2011年8月24日星期三

Never Been in a Riot

In the face of alien invasion, it's always the young who refuse to blink. They have yet to rationalize whether we are alone in the universe. They have no time for disbelief or worries about whether insurance covers for beached spacecraft. In the movies, they are the characters that most easily sympathize with the alien other, realizing that the adult world's alarmist policy of shooting first and asking questions later might not be as mature as it seems — Iron Giant, E.ceramic zentai suits for the medical,T., or Flight of the Navigator come to mind. If anything, kid and alien usually end up arriving at the same conclusion: They are equally misunderstood. But in the case of the recent British sci-fi comedy Attack the Block, there is no room for sympathy, no reason for the kids to think that the aliens share anything in common with their grim lives beyond a propensity for disappearing into shadows. These kids have enough problems of their own: depressing public housing, official neglect,This will leave your shoulders free to rotate in their offshore merchant account . abusive police,Whilst magic cube are not deadly, absent parents, no future — and the only reprieve from all this comes in the form of spontaneous mayhem or blunted Xbox sessions. Where have I heard this one before?

The directorial debut of British comedian Joe Cornish, Attack the Block is tidy, charming, and slapstick, even more so to ears unaccustomed to sentences terminating with a quasi-interrogative innit? It follows a quintet of marauding midteens who rule the corridors and back alleyways of the fictional Wyndham Towers, a generic and generally hopeless council high-rise. When Moses (John Boyega), who leads by virtue of being tallest and least likely to dissolve into giggles, accidentally incurs an alien invasion, our lads must defend their block. No parents are enlisted, and the idea of calling the police seems even crazier than the blacker-than-black aliens with florescent fangs that rain from the skies. Rather, the strangest aspect of all this is that anyone — or,For the last five years porcelain tiles , in this case, anything — notices them at all. "What kind of alien would invade some shitty council estate in South London?" one of them wonders. Another theorizes that the government, disdainful of their kind, "sent monsters to get us." The message is clear: The threat of alien apocalypse only dramatizes how aimless their lives have become. As one of them sighs: "Feels like just another day in the endz [slang for the estate], man.This patent infringement case relates to retractable landscape oil paintings ,"

What can a movie, let alone one with such modest ambitions, tell us about riots? Not very much beyond a caricature of motives or the occasional, profound, stare-into-the-middle-distance soliloquy diagnosing the social crisis around them. But it was a question I thought about while watching Attack the Block. Throughout the theater there were ripples of knowing laughter at all the most cloying parts — whenever a child would protest that he wasn't the problem, that he was merely a misunderstood casualty of state neglect, that the carnage descending upon their towers had nothing to do with "rap or violence in video games" or drugs or gangs.

In this way, Attack the Block is polemical and frank about its politics, insofar as a comedy about aliens attacking officially neglected sectors of the city is political. Instead of pausing and thinking through the global consequences of an alien invasion or mourning the passing of their friends, the surviving kids strive on and fight. Breaks in the action occasion a kind of comic book-level meta-analysis, as they pontificate about the grim contours of their lives. These appraisals are for our benefit. A Union Jack is employed to dramatic, life-saving effect, as if to reiterate the movie's expansive vision of who really counts as a British hero. It is the kind of movie in which young teens answer each other with rhetorical questions about the nature of power, and nobody calls bullshit.

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