Afterschool

I remember first seeing the trailer for this a long while back and wanting to see this, but I just never got around to doing so. Now I don't know why I waited so long. I think this is a great film that takes a serious and realistic look at high school life. The characters mumble and show little emotion in an effort to blend in to their surroundings and not stick out, yet they all hide their own dark secrets and personality flaws from the rest of the world. They adapt voyeuristic tastes and view the troubles of others instead of deal with their own, whether through watching cell phone videos of student fights on YouTube or making such spying videos of their own. The acting does get a bit dull at times and tedious to follow along with, and the quiet audio and super-steady camera shots may start to drag on one's patience. But for the most part that fits along with the amateurish, voyeuristic mood of the piece. And the performances, for how plain they were, do captivate the audience in a neo-realistic sense. This is a director to keep an eye on in the future.

The daily routine of a boarding school spirals out of control and shifts to new policies after the death of two students by drug overdose in one of the many corridors of the place. And it was all videotaped by another student, Robert (Ezra Miller), who was using his camera for a school project. The story, actually, begins with him - a typical teenager, just a little more lonely than the usual barely talking to his roommate and constantly spending his days on the internet watching porn or school fight videos. Connect those events and you have a figure formed, a bomb waiting to explode. The movie's concern is in seeing how Robert will react with this tragedy while continuing with his project (now a memorial tribute for the dead girls), classes and involvement with his classmates.

So, it denounces the internet in a large scale and stays contrived while criticizing reality, real people and their sometimes useless values. Deals with real and poignant themes but the characters aren't so real, specially when you see the now familiar faces and voices of Miller and Michael Stuhlbarg. Good actors here and elsewhere but since the director is trying an almost documentary kind of film their performances get in the way. The themes explored were great, the presentation and the choices made were what killed its potential. It's a suffocating experience. It's right for the movie but that at no point cannot take the pleasure of the viewing.

Director Antonio Campos uses of static images that represent the voyeurish act of seeing things very distantly, rejecting close-ups and movements. It's the vision of the kid of sees everything from a distance, the girls he can't reach present on the net videos, and also the ones he couldn't save because he was in a state of shock (we're fooled into this until a certain moment). Furthermore, it's slow and problematic in the sound department - and since I didn't have captions for it a few things were gathered with the help of IMDb boards. That's what the director tries to convey (it could be) but to me it was lazy filmmaking hacking from masters like Haneke and Van Sant, trying to be a higher (and updated) variation of "Benny's Video" with "Elephant". Fails on both accounts. It's too mechanical.

Why does it always have to follow through doubtful actions? Why it has to be inconclusive or misleading or going in several directions? And the ending? A real betrayal that almost destroyed the film. I saw film critics dissing films because the final image killed the experience and shifts the movie to an unexpected and unpleasant degree, and I've never understood much of that. Now I know. It didn't kill my enjoyment but I must recognize that it was very cheap.

I liked "Afterschool" because when it wasn't trying to be pretentious (and it is) it offered valid criticisms about adults negligence while dealing with kids and it's an intelligent and psychological radiography on today's youth and all of its problems. Extremely manipulative and quite deceiving towards its final moments but gotta admit Mr. Campos managed to build tension in all scenes even the ones you give less importance like when the headmaster complains about Robert's expressionless video.

Some people look at this as a critique of the America post 9/11, and there's plenty of sustainable elements to confirm such view. I don't buy all that much but that can make your view something extra if you look carefully. Mindblowing. My message to the hipsters who believe this is one of the 10 best of the past decade: relax yourselves because there's better out there. The director's technique is poorly employed here. It works with other directors because they know what they're doing and probably they're not copying a style, they're making a tribute and using a bit of their own craft. "Afterschool" is simply a copy and paste. Good movie, far from great. 7/10

Afterschool is a movie about a boarding school in United States and how rotten is the environment there. The film's pace is slow but that helps the viewer appreciate the photography and the filming technique. The comments of the director about the hypocrisy of the school teachers and the faulty communication between students and their parents are discreet but effective in a filming manner. The acting is superb (most of the cast has worked at New York theaters) and there are some innovations in the cinematography (different angles and film-editing games). It certainly reminds us of "Elephant" (Gus Van Sant) because of the subject but here the interest is centered in drug abuse and how someone witnesses it even though he/she is not connected to the drug-user. In addition, it comments on many more perspectives of puberty. An interesting film that leaves many thoughts to the viewer without forcing him/her to create a specific opinion. A definite must-see!

I am going to take you to "Afterschool"!!! OK, maybe after reading my pun-infested movie review, you might think of it more as puntention (I mean detention), and think that I have no class. But please just swim with these school of puns for a little while. "Afterschool" is a dark, quirky and semi-interesting film about an isolated prep-school teen named Rob who witnesses fatal drug overdoses of preppie female twins while working on an audio/visual school club project. Therefore, he is able to gather video footage of the twins' deaths. Rob is traumatized from the experience, and has difficulty coping with it. Rob's roommate is Dave, a cocky & arrogant bully who manipulates Rob on a daily basis and may or may not had a hand in the cause of the twin overdoses. Mr. Burke is the school director who is more concerned about the image of the school and its funders then of the ordeals and stress that teenagers go through. Amy is Rob's student partner in the audio-visual club and this Amy might be aiming for some Roboco**. Writer-Director Antonio Campos did develop an intriguing narrative on teenage angst, trauma, and insecurity; however, the immensely slow pace was more of an afterschool exercise of futility. Hey, I am down with slow pacing films, but Campos was too much of a "campesino" on the doldrums that hamper a slow-paced movie. His scribe was not a screenplayer valedictorian classic, but it did warrant a passing grade. I would not say it is Hollywood Miller Time yet for this young actor, but Ezra Miller's starring performance as Rob was a credible one even though it was a bit too monotone for my taste. Michael Stuhlbarg, of "A Serious Man", was superb as the self-centered school director Mr. Burke; Stuhlbarg is one seriously good actor that will probably garner a few Oscar nominations in his future. The rest of the supporting acting of "Afterschool", primarily comprised of teen actors, is not really worth mentioning, it's a D=Needs Improvement in my gradebook. "Afterschool" does barely make the grade, but it does not graduate itself to teenage movie genre superiority. *** Average

OK. I've tried to finish this exercise in audience alienation twice. First I stopped after half an hour of watching admittedly realistic, if over-familiar and desultory, dialog, and trying to stay interested in people I only half-saw, or saw from a distance, or from the back of their heads, all going through what looked very much like what innumerable prep school students go through regularly. Having decided there really wasn't a point to this, I came here and discovered... there is a Major Dramatic Event in the movie! Somewhere. So I put in the DVD again and watched for about ten minutes past said Major Dramatic Event. Only to find more perfectly believable, probably emotionally rich, scenes shown at a numbing distance and presented at a tortuously slow pace. Yes, this film is like "Elephant" - and a number of other punishingly self-indulgent Gus Van Sant films. Not to mention various low-budget French films I saw in Paris in the Eighties (I mainly remember long shots of people walking down hallways, the echo of their footsteps the only soundtrack). This is, in other words, a parody of many people's worst fantasy of an independent film. It's not exaggerated to say I got to the point where I was actually resenting the film's abuse of my (not overly available) time. As for being "innovative".... if you loved "Last Year at Mariendbad" (1961), this kind of film-making will be right up your alley.