Cinema
Juice (`15', selected cinemas)
The Cutting Edge (`15', selected cinemas)
BFI New Directors (Metro)
Teen angles
Vanessa Letts
Ienjoyed Juice, which is one of those films-for-teenagers whose good intentions come over as both cynical and calculating. On the one hand it tries to take the glam- our out of gang violence, but on the other it displays enough of it to make sure the bucks roll in. The result is a confusion of tone which the audience found quite funny. But the film survives too much ridicule because it is genuinely slickly made and often deliberately amusing. The characters have their own cool and come out with intriguing new insults such as, 'Man, I was almost your father'.
The story concerns a gang of attractive black youths who dodge school to walk New York's streets of crime. Their Harlem comprehensive is presented as such a frightening place that bunking off seems intelligent. Likewise, when the lads go pinching records, the escapade is fun as well as easy, despite a notice on the door saying 'Shop-lifters will be killed'. But although a certain amount of crime is shown to pay, the makers do their utmost to persuade us that the film is upstanding and moral. They push the line not only that, `All this shit ain't worth it', but, worse, `All this shit might come back on you'.
The shit does come back on rather a large number of characters. Two murders take place, there's a spot of GBH, one per- son falls off a building, presumably to splat on the pavement below, and the hero, Q (Omar Epps), has his faith in humanity more than partially destroyed. Because of
the ambiguities between the film's mes- sage, its setting and the director's sense of humour, the audience was unable to work out what genre it was meant to be, and though it eventually turned into a tragedy. they preferred, with their hearts in their mouths, to take the whole thing as a farce. Juice (this means spunk) seems like the work of a film-maker who is trying things out uncertainly, but who is on the road to getting it right. By contrast, The Cutting Edge, directed by Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky of Starsky and Hutch), is wholly accomplished. This film's aim is to provide unadulterated entertainment for those people who have enough on their plate in real life not to wish to be troubled with thinking once they're in the cinema. Like Juice, this is a teen-pic, only here instead of guns we have ice, and instead of gangs we have lovers. Doug (D.B. Sweeney, v. handsome) is 'one of the finest skaters on the amateur circuit'. When he is beaten up on the rink and loses 18 degrees of his peripheral vision, the doc- tor says to him, 'Doug, I'm sorry, I don't see professional hockey in your future'. Doug forfeits his jock scholarship at Min- nesota State and is sent back to his oikish brother, who runs a bar in the American craplands, full of long-haired truck driver extras whom we've seen in the same bar in a thousand other films. His opposite num- ber, Kate Mosely (Moira Kelly), is an uptown girl, a lonely 'Snow White' who seems to have everything she wants, includ- ing a private ice rink, and yet who is driven mad by a wicked father who cares only for success. Doug is leant on to be her partner as a nancy figure-skater. Naturally the two of them loathe each other, but a little flame is kindled in their hearts. They land up kissing on the rink in anticipation of Winning the Olympics. One other critical theme in this film is the Star-spangled Ban- ner. Though I loved every minute of The Cutting Edge, I did, for once in my life, for the added pleasure that this would have brought to the watching experience, wish that I too was AN AMERICAN.
Back to earth, the BFI New Directors season has dreary people making shoes out co! bits of old rubbish, talking about Victo- ria sponges and wondering privately whether or not they're gay. The only really enjoyable one of these shorts is set in Brix- ton and stars Charlie as 'Beefy', a British bulldog with a coat that looks like lemon velvet. By way of contrast to Juice, though It too revolves around a crew of black lads, 11,14 blic Enemy, Private Friends is straight- forwardly affectionate about their desper- ate attempts to be cool. At the end, instead of gore and bloodletting it's a relief to have 20d speaking cheerfully from a little crack in the clouds of a South London sky.
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