Threat is putting the ‘die' back in indie
MONTREAL (CUP) -- In an era when “indie” films are made with $20 million budgets and garner Golden Globes and Oscars, Threat is a film to remind us what the term used to mean.
Its no-budget, DIY production values and fuck you attitude hark back to the days of Easy Rider and Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, garage-made Molotov cocktails hurled from the dark edges of the zeitgeist right at the heart of timid mainstream sensibility. The problem today is that mainstream sensibility is no longer timid. We've been listening attentively to rumblings from hippies, punks, hardcore rappers, urban and suburban malcontents and all other manner of subversive voices for so many years that fuck-the-status-quo messages are no more novel or attention-grabbing than car commercials. What's a film like Threat to do?
In an age when Che Guevera shirts are worn by high school jocks, the sort of generalized rebellion towards society that Threat promulgates seems re-warmed and stale leftovers from the era of Reagan punk or the days before gangsta rappers had their own shoe brands. Is it possible to make genuinely subversive films anymore? Has the American pop culture spirit that brought us hippies, punks and hip-hop been turned into a theme park?
Watching Threat's characters sit around and spew monologues of derision against society, capitalism, the government and their parents, I felt like I was watching something embalmed.
Threat was made by Kings Mob, a New York based production company, and written and directed by Katie Nisa and Matt Pizzolo. All the main cast members served double duty as crew; this is a film made for little money and against great obstacles, strictly for the love. It's a hardscrabble film, shot on cheap video with noticeably non-pro actors, but the love that its makers put into it burns on the screen (if anything can really be said to "burn" onscreen with video). The movie has a belief in its characters and their situations that gives it a winning integrity.
It focuses on a dozen or so characters, hip-hoppers and punks living in NYC's Lower East Side. Not really much of a plot-oriented movie, Threat follows them to and from their jobs, apartments and homeless flops as they grumble and pontificate about life, existence and "society." Yes, the s-word is thrown around several times in the film, giving this viewer a feeling of nostalgic regret—this time-worn catchphrase used by so many punk rockers and "conscious" rappers back in the day feels quaint and clichéd in 2006.
It seems more the fault of "society" itself than this integrity-infused but ill-fated movie that the phrase has so little effect now. The key characters in the film are Jim (Carlos Puga), a homeless straight-edge punk, and Fred (Keith Middleton), a black hip-hopper, who both work in a comic and record store. On the periphery of the narrative lurk about a dozen-odd characters in the hip-hop or hardcore scenes, who we get to casually observe as they meet, give pounds, talk shit and get into fights.
One of these fights turns deadly thanks to the presence of guns. It's this event that's made into the main event of the film, but it comes off as kind of an arbitrary point of focus—as if to give the filmmakers a centre their loosely structured, episodic film didn't really need in the first place—as well as a jumping-off point for a message about how disenfranchised youth should aim their anger at, uh, "society" instead of each other.
The film ends two days after the shooting, with Jim's voiceover speaking out in favour of turning guns on the powers that be as he and a friend randomly grab a guy in a business suit and smash a bottle over his head. If this is Kings Mob's idea of an original or constructive call to arms then maybe it's not so hard to figure out how the revolution failed and punk rock rebellion got co-opted by car companies and Wal-Mart.
Its no-budget, DIY production values and fuck you attitude hark back to the days of Easy Rider and Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, garage-made Molotov cocktails hurled from the dark edges of the zeitgeist right at the heart of timid mainstream sensibility. The problem today is that mainstream sensibility is no longer timid. We've been listening attentively to rumblings from hippies, punks, hardcore rappers, urban and suburban malcontents and all other manner of subversive voices for so many years that fuck-the-status-quo messages are no more novel or attention-grabbing than car commercials. What's a film like Threat to do?
In an age when Che Guevera shirts are worn by high school jocks, the sort of generalized rebellion towards society that Threat promulgates seems re-warmed and stale leftovers from the era of Reagan punk or the days before gangsta rappers had their own shoe brands. Is it possible to make genuinely subversive films anymore? Has the American pop culture spirit that brought us hippies, punks and hip-hop been turned into a theme park?
Watching Threat's characters sit around and spew monologues of derision against society, capitalism, the government and their parents, I felt like I was watching something embalmed.
Threat was made by Kings Mob, a New York based production company, and written and directed by Katie Nisa and Matt Pizzolo. All the main cast members served double duty as crew; this is a film made for little money and against great obstacles, strictly for the love. It's a hardscrabble film, shot on cheap video with noticeably non-pro actors, but the love that its makers put into it burns on the screen (if anything can really be said to "burn" onscreen with video). The movie has a belief in its characters and their situations that gives it a winning integrity.
It focuses on a dozen or so characters, hip-hoppers and punks living in NYC's Lower East Side. Not really much of a plot-oriented movie, Threat follows them to and from their jobs, apartments and homeless flops as they grumble and pontificate about life, existence and "society." Yes, the s-word is thrown around several times in the film, giving this viewer a feeling of nostalgic regret—this time-worn catchphrase used by so many punk rockers and "conscious" rappers back in the day feels quaint and clichéd in 2006.
It seems more the fault of "society" itself than this integrity-infused but ill-fated movie that the phrase has so little effect now. The key characters in the film are Jim (Carlos Puga), a homeless straight-edge punk, and Fred (Keith Middleton), a black hip-hopper, who both work in a comic and record store. On the periphery of the narrative lurk about a dozen-odd characters in the hip-hop or hardcore scenes, who we get to casually observe as they meet, give pounds, talk shit and get into fights.
One of these fights turns deadly thanks to the presence of guns. It's this event that's made into the main event of the film, but it comes off as kind of an arbitrary point of focus—as if to give the filmmakers a centre their loosely structured, episodic film didn't really need in the first place—as well as a jumping-off point for a message about how disenfranchised youth should aim their anger at, uh, "society" instead of each other.
The film ends two days after the shooting, with Jim's voiceover speaking out in favour of turning guns on the powers that be as he and a friend randomly grab a guy in a business suit and smash a bottle over his head. If this is Kings Mob's idea of an original or constructive call to arms then maybe it's not so hard to figure out how the revolution failed and punk rock rebellion got co-opted by car companies and Wal-Mart.
