Havoc (Unrated Version)
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Movie Reviews of Havoc (Unrated Version)
Movie Review: The premise hits home, everything else doesn't
Summary: 3 Stars
Many films try to get inside the teenage mind. What makes kids have sex with guys they just met an hour earlier at a party? Or for them to try out drugs and drink till they pass out? Quite frankly I don't want to know. I never was interested in that kind of lifestyle but many are. Havoc tries to get into that mind, in particular the odd subculture of the wigga, meaning rich white kids trying to be gangster and street. The premise is intriguing but ugh it goes nowhere.
Allison(a regrettably miscast Anne Hathaway) is one of those rich white girls who leads a boring life. Since nothing exciting happens she joins an odd subculture called wiggers, where they try to be like a gang, even with their own name. On a ride to get weed with her friend Emily(Bijou Phillips, who oddly seems comfortable in these roles) and boyfriend, things go awry when the boyfriend accuses the dealer Hector(an unrecognizable Freddy Rodriguez from Six Feet Under). Oddly Allison develops a fascination with it.
This grows even more when she keeps following him around and doing what I call the accidental stalker.("oh what are you doing here?") comes to mind, since you knew they were there. Anyways Allison and her friend want in only they go through a ritual involving sex and numbers on a dice. Things don't go as planned and they all get a reality check.
Of course one of the big draws of the film isn't the message of the film, but rather star Anne Hathaway disrobes. 3 times actually. She's a bit miscast since after going from Princess Diaries to this it's too much of a change. Other actresses do sort of serious work gradually and then do a 180 role and we accept it since it's not a change. Here it's like Disney......to being naked and giving oral sex in the back of a car. The other actors do their part well but there's not really any standouts, except maybe Freddy Rodriguez. Of course my highlight is Shiri Appleby. Just her face is enough to keep me entertained. Lamentably she doesn't have a whole lot of screen time.
The one issue that I have is the ending. It's so truncated, sudden and leaves you with a feeling of emptiness. There's not a real closure for any of the characters and their fates are never dealt with. This might tie into the feeling of their fates aren't determined just like life but this is either lazy filmmaking or wannabe artsiness.
I can understand the idea behind the film which is teenagers tend to go towards something that is not always the best idea so the message gets across, just not the film itself.
Movie Review: it has its particular pleasures
Summary: 3 Stars
This is one of those well-meaning movies made by well-intentioned people trying to comment on important social phenomena that winds up accidentally undercutting everything it wants to say by its flawed execution. The funniest thing about Havoc is that it was made by Barbara Kopple who is well known for making quality documentaries, yet it feels so resoundingly and thoroughly fake throughout (and of course Stephen Gaghan is sort of the current reigning writing champion of real yet simultaneously somehow very fake, which I say as someone who quite liked Syriana).
One really terrible decision (and I don't know whether to blame this on Gaghan or the original story) was to have a student making a movie about his fellow students in the movie. The idea was presumably supposed to be that it would allow for things/facts/themes to be said by the actors straight to the "documentary" camera that would have been difficult to establish quickly through dialogue but the result is a disaster where none of the people addressing the "documentary" seem to be coming from reality or talking like actual human beings. The only payoff for this decision is a great scene where Hathaway torments the young male filmmaker by flaunting her sexuality in front of him but on the whole, it was not a good decision to use this device.
As someone has already commented, the teens behaving badly scenes here are like slickly hollywoodized renditions of moments from Larry Clark's indie Kids (and note that Bijou Phillips also already appeared behaving badly in Clark's other kids behaving badly movie Bully); but then perhaps that's just a difference between New York and La La Land and perhaps this movie is a lot more real about L.A. than I know as an east coaster. The key to really enjoying Havoc is not to take it all that seriously and then you can have a very good time with it; try to think of it as an kind of overheated teen delinquency 50s-style melodrama. Hathaway is very pretty and tries hard with this movie; I admire her for taking the part and for gracing us with glimpses of her bared lovely skin. And some individual scenes are in fact pretty compelling or touching on their own, just in a rather exaggerated aftershool-special melodramatic way. So my advice is, don't go into Havoc expecting serious commentary on the state of our youth today and just take what fun it gives you.
Movie Review: So this is what happens when white suburbia gets...bored?
Summary: 3 Stars
I think I can speak for 'almost' every white kid when I say we've all been through that 'wigger' stage. I went through it, my friends went through it, I grew out of it, my friends grew out of it. The point is that every quote unquote white kid gets curious. From the start of this film that's how these kids appear. Curious. One of the kids, Eric (O'Leary), is documenting it, trying to understand the whole phenomenon. The problem is that some of these posers tend to take themselves to seriously. I never took myself seriously when I played ghetto, because I knew I wasn't. These kids think they can play hard.
Allie (Hathaway) and her best friend Emily (Phillips) find out the hard way that just because you dress the part doesn't mean you can handle it. As members of an all white LA gang with their boyfriends Toby (Vogel) and Sam (Gordon-Levitt in a hilarious scene stealing role), who they are growing bored with, Allie and Emily think their life is the real deal. When they meet by chance members of a real Latino gang called '16 Street' they are brought to the realization that they're so called ghetto life is NOT the real deal. It's fake...and they don't want fake anymore. Allie and Emily get as deep as they can into this street life, Allie growing fonder and fonder of gang member Hector (Rodriguez) until something happens that tears riffs in the fabric of their new society.
'Havoc' attempts to shed light on our dying youth, exposing what our teens are really thinking and doing while their rich parents are attempting suicide and attending marriage counseling. For the most part is does a good job, mostly because Hathaway and Phillips are so convincing. I'm mostly intrigued by Bijou's character for she really was more of the follower who got caught up in the game, and she had a role that could have easily been pushed aside and forgotten but she made it her own and shown almost as big as Hathaway. At times the movie is humorous when watching these white kids, especially Toby and Sam, try and convince Eric they are serious, and it kinda reminds me of Jamie Kennedy in `Malibu's Most Wanted', but Hathaway and Phillips make up for that with dead on sincerity. So not all kids are like this, not all white kids wanna play gangsta, but some of them do...
Movie Review: ooh, la, la, la bamba meets the 21 Jump Street episode wherein Johnny Depp in hair net and khakis says "Orale!" constantly
Summary: 3 Stars
Ritchie Valens from the wrong side - the CHICANO side of LA meets a pretty privileged white chick and they fall madly in love and he writes a song about how precious his Lady in White is to him. The spirit of La Bamba permeates this film insofar as we are supposed to understand how Anne Hathaway genuinely "shares a moment" for her Ritchie Valens. I have no idea what the characters' names are in this movie but everyone is familiar. Laura San Giacomo is in it, Reese from Terminator is in it, boy from Third Rock From the Sun and busty loosey goosey teen is played again by no longer a teen Bijou Phillips. I thank them all for doing this public service announcement about treating thug life as a consumer product.
I feel so sorry for that young looking Hispanic actor who had to play the Ritchie Valens part in this movie complete with the big man walk. I think he even did that cigarette drag and unplug that shows you are tough. If the characters had been permitted to have a real romance, we would have been favored with close ups of tears standing in his eyes and the line in his cheek from biting down on his back teeth during moments of romantic misunderstanding. This movie also has the 40-something year old actor who played the surviving marine in Clear and Present Danger. Unfortunately, Esai Morales is too busy doing phone card commercials on Spanish television to participate in this amazing film.
Obviously, the Socs from Pacific Palisades can't take on Sabor Latino so I think a sequel/crossover is called for where the Socs bring in the Southies from Good Will Hunting.
p.s. Anne Hathaway raps or sings some gangsta moll song early in the movie. She does a lot of acting with her eyes in this movie resembling a pretty fit Liza Minnelli and is the main reason that this movie is not terrible. It's not too heavy or embarassing or violent to be "important" and therefore unwatchable. This movie is a needed postscript to Clueless and 90210 because it is effective in a way that typical rich kids are decadent and too fast for their own good movies such as Cruel Intentions can't get past nubile prettiness, expensive clothes and real estate for the audience to understand that their situation is terrible and wrong.
Movie Review: Yes, Anne Hathaway is 'nude', but there was also a movie....
Summary: 3 Stars
Obviously the main draw of this DVD is the fact that Anne Hathaway appears 'nude'. However, if your expecting all out full-frontal nudity and borderline porno scenes with Hathaway---think again. Several scenes (most notably the one with Hathaway and Philips in the bedroom) had oh so much potential, but in the end there are simply a few scenes of Hathaway topless. (a lot more of Philips)
Now, on to the movie...
This is an interesting topic to make a film about...wiggers AKA white kids with too much time and money. Ironically the term is mostly used by white people to label other white people. Anyways, THIS particular film did not achieve anything spectacular. The story begins with 2 'crews' arguing with each other and introduces us to the PTC (Hathaway's crew). The story itself is not very interesting (white kids go to the hood and get involved with a gang), but, surprisingly, the film is entertaining to watch.
The character's themselves (in the beginning) were a little to close to 'Malibu's Most Wanted' to fully embrace this movie as a drama and care about them. Also, as the story progresses, not enough effort is put into learning about or developing the characters. (More details about Hathaway's character in the beginning would have been great)This is unfortunate becuase later in the film, it would have been helpful to care a little more about these people. The characters really only start to become more than two dimensional in the last 25 minutes or so. Anne Hathaway and Bijou Philips were good on screen together and had the most authentic feeling relationship in the entire movie.
Overall, this film definitely had potential to be a good film and could have been done wonders with a few more plot intricacies and more character development. But, as is, I would RENT this movie instead of purchasing it.