Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Fifteen-year-olds getting pregnant and exchanging sex for coke from posh drug dealers. Wiggers stealing beer with menaces from the Asian corner shop. It pulls you in to your safe liberal zone with a recurring gag about taxis not stopping for young black men; and then undercuts it completely by implying that they shouldn’t. The plot coalesces neatly around a spiral of revenge, a real gangster uncle, West End nicking sprees, the extremes of economy and environment between wealthy white and poor black, the conscience of the potentially absent black father, a series of brutally real punch-ups, a comic sneer at the desperation of the white middle classes to impress and co-opt black working-class cool; and all of this heads towards a convergence of differing, dangerous agendas at the party and a death you don’t see coming.

  All the girls are materialist slappers . . . until some are not. All the boys are thieving wannabe gangstas . . . until a few are not. The worst words you can think of – and some you don’t even understand and don’t want to – are put into their mouths. Everything is played out to a soundtrack of dark, pessimistic hip hop and grime. Yet . . . Kidulthood is funny.

  The film has a raw sense of humour that constantly dares you to get into the nihilistic spirit or retreat to your liberal corner. The scene where Jay (Deacon) is successfully seducing Sam’s girlfriend while we know the baddest bwoy in da hood is on his way home is like a docudrama spin on the ‘look out . . . the monster’s coming!’ schtick that provides one of cinema’s most enduring pleasures by making you laugh at fear once-removed. But . . . the conflict point is a 15-year-old girl who took about three minutes to agree to sex with someone she barely knows. It’s really not funny, at the core. Huda and Clarke know that. They make you laugh and scream ‘Behind You!!!’ anyway.

  Kidulthood is arguably the most irresponsible movie in this book and its gleeful rubbing of our noses in our worst assumptions about working-class teens is one of its greatest strengths. The movie has none of the self-serving get-out clause moralising and sentimentalities of those awful American teen/hip hop/gangsta movies like Boys N the Hood, Juice and Menace II Society. It doesn’t stop to wring its hands and cry, ‘Oh Lord, what can we do about the yoof? Stay in school! Families need fathers! Oh . . . and now I’ve pretended that I’m really trying to stop black-on-black crime rather than exploiting it, can I have a bit in Ebony magazine and a Martin Lawrence movie please?’ None of that bollocks. It walks up to your face with that stag-fight/head-butt stance that footballers have become fond of, and says, ‘You’re right. We’re exactly what you think we are. And no, we don’t know how to stop it. We’re not role models just because we’re black. And if you don’t get this film it’s not for you – it’s for us. So fuck you.’ And by doing so, it credits you with the intelligence to decide for yourself whether to care about the fall of England or just be a sick bastard and get off on the bit where Sam’s getting his head kicked in to the strains of ‘Jus’ A Rascal’ by Dizzee Rascal.

  That’s why I really, really love this movie. Watch it in one mood and it’s a searing indictment of the moral and spiritual void at the heart of an England – young and old, rich and poor, black and white – which would increasingly and merrily sell its own granny for a blow job and a new pair of trainers. Watch it in another and its pure, malevolent fun and dumb thrills.

  The sequel, Adulthood, is good enough, but not great. Clarke directs instead of Huda, and makes his Sam into a tough-guy hero, like a grimy Terminator 2. It’s a good action thriller, but doesn’t resonate with wider truths, partly because it’s not about children. You don’t feel implicated by watching and enjoying it. It’s just a film.

  Kidulthood isn’t. It has a disturbing glee and a baleful prescience. I know it’s a term that has become popularly connected to liking cheesy power ballads. But I never felt too ashamed about that. Kidulthood is, like Eminem records, dog racing and staring at your best mate’s wife’s tits, a true guilty pleasure.

  HAIRSPRAY

  2007

  Starring: Nikki Blonsky, John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Zac Efron, Alison Janney, Queen Latifah

  Dir.: Adam Shankman

  Plot: Grease remixed by Martin Luther King.

  Key line: ‘Get that chubby communist off the show!’

  This is wrong. So very, very wrong. I’m an alternative boy, reared on punk rock, cult movies and that whole thing about being gay even when you’re not. I hate modern musicals, especially anything staged with any similarity to Chicago. I don’t even know who Adam bloody Shankman is. So . . . why do I like this Hairspray even more than I love the John Waters original?

  I dunno. Maybe I don’t. But I do love a film that manages to be funny about racism, and especially one that includes the lines: ‘I wish every day were Negro Day!’ and ‘This is just so Afrotastic!’ That reveals that John Travolta is the most adorably funny tranny in Hollywood. And that, while obviously aimed at children on some level, somehow finds a way to smuggle John Waters himself in . . . as a flasher. You’ve got to admire people – in this case Shankman, screenwriter Leslie Dixon and Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, who turned a cult rock movie into a hit stage musical – who can make bad taste parody into family fun while simultaneously keeping the sleaze and amping up the politics. Hairspray is one of those rare films that makes good and worthy intentions into irreverent entertainment.

  If you are not familiar with either version, Hairspray is set in Baltimore in 1962, and concerns Tracy Turnblad (Blonsky), an overweight, working-class teen who wants to be the star of the local rock ’n’ roll TV show, get hottest boy in school Link (Efron) and end American segregation. She does all three, and sings and dances along the way. The original Tracy was played by Ricki Lake, and the only reason the adorable Ms Blonsky isn’t better is because it is actually mathematically impossible to be a better Tracy Turnblad than Ricki Lake. Don’t bother getting out a calculator. I’ve tried it. Mathematically impossible.

  The original established the fact that Tracy’s even porkier mom Edna is played by a man. In 1988 it was Waters’ mascot and symbol of porcine transsexuality Divine. It was his last role, and he was entirely wonderful. But some bright spark decided that the man to match the unmatchable was . . . John Travolta. And in the history of ‘It’s crazy . . . but it just might work!’ cinematic ideas, it’s among the champions, because Travolta, with his fat suit and brilliantly over-the-top Baltimore accent, is even better than Divine.

  For those of us who thought a mainstream Hollywood version of a beloved Waters cult had to be a whitewash, the opening number is vital and gets us onside by establishing the wryness of the entire stage musical scenario. In ‘Good Morning Baltimore’, Tracy hits you with gung-ho optimism about a new day in B-More while negotiating rats, drunks and flashing John Waters. It’s a fantastic opener, giving you the main themes – how early ’60s kids stayed positive enough to change the world for the better in the face of poverty and class and race divisions – while establishing a fat girl heroine, a bright palette of Disney colours and a sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the American dream.

  ‘The Nicest Kids In Town’ then tips the film fully into subversive genius territory. Tracy and a friend run home to watch local sock hop TV show The Corny Collins Show, and ‘The Nicest Kids . . .’ is the opening song and it’s going so well, all Ultrabrite smiles from the dancers and teen-positive sentiments in the lyrics. Then Collins hits a new verse and his clean-cut enthusiasm curdles into something Klan-cut sinister: ‘Nice white kids who like to lead the way/And once a month we have our . . . Negro Day!!!’

  It doesn’t stop there. Class agendas have to be revealed with a bounce and a grin, too. ‘Who cares about sleep when you can snooze in school/You’ll never get to college but you’ll sure look cool.’

  From there it’s all snotty gags, fun songs about how great it is to be black, or pro-black, or fat, or just plain liberal, mingled in with the sheer joy of the idea of Christopher Walken being married to John Travolta, and Michelle Pfeiffer having a ball
as the pushy racist TV producer Velma Von Tussle, a kind of glam-Nazi, Catwomanesque template for Sue Sylvester out of Glee. Pfeiffer gets most of the best lines, what with being evil and all, particular favourites being her response to being asked how to sack Corny Collins from his own show – ‘They do it all the time on Lassie’ – and the elegant revelation of her sinister televisual agenda: ‘They’re kids, Corny. That’s why we have to steer them in the white direction.’

  You want more? There’s a fabulous, poignant moment when three white girls are singing a cute, banal, Tracy-referencing number called ‘The New Girl In Town’ with rubbish dancing, and we suddenly switch to three sassily beautiful black girls singing the same song, which is now, funky, slinky and almost like a real Supremes-lite pop hit . . . with a genuinely black pay-off line.

  And while we’re on fabulous and poignant . . . how does one do a ‘The ’60s is coming. Wasn’t it swinging?’ song and major theme without annoying the fuck out of us all with both the familiarity and the unavoidable smugness? One smart way is to quickly turn Travolta’s Edna from broad comic tranny into a gently tragic figure; a woman so ashamed of her weight that she hasn’t been out of the house in over a decade, locked into that comfort-food obesity loop where she eats to make her shame bearable. Tracy’s song ‘Welcome To The Sixties’ becomes an embrace of everyone different, including the black, the freaky, the (by implication) gay . . . and the fat. The song and its staging insists that everyone has a chance to, literally, come out and be visible in this brave new world.

  It’s beautiful. And naive, sure. The absence of romantic lead roles for big women outside of movies that begin with H and end with Y proves that. But don’t you love movies that give you a glimpse of a world better than the one we have to live in? Don’t those glimpses encourage us to make our world better? Especially when they’re aimed at the young, who have the time and the energy to change things for the better? If you’re answering ‘No’ I honestly feel sorry for you and your Radiohead box sets. What have relentless default pessimism, cynicism and resignation ever actually achieved?

  And if you can’t buy that, then maybe you can buy a wobbly John Travolta dancing in the street in a pink dress and high heels . . . a big old wink to lovers of pop film and iconic dance sequences.

  Among all this wish-fulfilment there’s a running joke that has a real resonance for me. Every time a kid in this movie is sent to detention, they are essentially being sent to a classroom full of black kids having a party. Way back in The Dark Ages, I went to a primary school in North London that had a dustbin class called Class 3. The school had given up on these 30 kids. It was taken by an elderly male teacher who was quite obviously senile. And if you entered it to give the guy a note from your teacher, you quickly realised that all the children were black, and that, because senile Mr N couldn’t control them, they were essentially having a party instead of an education. I’d love to think things have entirely changed in the ensuing 38 years. But I suspect that would be naive.

  Is this Hairspray really better than the original? Well . . . the acting is different class, but then, part of Waters’s aesthetic was deliberate bad acting. It’s more adamant about its place as an anti-racist story, and its love of fat women is even more pronounced and, in the anorexic 21st century, this seems oddly transgressive, in a much-needed, pro-feminist, anti-health and safety way. It’s more witty, but less laugh-out-loud funny. And the fact that it’s more uplifting – and more the kind of film you’d show to your kid to make points about tolerance and liberalism – is in stark contrast to the original’s tone of genuinely rebellious sleaze.

  The major way it loses it out to Waters is in the music. The lyrics of the songs are great. But these typically wishy-washy, thinly produced showtunes are absolutely no match, musically, for the rock ’n’ roll originals in the 1988 version. So while the enthusiastic dancing and smart words do hold your attention, the music itself gets you thinking about making cups of tea and the simple fact that, if rock ’n’ roll and soul had sounded like this, we’d still be listening to Rosemary Clooney and living in unofficial apartheid. Which kind of defeats the film’s entire point.

  But let’s be honest . . . since the rise of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, talented composers don’t go into musical theatre any more. The songs of Grease seem stupendous because they have absolutely no competition. This whole subcultural fusion between Lloyd-Webber, gay men who prefer diva melodrama to actual music, pop group tributes, people doing bad Irish dancing and a Broadway machine that makes money out of busloads of easily impressed out-of-town tourists has dispensed with the art of the musical and the compositional genius of the whole Gershwin/Porter aesthetic; ergo, all music for musicals is now utter dross. Sorry to sound like a snob, but, when it comes to pop culture I am, what with being a child of Bowie and Tamla Motown.

  So, in those unavoidable dross stakes, Hairspray’s score isn’t a total dog. Maybe half a dachshund, or a small labradoodle.

  Oh yeah . . . nearly forgot this Hairspray’s biggest mistake. Zac Efron. Yeuch.

  But any movie that unleashes John Travolta’s feminine side, let’s the sainted Chris Walken and Alison Hanney be funny, and makes a connection between the great civil rights marches and musical teen comedy is doing something very, very right. The Hairspray remake is a funny, morally crusading celebration of fatness, blackness, rock ’n’ roll style, teenage romance, integration, cross-dressing, the working class and the world-changing potential of boundless youth optimism, which, give or take Tottenham Hotspur and Thornton’s Caramel Shortbreads, may be the very best things on Earth. Try doing as I did and watch it straight after Lee Daniels’s extraordinary Precious (see here). The themes – skin colour, body shape, food, race, class, a plump girl’s fantasies about celebrity – are strangely interchangeable. Precious shows you the pain. Hairspray gives you the pleasure.

  JUNO

  2007

  Starring: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Alison Janney, JK Simmons, Olivia Thirlby

  Dir.: Jason Reitman

  Plot: The best teen screenplay ever written.

  Key line: ‘At school people are grabbing on my belly all the time . . . it’s crazy. I’m a legend. They call me The Cautionary Whale.’

  I’ve just been writing about multiple perspectives in the entry for Elephant, so, if it’s OK with you, I’m going to stick with that for a minute. Juno is obviously an enormous movie in recent teen cinema, and, like most every smart, sophisticated work of art, parts of it may look very different to different people.

  I’ve just watched Juno for the umpteenth time with my wife Linsay, and as soon as it was over, she expressed her surprise at how she felt about a specific scene. It’s the one where Juno visits Mark Loring, the thirtysomething prospective adoptive father of her unborn baby, having bonded with him for months over shared tastes in classic guitars, alternative rock, slasher movies and ironic sarcasm. His wife Vanessa is out.

  Mark has just shown Juno an obscure Japanese comic about a pregnant superhero, which makes her feel ‘way less of a fat dork’. She is educating the older man in her music tastes, and instructs him to put on ‘All The Young Dudes’ by Mott The Hoople. It was written by David Bowie and it’s kind of a power ballad. They begin to slow-dance, awkwardly, jokily. He looks down at his hands around her huge belly and cracks the ‘Does it feel like there’s something between us?’ gag. She keeps looking vulnerably into his eyes. She holds him closer and rests her head on his chest, and she looks peaceful, and so does he, and they look like a couple. The scene is charged with sexual tension . . . which will be entirely broken seconds later, but we’ll come back to that.

  For me, having seen the film before, this scene is now about the one character in the movie who I don’t like, and his deluded, sleazy, mid-life crisis imaginings of starting over with a barely legal shag bunny. I think that the first time I watched it, and had no idea where the scene or the characters were headed, I was just covering my eyes and silently scre
aming, ‘NOOOOOO!!!’

  But Linsay, even after knowing exactly where Mark is heading in just a few seconds, is in a very different place in the scene. She is remembering being around 16, and the first times older men showed an interest in her, and how exciting that was when you were practising to be a woman. She finds the scene sexy.

  This says something important about why Juno is such an extraordinary movie, and the part talented collaborators from different places play in that process. Director Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbusters director Ivan) did the relatively unusual thing of insisting that screenwriter Diablo Cody was on set throughout the entire making of the movie. At every turn he would consult Cody and star Ellen Page about the tone of each scene. His reasoning was simple: ‘I’ve never been a 16-year-old girl.’

  It also perhaps explains why Juno became a hot topic in abortion-obsessed America. Pro-lifers were quick to claim it as a pro-life movie, because Juno MacGuff initially intends to terminate her pregnancy, goes to the clinic, hates the place and decides to go through with the pregnancy but give her child up for adoption. I’m going to assume that these were similar people to those who claimed that the documentary March Of The Penguins was actually a pro-family values polemic because people and penguins have so much in common, and therefore didn’t notice that this movie’s only anti-abortion activist is a comedy teen Asian on anti-depression meds holding a sign that says, ‘No Babies Like Murdering’, and that when Juno walks into the clinic, the bored girl at the desk is required to say: ‘Welcome to Women Now where women are trusted friends. Please put your hands where I can see them and surrender any bombs.’

  The controversy became more serious when a story broke in June 2008 that, in Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, 18 girls had fallen pregnant within one school year amidst allegations of a ‘pregnancy pact’. Despite none of the girls going on record about having watched Juno, and their denial of a pact, the media attached the phrase ‘The Juno Effect’ to the story. New soundbite, old problem.