Some old Boll shit
"Bad" is a pretty vague designation for movies. It can be objective, signaling some sort of technical incompetence: unconvincing actors, amateur special effects, a sloppy pace, an unintelligible sound mix. It might point to spectacular miscasting, unfathomable plot points or an archaic, contradictory or otherwise misguided message. It could simply mean that a movie is so aggressively bland and conventional that it fails to distinguish itself among similar titles. Really, it usually comes down to personal taste, where you consider something bad because it holds no personal interest or even somehow offends you.
It is even flagrantly misused, frequently in reference to my favorite genre. You've undoubtedly heard someone remark about being in a deserted rural location, "Ooh, this is like a bad horror movie!" Whenever you hear this cliché, remember that the uncreative joker is essentially claiming that there are no good horror movies featuring characters in deserted rural locations, which is ignorant at best.
There have been countless attempts to determine the "worst" movie ever made. This is a vain, fruitless task, as something so subjective can never provide a definitive answer. Some will single out mainstream flops like "Gigli," "Waterworld" or "Ishtar" due to their high-profile waste of money and time. Other popular targets are low-budget clunkers both old ("Plan 9 from Outer Space," "Manos: The Hands of Fate," "The Beast of Yucca Flats") and new ("Birdemic: Shock and Terror," "The Room," any given week's made-for-SyFy Asylum title). These are all valid choices, as long as you perpetually admit that there might be something even worse out there.
Longtime readers know that I like to celebrate my dislike of summer by sitting down with a "bad" movie and detailing its problems. The point is explicitly not to consider potential "so bad it's good" titles, instead focusing on movies I predict not enjoying in any way. I finally broke the tradition of lousy family/animal movies last summer, when I was introduced (with the IMDb's Bottom 100 as my guide) to Ulli Lommel's miserable milieu of modern trash via "Zombie Nation." Today, no Lommel titles are in the Bottom 10, which otherwise looks pretty similar to a year ago, complete with the continued preponderance of Paris Hilton vehicles.
Curiously, you have to go down to the 30s before you hit something helmed by Uwe Boll. I had thought Boll was even more loathed than Lommel among maddeningly productive German hacks. My minimal research points to a sea change a few years ago, wherein people started to begrudgingly accept his output as plain old crap rather than a virulent infection of cinema's soul. Maybe his newer movies are not as irritating to nerds since they're not all based on video games, or maybe he's actually gotten better.
All I do know is that I'd never seen one of his movies until now because they looked stupid and he seemed like a fucking jerk. I would only watch an Uwe Boll joint to form a more educated opinion about all the fuss. I've never pulled the trigger because I never wanted to give him the satisfaction, despite having stashed "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" in my Netflix queue years ago. At least casting Ray Liotta as an evil wizard and Burt Reynolds as a wise old warrior king sounds hilarious, and it has a passable metal soundtrack that's basically a Nuclear Blast Records sampler with things like Pantera, Mastodon and Dream Theater thrown in. However, since the goal is to watch something terrible that I don't really want to see, it was finally time to cross the Boll threshold with something that didn't sound sorta fun.
I didn't want to do "Postal" or "Rampage" as they look semi-interesting and some people think they're actually good. Likewise for "House of the Dead," "Bloodrayne" and his other game movies, since those are often deemed unintentionally hilarious. "Blubberella" is tempting, but also obviously calculated to irritate and antagonize, so there's no point in that. Dare I be timely and check out his new "Assault on Wall Street"? Looks fascinatingly dumb, but I can't abide fascinating here.
Well, while combing through Uwe Boll's filmography, I noticed he also has a slew of less-discussed, socially conscious dramas which I assume to be atrocious. A shitty drama, just what I don't feel like watching! Since I am not a chump and still use physical media, I got Netflix to mail me the perfect candidate, an obscure old DVD which met my criteria even better than I anticipated.
"Heart of America"
(2002)
I must start by acknowledging that I have never been personally impacted by the school shooting trend that started in the late ‘90s. I graduated high school in 1993. The kids my age were more likely to pull a "Jeremy" than a Columbine. In fact, on the day of the Columbine incident, I was already a working adult, assigned to cover a Marilyn Manson concert at the local arena. (I was additionally tasked with getting reaction quotes from kids at the show that evening, most of whom had yet to hear about the massacre or Manson's alleged connection to it. My review wasn't published until I gave it to a local zine, as my employer deemed the subject too touchy. Plus, I don't think the conservative brass liked my pinko stance that you can't blame a mainstream musician for his stupidest fans' actions.) I also don't and won't have children, so I will thankfully never deal with my offspring being caught up in such a nightmare.
Most of America, however, was understandably devastated when this awful fad started, and to this day, no number of subsequent copycat incidents has diluted that. Of course it's impossible to not care, but honestly, doesn't everyone consistently freaking out about school shootings only increase their allure to fucked-up kids when they feel marginalized into hurting whoever they can? Yet, whenever it happens, the news channels are clogged with experts pontificating on what they perceive as the causes (all of them peddling books which ostensibly outline the solution). Filmmakers in turn have tried to tackle the subject here and there, most notably Gus Van Sant with his experimental "Elephant." But he's also the guy who decided it was a good idea to remake "Psycho" and gave us "you're the man now, dog," so surely someone else could take a more incisive look into this tragic modern American phenomenon. Who better to get to the "Heart of America" than a prickly German huckster who famously spliced actual video game footage into his feature-length adaptation of a first-person shooter?
Yes, Uwe Boll made a school shooting drama, a complete waste of space that's a lot harder to talk about than things like "K-9: P.I." or "Zeus and Roxanne" were. I can't just describe the proceedings to you in order to underline the inanity. For one thing, although it's obviously a low-budget endeavor, it's quite competent when it comes to the technical aspects, slightly exceeding that Lifetime movie ideal of professional yet empty button-pushing craft. There are actually a handful of interesting shots in here. For another thing, the film is nearly plotless when you step back from the minutiae that consumes much of its running time. If I were to waste a bunch of time telling you about the ten thousand characters stuffed into "Heart of America," only to end with, "Whelp, he/she either died or nothing happened to him/her," I would be committing the same offense as the movie itself does.
So, the story is that people are getting ready for the last day of school, during which shootings occur. That's the entirety of it. Plot description out of the way, let's meet this menagerie of creeps, harpies and cyphers!
First we have Daniel, aka Shooter #1. With his greasy dark hair, insistence on smoking in his house and D-grade mallcore theme music, it's a pretty accurate picture of a school shooter. His dad, played by the great Clint Howard, apparently exists to sit in the kitchen and belittle the kid, calling him "Danielle" and trying to railroad him into a job "hauling bags of concrete." Getting picked on is Daniel's only defining character trait, since we also see flashbacks where the mean jocks at school spray pop on him or shove him away from a bathroom sink. There's also a long sequence showing when he and his friend Barry got beat up for walking through the cruel jocks' "sacred" athletic field, during which one of the baddies burns Daniel's face with a cigarette. Daniel's big moment comes in a grandstanding "let's get 'em" speech to Barry, which would surely have been sampled by the kinds of Ozzfest second-stagers he listens to, if only the dialog wasn't smeared over so thickly with cheesy synthesized strings.
Here's Barry, a blank-faced dweeb who conversely has a good relationship with his single parent. In fact, as his frazzled mom points out during the first of the movie's too-self-aware conversations, it's like he's the parent and she's the kid! We see no evidence of his camaraderie with Daniel, only that they hang out and Daniel essentially bullies Barry into doing things he doesn't want to do. For instance, during one of the black-and-white flashbacks to their confrontation by the jocks, Barry wants to go around the field to avoid a whuppin', but Daniel stupidly insists otherwise. When the beatdowns begin, Barry can only groan to his pal, "You knew they were here, didn't you?" and struggle weakly while the meatheads shove his face in some dog shit that is conveniently festering in the middle of the school athletic field. So, for some reason, Barry's mom decides that the last day of her son's senior year is a good time to go confront the principal about him being bullied. Knowing that Daniel is hellbent on blasting up the school, he talks her out of it. Spoiler alert: this is pretty much the only thing Barry does in the entire movie.
The evil jocks' ringleader, Ricky, actually gets more of a character arc than any of the lead "victim" kids. He and his interchangeable Asics-clad brahs are introduced smoking cigs, listening to crap nü-metal that's only slightly wussier than Daniel's, and nearly T-boning the school principal, who is blithely backing out of his driveway fast without looking at the road. These guys apparently need to get to school early so they can hang out at the athletic field. Today, they find Ricky's 23 year-old brother, Frankie just sitting there in the bleachers at 7 whatever in the morning. The younger cretins totally look up to Frankie, who kinda looks like Jason Stackhouse with Milwaukee eye, and he shares both his weed and his exploits in high school bullying. He's most proud of the time he and his braheims ran a rape train on a girl who was "kinda slow in the head," although he doesn't think she was "retarded, technically, or nothing like that." (If you imagine that Boll depicts the accompanying flashback tastefully and without lingering, guess again.) Upon hearing this tale, Ricky gets all sullen and says, "I heard about that. I heard that a stickball bat got involved." Frankie laughs it off as a rumor, then says their dad heard the story years ago and totally approved. As his closest brosephs celebrate sexual humiliation, Ricky flashes back to that famous time they beat up Daniel and Barry, perhaps now regretting that they depantsed the boys, mocked their genital size and demanded that they achieve erections. (But, y'know, no gay stuff.)
When the kids part to go to school, Frankie leaves the now-ambivalent Ricky with this last-day-of-school advice: "Tomorrow, these little fucks are gonna be the people you wish you were. You make 'em pay for that today." What kind of lunkhead bully is so introspective as to not only recognize the root of their aggressive behavior, but to cogently spell it out in the form of advice to others? Going by what we've seen of him, Frankie is the most calculatingly evil sociopath in town. Naturally, Frankie disappears from the movie at this point and receives no comeuppance for his transgressions.
Oh, yeah, there is a girl named Dara who lives in a nice house and gets a steady stream of spending money from her absentee mom, so of course she dresses all goth and does meth. I'm talking black trenchcoat, combat boots, off-brand "bad girl" t-shirts, meds she won't take, the works. I'm not sure what's going on with her hair, though, with some but not all of the strands lazily but methodically twisted together. It that a meth thing they didn't teach me about on "Breaking Bad"? Maybe she's trying to start white girl dreads or something? Well, fortunately for her, she has a good enough relationship with her dealer that she can call and literally say over the phone, "I need some meth." Dara smokes up before school and has a cut-rate trip sequence complete with spinning camera, flashing lights and cheap techno music. She eventually makes her way to the school roof where she stands... ON THE EDGE! While you revel in this incredible symbolism, Dara has flashbacks to when everybody laughed at her as she read aloud in creative writing class. The dastardly teacher leads the attack: "Are those really your feelings that you put down on paper? That is SO silly!" This teacher actually gets his own sub-subplot. More on that in a bit.
Now we check in with the principal's daughter, a prissy blonde named Karyn, who has a shrill, high-pitched voice reminiscent of those pop-up ads that yell, "Congratulations! You have been selected..." Her boyfriend is a beefy penis with ears named Tommy, whose entire character is built around how he wants to fuck. Karyn confirms that she's not ready to go to the bone zone, but reminds him, "It's not like we don't do other things." This leads him to dump her, apparently because he doesn't like handjobs or blowjobs or pegging or watersports or whatever those "other things" are. She then learns that Tommy has not remained a virgin like she has, and in fact nailed her best friend along with at least 8 other girls, including Dara. (A flashback to when he picked Dara up outside a convenience store and they fucked in the truck explains an earlier scene where Dara calls Tommy and hangs up, about which you will have surely forgotten at this point). Karyn leaves in a huff, while Tommy strolls into school and instantly makes a date with Karyn's roundheels bestie. Hooray for Tommy!
Hey, another couple is also on edge about couple stuff! Robin's voice is equally irritating to Karyn's, and the less remembered about some of the weird faces she makes, the better. The weenie boyfriend here, Kevin, is the kind of high schooler who had Proclaimers record flats hanging in his bedroom in 2002. Their problem is that Robin's knocked up and doesn't want a baby to ruin her college plans. She's also concerned about what it will do to her body, so much so that she lights up a cigarette. She is obviously conflicted, though, since she discloses wanting to name the baby Jack or Melissa. This is perhaps the most unrealistic part of the film, since everyone knows white teenagers only name their kids things like Swift or Kayrden. Kevin offers her abortion money, at which her icy behavior starts to melt. Oh, OK, so the drama was that they hadn't talked about it before, and now they are? Kevin goes on to say he would marry her and have the baby, or would really just go along with what she wants. Conflict resolved! They embrace and it's sunshine and rainbows for all. Heh, heh, heh...
Would you believe there are even more pairs of characters embroiled in conversation this morning? There's drug dealer Wex Presley (now there's a white teen mom name!), easily the oldest-looking "teenager" here. After hooking Dara up, he's collared by guidance counselor Vanessa Jones and subjected to a concerned interrogation. Vanessa, whose name seems curiously Anglo considering her heavy accent, is played by everyone's favorite '80s Latina, María Conchita Alonso. Vanessa's befuddled questions include why he sells drugs even though he scored a 1400 on the SAT, to which he replies that he is expanding minds, just like she is. These two great communicators find resolution when she says she "could call the cops" about the drugs and money she found on him, but wonders, "What is that really going to accomplish?" So, with that logic, she just lets him go. Vanessa disappears from the movie at this point and receives no comeuppance for her questionable decision.
Finally, of even smaller significance, is Dara's meanie creative writing teacher, Will. As played by erstwhile "Streets of Fire" hero and Boll stock player Michael Paré, he's pulled into the principal's office and taken to task for obviously giving unfair grades to his students, being a prick due to frustration from writer's block. The previously mentioned principal and dad of goody two-shoes Karyn, Harold Lewis, is played by top-billed German cinema legend Jürgen Prochnow. I don't know, maybe this is a Teutonic thing, to want your obviously foreign actors to play American characters with Joe Sixpack names? In Lommel's "Zombie Nation," the conspicuously German killer cop was named Joe Singer, and just look at any given Schwarzenegger character. Anyway, the acclaimed star of "Das Boot" is here reduced to telling another adult not to pick on teenagers. Confronted with the evidence, Will is all like, "Hmm, yeah, guess you're right, Harold. Sorry, man. I'll regrade these papers." So, easy as that, the problem's solved! Will goes to his class and apologizes for being a childish dick. Too bad Dara isn't there to hear it, because... for everyone who didn't see the DVD cover when they rented it...
SURPRISE! Dara's the second gun(wo)man! Refuting the film's unattributed opening school shooting statistic that "96 percent of the offenders were male," and apparently not spinning or hearing a Eurodance megamix anymore, it is she and not Barry who meets Daniel in the school's boiler room, where he's stashed the guns. In quick succession, Daniel blasts the dumbest-looking jock bully in the bathroom, then takes out Ricky and another of his lackeys. To think, remorseful Ricky had just decided not to mess with Daniel when the goons saw him coming down the hall. Such unfortunate timing! And even more unfortunate is Kevin, who just gets done hugging preggers Robin when Daniel plugs him, apropos of nothing. Damn! What about the baby? How will Robin ever fulfill her dream of becoming a waitress now?
For her part, Dara strolls into Will's class and gives him two in the chest. Then, after reminiscing about screwing Tommy in his fucktruck and being jealous of Karyn, she tells Tommy that she loves him and shoots the very surprised Karyn. The remaining evil jock guy from Ricky's crew tackles Dara, putting an end to her rampage, and a news report later shows him becoming a media hero. Hey, good for that brave sadistic tormentor and genital mocker. Harold manages to show up in the classroom immediately, only to learn that his daughter is dead. Meanwhile, Daniel shoots himself offscreen, and we see Barry flinch at the gunshot as he loafs about outside the school. True to character, he did absolutely nothing, which, despite not warning the school officials, makes him perhaps the most sympathetic character here. (You gotta feel for Harold, though, despite his shitty driving habits.)
Let's see, who's left? That Wex, he sure looks a little sheepish after Dara walks by in the hall and tells him, "Thanks, I couldn't have done this without you," right before shooting up her classroom. At what cost, Wex? If you only sold weed, maybe she would have just sat in her car listening to Mushroomhead and eating Cheetos instead of getting all violent. Then there's Tommy, who, despite having one regular fuck buddy now headed to the slammer, still has that date with his dead ex's DTF friend, so I guess that worked out for him. And then there's crusty old Clint Howard, who ends the film in his favorite kitchen, sporting his favorite underwear, next to his favorite empty liquor bottle, staring in disbelief at the TV news report as his phone rings into oblivion.
I understand that the point of "Heart of America" was not to have an intricate plot. We're supposed to take all of this as just another day in the lives of all of these people, and how people's poor actions can cause worse reactions that can escalate into calamity. The film's problem is not just that this is a trite message which should be obvious to anyone over the age of 10. More damningly, Boll tries to make a definitive statement about school shootings out of all of this chaff and clutter, totally confounding himself in the process.
From personal experience, I'll say the peer bullying stuff seems fairly accurate and effective, as are the disparate reactions of the picked-on kids. However, all the side characters' dramas (the frustrated teacher, the genius dealer, the sex-wanting guy, the not-really-a-debate over pregnancy) are so broad and take up so much time that they detract from the bullied kids' plight. Yes, fine, the shootings hurt or otherwise affect other people, who have their own dreams and troubles. Understood. Did we need to spend an entire movie watching these one-note automatons wringing their hands over stuff that we know won't matter by the time the credits roll? Plus, there are just too many of them for the audience to really "get in" with anyone.
Then, there are details which connote that despite weaving this rich tapestry of shallow perspectives, Boll was making it up as he went along anyway.
Sure, I guess. If "Heart of America" had concerned a rash of kids doing that, it would have indeed offered a unique perspective in 2002. As-is, not so much. And, Uwe, I really could have lived without seeing that retard rape. I am now off to watch "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats," a 1977 movie about a cursed killer bed, which I am positive will be better than what I just suffered through.
(Apologies for the quality of the screenshots... my computer is very old now.)
It is even flagrantly misused, frequently in reference to my favorite genre. You've undoubtedly heard someone remark about being in a deserted rural location, "Ooh, this is like a bad horror movie!" Whenever you hear this cliché, remember that the uncreative joker is essentially claiming that there are no good horror movies featuring characters in deserted rural locations, which is ignorant at best.
There have been countless attempts to determine the "worst" movie ever made. This is a vain, fruitless task, as something so subjective can never provide a definitive answer. Some will single out mainstream flops like "Gigli," "Waterworld" or "Ishtar" due to their high-profile waste of money and time. Other popular targets are low-budget clunkers both old ("Plan 9 from Outer Space," "Manos: The Hands of Fate," "The Beast of Yucca Flats") and new ("Birdemic: Shock and Terror," "The Room," any given week's made-for-SyFy Asylum title). These are all valid choices, as long as you perpetually admit that there might be something even worse out there.
Longtime readers know that I like to celebrate my dislike of summer by sitting down with a "bad" movie and detailing its problems. The point is explicitly not to consider potential "so bad it's good" titles, instead focusing on movies I predict not enjoying in any way. I finally broke the tradition of lousy family/animal movies last summer, when I was introduced (with the IMDb's Bottom 100 as my guide) to Ulli Lommel's miserable milieu of modern trash via "Zombie Nation." Today, no Lommel titles are in the Bottom 10, which otherwise looks pretty similar to a year ago, complete with the continued preponderance of Paris Hilton vehicles.
Curiously, you have to go down to the 30s before you hit something helmed by Uwe Boll. I had thought Boll was even more loathed than Lommel among maddeningly productive German hacks. My minimal research points to a sea change a few years ago, wherein people started to begrudgingly accept his output as plain old crap rather than a virulent infection of cinema's soul. Maybe his newer movies are not as irritating to nerds since they're not all based on video games, or maybe he's actually gotten better.
All I do know is that I'd never seen one of his movies until now because they looked stupid and he seemed like a fucking jerk. I would only watch an Uwe Boll joint to form a more educated opinion about all the fuss. I've never pulled the trigger because I never wanted to give him the satisfaction, despite having stashed "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" in my Netflix queue years ago. At least casting Ray Liotta as an evil wizard and Burt Reynolds as a wise old warrior king sounds hilarious, and it has a passable metal soundtrack that's basically a Nuclear Blast Records sampler with things like Pantera, Mastodon and Dream Theater thrown in. However, since the goal is to watch something terrible that I don't really want to see, it was finally time to cross the Boll threshold with something that didn't sound sorta fun.
I didn't want to do "Postal" or "Rampage" as they look semi-interesting and some people think they're actually good. Likewise for "House of the Dead," "Bloodrayne" and his other game movies, since those are often deemed unintentionally hilarious. "Blubberella" is tempting, but also obviously calculated to irritate and antagonize, so there's no point in that. Dare I be timely and check out his new "Assault on Wall Street"? Looks fascinatingly dumb, but I can't abide fascinating here.
Well, while combing through Uwe Boll's filmography, I noticed he also has a slew of less-discussed, socially conscious dramas which I assume to be atrocious. A shitty drama, just what I don't feel like watching! Since I am not a chump and still use physical media, I got Netflix to mail me the perfect candidate, an obscure old DVD which met my criteria even better than I anticipated.
"Heart of America"
(2002)
I must start by acknowledging that I have never been personally impacted by the school shooting trend that started in the late ‘90s. I graduated high school in 1993. The kids my age were more likely to pull a "Jeremy" than a Columbine. In fact, on the day of the Columbine incident, I was already a working adult, assigned to cover a Marilyn Manson concert at the local arena. (I was additionally tasked with getting reaction quotes from kids at the show that evening, most of whom had yet to hear about the massacre or Manson's alleged connection to it. My review wasn't published until I gave it to a local zine, as my employer deemed the subject too touchy. Plus, I don't think the conservative brass liked my pinko stance that you can't blame a mainstream musician for his stupidest fans' actions.) I also don't and won't have children, so I will thankfully never deal with my offspring being caught up in such a nightmare.
Most of America, however, was understandably devastated when this awful fad started, and to this day, no number of subsequent copycat incidents has diluted that. Of course it's impossible to not care, but honestly, doesn't everyone consistently freaking out about school shootings only increase their allure to fucked-up kids when they feel marginalized into hurting whoever they can? Yet, whenever it happens, the news channels are clogged with experts pontificating on what they perceive as the causes (all of them peddling books which ostensibly outline the solution). Filmmakers in turn have tried to tackle the subject here and there, most notably Gus Van Sant with his experimental "Elephant." But he's also the guy who decided it was a good idea to remake "Psycho" and gave us "you're the man now, dog," so surely someone else could take a more incisive look into this tragic modern American phenomenon. Who better to get to the "Heart of America" than a prickly German huckster who famously spliced actual video game footage into his feature-length adaptation of a first-person shooter?
Yes, Uwe Boll made a school shooting drama, a complete waste of space that's a lot harder to talk about than things like "K-9: P.I." or "Zeus and Roxanne" were. I can't just describe the proceedings to you in order to underline the inanity. For one thing, although it's obviously a low-budget endeavor, it's quite competent when it comes to the technical aspects, slightly exceeding that Lifetime movie ideal of professional yet empty button-pushing craft. There are actually a handful of interesting shots in here. For another thing, the film is nearly plotless when you step back from the minutiae that consumes much of its running time. If I were to waste a bunch of time telling you about the ten thousand characters stuffed into "Heart of America," only to end with, "Whelp, he/she either died or nothing happened to him/her," I would be committing the same offense as the movie itself does.
So, the story is that people are getting ready for the last day of school, during which shootings occur. That's the entirety of it. Plot description out of the way, let's meet this menagerie of creeps, harpies and cyphers!
First we have Daniel, aka Shooter #1. With his greasy dark hair, insistence on smoking in his house and D-grade mallcore theme music, it's a pretty accurate picture of a school shooter. His dad, played by the great Clint Howard, apparently exists to sit in the kitchen and belittle the kid, calling him "Danielle" and trying to railroad him into a job "hauling bags of concrete." Getting picked on is Daniel's only defining character trait, since we also see flashbacks where the mean jocks at school spray pop on him or shove him away from a bathroom sink. There's also a long sequence showing when he and his friend Barry got beat up for walking through the cruel jocks' "sacred" athletic field, during which one of the baddies burns Daniel's face with a cigarette. Daniel's big moment comes in a grandstanding "let's get 'em" speech to Barry, which would surely have been sampled by the kinds of Ozzfest second-stagers he listens to, if only the dialog wasn't smeared over so thickly with cheesy synthesized strings.
Here's Barry, a blank-faced dweeb who conversely has a good relationship with his single parent. In fact, as his frazzled mom points out during the first of the movie's too-self-aware conversations, it's like he's the parent and she's the kid! We see no evidence of his camaraderie with Daniel, only that they hang out and Daniel essentially bullies Barry into doing things he doesn't want to do. For instance, during one of the black-and-white flashbacks to their confrontation by the jocks, Barry wants to go around the field to avoid a whuppin', but Daniel stupidly insists otherwise. When the beatdowns begin, Barry can only groan to his pal, "You knew they were here, didn't you?" and struggle weakly while the meatheads shove his face in some dog shit that is conveniently festering in the middle of the school athletic field. So, for some reason, Barry's mom decides that the last day of her son's senior year is a good time to go confront the principal about him being bullied. Knowing that Daniel is hellbent on blasting up the school, he talks her out of it. Spoiler alert: this is pretty much the only thing Barry does in the entire movie.
The evil jocks' ringleader, Ricky, actually gets more of a character arc than any of the lead "victim" kids. He and his interchangeable Asics-clad brahs are introduced smoking cigs, listening to crap nü-metal that's only slightly wussier than Daniel's, and nearly T-boning the school principal, who is blithely backing out of his driveway fast without looking at the road. These guys apparently need to get to school early so they can hang out at the athletic field. Today, they find Ricky's 23 year-old brother, Frankie just sitting there in the bleachers at 7 whatever in the morning. The younger cretins totally look up to Frankie, who kinda looks like Jason Stackhouse with Milwaukee eye, and he shares both his weed and his exploits in high school bullying. He's most proud of the time he and his braheims ran a rape train on a girl who was "kinda slow in the head," although he doesn't think she was "retarded, technically, or nothing like that." (If you imagine that Boll depicts the accompanying flashback tastefully and without lingering, guess again.) Upon hearing this tale, Ricky gets all sullen and says, "I heard about that. I heard that a stickball bat got involved." Frankie laughs it off as a rumor, then says their dad heard the story years ago and totally approved. As his closest brosephs celebrate sexual humiliation, Ricky flashes back to that famous time they beat up Daniel and Barry, perhaps now regretting that they depantsed the boys, mocked their genital size and demanded that they achieve erections. (But, y'know, no gay stuff.)
When the kids part to go to school, Frankie leaves the now-ambivalent Ricky with this last-day-of-school advice: "Tomorrow, these little fucks are gonna be the people you wish you were. You make 'em pay for that today." What kind of lunkhead bully is so introspective as to not only recognize the root of their aggressive behavior, but to cogently spell it out in the form of advice to others? Going by what we've seen of him, Frankie is the most calculatingly evil sociopath in town. Naturally, Frankie disappears from the movie at this point and receives no comeuppance for his transgressions.
Oh, yeah, there is a girl named Dara who lives in a nice house and gets a steady stream of spending money from her absentee mom, so of course she dresses all goth and does meth. I'm talking black trenchcoat, combat boots, off-brand "bad girl" t-shirts, meds she won't take, the works. I'm not sure what's going on with her hair, though, with some but not all of the strands lazily but methodically twisted together. It that a meth thing they didn't teach me about on "Breaking Bad"? Maybe she's trying to start white girl dreads or something? Well, fortunately for her, she has a good enough relationship with her dealer that she can call and literally say over the phone, "I need some meth." Dara smokes up before school and has a cut-rate trip sequence complete with spinning camera, flashing lights and cheap techno music. She eventually makes her way to the school roof where she stands... ON THE EDGE! While you revel in this incredible symbolism, Dara has flashbacks to when everybody laughed at her as she read aloud in creative writing class. The dastardly teacher leads the attack: "Are those really your feelings that you put down on paper? That is SO silly!" This teacher actually gets his own sub-subplot. More on that in a bit.
Now we check in with the principal's daughter, a prissy blonde named Karyn, who has a shrill, high-pitched voice reminiscent of those pop-up ads that yell, "Congratulations! You have been selected..." Her boyfriend is a beefy penis with ears named Tommy, whose entire character is built around how he wants to fuck. Karyn confirms that she's not ready to go to the bone zone, but reminds him, "It's not like we don't do other things." This leads him to dump her, apparently because he doesn't like handjobs or blowjobs or pegging or watersports or whatever those "other things" are. She then learns that Tommy has not remained a virgin like she has, and in fact nailed her best friend along with at least 8 other girls, including Dara. (A flashback to when he picked Dara up outside a convenience store and they fucked in the truck explains an earlier scene where Dara calls Tommy and hangs up, about which you will have surely forgotten at this point). Karyn leaves in a huff, while Tommy strolls into school and instantly makes a date with Karyn's roundheels bestie. Hooray for Tommy!
Hey, another couple is also on edge about couple stuff! Robin's voice is equally irritating to Karyn's, and the less remembered about some of the weird faces she makes, the better. The weenie boyfriend here, Kevin, is the kind of high schooler who had Proclaimers record flats hanging in his bedroom in 2002. Their problem is that Robin's knocked up and doesn't want a baby to ruin her college plans. She's also concerned about what it will do to her body, so much so that she lights up a cigarette. She is obviously conflicted, though, since she discloses wanting to name the baby Jack or Melissa. This is perhaps the most unrealistic part of the film, since everyone knows white teenagers only name their kids things like Swift or Kayrden. Kevin offers her abortion money, at which her icy behavior starts to melt. Oh, OK, so the drama was that they hadn't talked about it before, and now they are? Kevin goes on to say he would marry her and have the baby, or would really just go along with what she wants. Conflict resolved! They embrace and it's sunshine and rainbows for all. Heh, heh, heh...
Would you believe there are even more pairs of characters embroiled in conversation this morning? There's drug dealer Wex Presley (now there's a white teen mom name!), easily the oldest-looking "teenager" here. After hooking Dara up, he's collared by guidance counselor Vanessa Jones and subjected to a concerned interrogation. Vanessa, whose name seems curiously Anglo considering her heavy accent, is played by everyone's favorite '80s Latina, María Conchita Alonso. Vanessa's befuddled questions include why he sells drugs even though he scored a 1400 on the SAT, to which he replies that he is expanding minds, just like she is. These two great communicators find resolution when she says she "could call the cops" about the drugs and money she found on him, but wonders, "What is that really going to accomplish?" So, with that logic, she just lets him go. Vanessa disappears from the movie at this point and receives no comeuppance for her questionable decision.
Finally, of even smaller significance, is Dara's meanie creative writing teacher, Will. As played by erstwhile "Streets of Fire" hero and Boll stock player Michael Paré, he's pulled into the principal's office and taken to task for obviously giving unfair grades to his students, being a prick due to frustration from writer's block. The previously mentioned principal and dad of goody two-shoes Karyn, Harold Lewis, is played by top-billed German cinema legend Jürgen Prochnow. I don't know, maybe this is a Teutonic thing, to want your obviously foreign actors to play American characters with Joe Sixpack names? In Lommel's "Zombie Nation," the conspicuously German killer cop was named Joe Singer, and just look at any given Schwarzenegger character. Anyway, the acclaimed star of "Das Boot" is here reduced to telling another adult not to pick on teenagers. Confronted with the evidence, Will is all like, "Hmm, yeah, guess you're right, Harold. Sorry, man. I'll regrade these papers." So, easy as that, the problem's solved! Will goes to his class and apologizes for being a childish dick. Too bad Dara isn't there to hear it, because... for everyone who didn't see the DVD cover when they rented it...
SURPRISE! Dara's the second gun(wo)man! Refuting the film's unattributed opening school shooting statistic that "96 percent of the offenders were male," and apparently not spinning or hearing a Eurodance megamix anymore, it is she and not Barry who meets Daniel in the school's boiler room, where he's stashed the guns. In quick succession, Daniel blasts the dumbest-looking jock bully in the bathroom, then takes out Ricky and another of his lackeys. To think, remorseful Ricky had just decided not to mess with Daniel when the goons saw him coming down the hall. Such unfortunate timing! And even more unfortunate is Kevin, who just gets done hugging preggers Robin when Daniel plugs him, apropos of nothing. Damn! What about the baby? How will Robin ever fulfill her dream of becoming a waitress now?
For her part, Dara strolls into Will's class and gives him two in the chest. Then, after reminiscing about screwing Tommy in his fucktruck and being jealous of Karyn, she tells Tommy that she loves him and shoots the very surprised Karyn. The remaining evil jock guy from Ricky's crew tackles Dara, putting an end to her rampage, and a news report later shows him becoming a media hero. Hey, good for that brave sadistic tormentor and genital mocker. Harold manages to show up in the classroom immediately, only to learn that his daughter is dead. Meanwhile, Daniel shoots himself offscreen, and we see Barry flinch at the gunshot as he loafs about outside the school. True to character, he did absolutely nothing, which, despite not warning the school officials, makes him perhaps the most sympathetic character here. (You gotta feel for Harold, though, despite his shitty driving habits.)
Let's see, who's left? That Wex, he sure looks a little sheepish after Dara walks by in the hall and tells him, "Thanks, I couldn't have done this without you," right before shooting up her classroom. At what cost, Wex? If you only sold weed, maybe she would have just sat in her car listening to Mushroomhead and eating Cheetos instead of getting all violent. Then there's Tommy, who, despite having one regular fuck buddy now headed to the slammer, still has that date with his dead ex's DTF friend, so I guess that worked out for him. And then there's crusty old Clint Howard, who ends the film in his favorite kitchen, sporting his favorite underwear, next to his favorite empty liquor bottle, staring in disbelief at the TV news report as his phone rings into oblivion.
I understand that the point of "Heart of America" was not to have an intricate plot. We're supposed to take all of this as just another day in the lives of all of these people, and how people's poor actions can cause worse reactions that can escalate into calamity. The film's problem is not just that this is a trite message which should be obvious to anyone over the age of 10. More damningly, Boll tries to make a definitive statement about school shootings out of all of this chaff and clutter, totally confounding himself in the process.
From personal experience, I'll say the peer bullying stuff seems fairly accurate and effective, as are the disparate reactions of the picked-on kids. However, all the side characters' dramas (the frustrated teacher, the genius dealer, the sex-wanting guy, the not-really-a-debate over pregnancy) are so broad and take up so much time that they detract from the bullied kids' plight. Yes, fine, the shootings hurt or otherwise affect other people, who have their own dreams and troubles. Understood. Did we need to spend an entire movie watching these one-note automatons wringing their hands over stuff that we know won't matter by the time the credits roll? Plus, there are just too many of them for the audience to really "get in" with anyone.
Then, there are details which connote that despite weaving this rich tapestry of shallow perspectives, Boll was making it up as he went along anyway.
- The opening credits play over fake security camera footage of a school shooting which you might take as a flash-forward or something. Nope, it's just some additional pulse-pounding, school shooting action that Boll shot. To get you in the mood, I guess?
- Other characters are introduced and immediately disappear. Will is set up with a wife and young son, who it's established won't stop repeating their swears, but they never come back into the picture. We also see an odd discussion between two school officials who are never seen again, save one lady's quick reappearance to reprise her signature declaration: "Last day!" (accompanied by power fist)
- The TV news guy goes off on a tangent, pontificating on possible causes for school shootings like he's some big cable news anchor rather than a beat reporter for the local affiliate. His list includes violent movies and video games. This may seem a bit incendiary in context, since none of the film's characters are ever shown consuming either movies or games, but its connection to "Heart of America" becomes clearer when you realize that the director was about to make his name by combining them.
- The very end of the film includes a series of text summaries about specific school shooting incidents. You will definitely remember some of these tragedies, like Jonesboro, AR and Littleton, CO, while some were lower profile, such as in Caro, MI and Alberta, Canada. But, as final evidence that Boll was carelessly cramming in as much as he could here, the incident he chose to conclude with has nothing to do with school shootings:
Sure, I guess. If "Heart of America" had concerned a rash of kids doing that, it would have indeed offered a unique perspective in 2002. As-is, not so much. And, Uwe, I really could have lived without seeing that retard rape. I am now off to watch "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats," a 1977 movie about a cursed killer bed, which I am positive will be better than what I just suffered through.
(Apologies for the quality of the screenshots... my computer is very old now.)
posted by SoulReaper at 8:30 PM
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