Heart of America

A look at the difficulties of high school life. The film takes place during a climatic last day of the school year and through ominous black and white flashbacks there are hints at the trouble that has been brewing.

Directed by the infamous Uwe Boll this is a surprisingly good film. While the acting is at times second rate and the hard rock soundtrack seems sorely misplaced during some moments, though not all, the film is pretty involving. Mainly through its flashback structure, the audience is placed hours away from a climatic event without knowledge of what will happen and bit by bit the past is revealed and we get an understanding of what is tragically imminent, kind of like in a Greek play.

There are also a few interesting shots - particularly the opening long take that ventures down a street including in and out of a house. The other major surprise is that Boll is at the helm. His crap video game adaptations are known for their brainlessness but this is significantly different and shows that he has (or at least had) some good film making ideas. The ending is also typical Boll - the film tries to outrun itself by turning into a big political statement and the catharsis seems underdeveloped for the characters and overly large for the film itself. And the kicker is that Boll uses - get this - narrated titles to make that statement. Though the presentation of media coverage was interesting and he should have stuck with just that as there is no need to state the obvious. It is that, and the few other annoyances, ultimately push this what could have been a good hard drama down to the "close but no cigar" category.

So Uwe Boll took a step in the right direction, but, since then, has somehow decided to take the road more traveled, crappy action movies, and that has made all the difference. 6/10

Rated R: violence, profanity, drug use, and a rape.

I do not know of any other director that has generated so much hatred. There are petitions on the net calling for Uwe Boll to never direct again. Is he really that bad? I am viewing this film, recommended as a good example of his work, with that in mind.

The film did an excellent job of showing the motivation behind the actions of the boys. The rape of the disabled girl was no different than the physical and psychological abuse of the two boys by the jocks. It was a violation of privacy and of their bodies.

But, it wasn't just the two boys or the girl who was raped, there was also other plots going on involving teen pregnancy, pressure to have sex, and unfair teachers. Would there be more than two people to explode on the last day? The end result was very predictable and a cautionary tale of what is allowed by school officials and the result of overpopulated schools.

Bottom line: this was an interesting and engaging movie and Uwe Boll did a very good job of telling the story.

In Uwe Boll's commentary on the DVD of "Alone in the Dark" he brags about how Ron Howard liked "Heart of America". I really have to wonder what Ron was thinking. Some might think of this film as bold for taking on the hot topic of school shootings, but others (including me) think of it as a travesty for badly dramatizing it. It is an intriguing, important topic, but I've never seen a film successfully tackle it (No, I'm not a fan of "Elephant"). I was in high school when most of the school shootings were happening, so I feel a kind of connection to the subject.

This film follows various high school kids through their last day of school. We cut between various pre-class conversations in cars, bedrooms, offices, etc. For every character there's a clearly (and mechanically) laid out conflict. Among them are a student who deals drugs, a couple of students who's relationship is ending, a tweaker student, a group of bullies, a teacher who is overly harsh on his students, and the two misfit kids planning the shooting. There are lots and lots of flashbacks (in black and white) explaining how things got this way for the misfit kids.

Clint Howard shows up as one of the shooter kids' emotionally abusive father. Jurgen Prochnow plays the school principal. And for no reason at all, Michael Pare appears as the teacher in a performance that reminds us all why he's on the celebrity Z list. None of these characters seem all that convincing and the dialog comes straight from an after school special (plus swearing, of course). The writers don't realty seem to understand their teenage subjects, resulting in the same major problem as "Elephant": you don't really come to care about the characters. Flimsy plot combined with irritating characters does not result in a compelling film.

This subject deserved a much better treatment. However, this is probably the height of schlock director Uwe Boll's career. The characters are irritating, and some of them you wouldn't mind seeing killed, but that's more than you can say for "House of the Dead" or "Alone in the Dark". That said, it is a tedious, insultingly dumb movie which I doubt anyone could benefit from watching.

Movie #4 of my Uwe Boll marathon (and second I've watched today) and I really don't know what to think about it. Most movies you rate on enjoyability, but this movie obviously wasn't supposed to be entertaining and I know that so it feels weird giving it an absolutely awful rating, but also it just...I don't know what its trying to say??? I do like that the main message seems to be "the extreme violence in schools is caused by the already existent violence by peers" and doesn't take the path of blaming it on media and video games, that's a very mature take on it, granted if he DID say that, then he'd retroactively say all of his future movies cause mass shootings so it just makes sense that he doesn't believe that (and I don't either.) Just, there's so much weird and strange and I don't understand about this film. Nearly 45+ minutes of it could've been cut from the film and not changed it in any way.

As everyone realizes by now, this is probably Boll's best work, but that's hardly a compliment considering his abhorrent filmography. This one detracts from his usual game-to-movie adaptation, and it's basically a remake of Columbine. It tries to create insight regarding the shooting, but it's mostly just banal sentimentality with copycat flair, one-dimensional, predictable characters with conventional, exaggerated teenage problems, and slow-paced, pointless black-and-white sequences to show us the 'troubled' past of these kids.

It offers nothing new to the subject. It creates a mundane, melodramatic explanation, it annoys you with slow-paced, trite, uninteresting drama, and it takes no risks. It doesn't try to offer an innovative, thought-provoking look at these kids motives, and considering that Boll wrote and directed the film, a risk would've probably been a disaster. Well, at least it wouldn't have been an already established, pointless, boring recreation.