After a couple of seconds of quiet, the same person who’d asked me about the movie turned the conversation a different direction, and shortly after that I walked away and sat down and didn’t bother trying to talk to anyone at work again for five years. That part with the leeches was real gross, though.”Įveryone just sort of stood there not doing much of anything, and it was awful and confusing (I didn’t realize I’d mixed the two movies up until an hour or so later).
Serrano? Did you like Lean on Me?” And everyone looked at me, and I looked at her, and then I looked at everyone looking at me, and I said, “For sure, for sure. I answered her thinking about Stand by Me, which is a movie about four boys who hike through the woods to go see a dead body. So when I answered her, I didn’t answer her thinking about Lean on Me, which is a movie where Morgan Freeman plays a principal who turns a school around by yelling at everyone. What I didn’t know was that they were talking about movies about teaching, 1 and I certainly didn’t know I was going to be asked to contribute an opinion about them. Serrano? Did you like Lean on Me?” Now, this caught me off guard a bit. Then, unexpectedly, one of the more outgoing people there attempted to include me in the conversation. So I walked up, stood there for a moment in silence, and things were going very well for me. I didn’t know any of them, but I joined them because while I do not especially care for standing, I do like people and I do like talking and if a situation is made up of more than 65 percent of things that I like then I try to involve myself in it. We were on a short break and some of the people there were standing in a group talking. It was my first year teaching and all the new teachers (there were seven hires that year) were at school a couple of weeks early, before the students arrived, so we could do new teacher training. I remember it very clearly because it was embarrassing for me. Nihilism may be the most fitting attitude in one of these instances, but it is jarring in the others - especially in a film whose interwoven structure suggests an intention to make sense of a world outsiders don’t understand.I’m going to tell you about an actual conversation that I had in 2006. But the screenplay fumbles some attempts to tie things together, offering abrupt moments of violence whose motivations we feel we ought to understand but don’t. The action becomes more familiarly story-driven as the film progresses, especially as we watch Rio’s first encounters with an attractive new student (musician Kelli Wakili, credited here as Kelli Strader).
(An abundance of facial tattoos makes the latter job easier.) The quasi-documentary approach suits Rechenberg’s no-frills, realistic dialogue, but doesn’t keep it from growing mundane over the course of the longish pic. He and DP Lyn Moncrief frame scenes tightly with a handheld camera that tags along restlessly for much of the film, we follow behind characters so much that we can identify the backs of their heads more readily than their faces. Instead, Rechenberg focuses on making us feel like we’re silent observers moving within their world.
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Rio, though seemingly smarter than his peers and gentle at heart, goes along too readily with bad-news acquaintances Flores, a new prison guard getting an education from coworkers in how to abuse his authority, puts up no fight that we see when they make him part of their no-snitching brotherhood.
Though we see enough of each man’s private life to understand his motivations to some extent - even if we hardly sympathize when Miguel violently pushes for increased stature in his aunt’s crime organization - none offers the kind of viewer-surrogate moral framework most films of this sort provide.
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