This will eventually be a list of the best 1000 films. This list is definitive. No assistance necessary.
Suburbia (1983)
dir. Penelope Spheeris
To know me is to know the profound love I have for Films Where Not Much Happens. I pretty much detest the hero’s call to action 8 minutes into every movie where they gotta throw off the shackles of mundanity to scale a sheer cliff face and rescue the Martian princess. I like to watch people chillll and navigate themes rather than overcome physical impediments that threaten life’s bounty. Just like in real life, nahmean?
Suburbia doesn’t satisfy that condition the whole way through like Dazed and Confused or The Last Days of Disco ‘cuz this crew’s accumulating a set of grudges that eventually requires a reckoning, but like even when things get heavy here everybody’s pretty much just eased out. You really gotta assume the house they all live in has a secanol cupboard or some other unseen downers.
The story’s a good one. Its animating conflict isn’t cultural or generational friction, which is the case in like every punk/hardcore film. The kids are out on their own ‘cuz their parents used them as whetstones to hone their base impulses or receptacles to dump their stresses, and the Reagan dads who catalyze the film’s climax do so as a result of unemployment simply having afforded them the free time. Overall, an adroit and never heavy-handed indictment of the purported purity of Reagan’s devastating 80s, made just 3 years into them.
The acting’s bad but who gives a fuck. The blacks are inky in the performance footage. TSOL has two great songs in the middle. And D.I.’s Richard Hung Himself at the beginning cements (along with X’s Nausea in The Decline of Western Civilization) Spheeris’ title as The Queen Of Overtures. Also, I just learned from the Z Channel documentary that Spheeris initially met with some money creeps in the valley who wanted to produce a porno movie and she talked them into financing this instead. The fuckin’ audacity of that switcheroo and then delivering this totally great film is kookoo bananas of the fruitiest vintage.
DID YOU KNOW: Spheeris’ own father was murdered after intervening in a race conflict between a white and black man. The white man came back afterwards and stabbed her father to death, a crime for which he served no jail time. It sure as hell looks like she gave the kids (especially the main girl and Flea) instructions on how to broadcast heavy trauma through their facial expressions and other mannerisms. That Spheeris might have the ability to identify those behaviours in herself and repurpose them as direction for young actors would be mind-bending, though that’s all just speculation on my part.
A million stars.
