnold’s housing-estate coming-of-age movie Fish Tank manages to be both depressing and uplifting as it captures the bleak world in which many of the young people trashing city streets have come of age, forced to fend for themselves, against the odds, and construct their own morality and rules to cope with a society that either exploits and abuses or ignores and neglects them. Katie Jarvis’ character Mia is forced to find her own moral center and the inner resources and courage to escape the grim fates of housing-estate life, but it’s as plain to see that most of her peers will not. – T.K.
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing isn’t that old (it’s from 1989), but it’s a portrait of a New York that is in some ways unrecognizable—or at least has been papered over by years of gentrification and the city’s lucrative embrace of the mandarins of high finance. The much-feted movie zooms in on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesat, and dwells on the city’s many racial fissures. This scene (start at 2:15) is the film’s most famous, an over-the-top series of vulgar, racist tirades brought to an abrupt end by Samuel L. Jackson. –I.T.
