Wassup Rockers
Wassup Rockers, Clark’s latest exercise in teen anthropology, follows the misadventures of seven Latino skaters as they make their way from South Central to Beverly Hills and back again. It’s the least impressive of the Clark features I’ve seen (not including Ken Park, which has never been released in the U.S.), but its flaws are illuminating. Clark first made a name for himself with the photo book Tulsa (1971), whose moody portraits of thieves and junkies influenced Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish. When Clark made the transition to movies he brought to the big screen that same realism and eye for character-defining detail, but the documentary element in his work has always mixed uneasily with the dramatic demands of commercial filmmaking. In Wassup Rockers the conflict is especially pronounced: the first half is a striking piece of photojournalism with little dramatic interest, and the second half is a highly contrived narrative that forfeits any claim to realism.
