BEFORE: Linking from "The Brave One", character actor Lenny Venito, perhaps most famous for being in "The Sopranos", was also in "Rounders" with Edward Norton (last seen in "The Italian Job").
THE PLOT: A former neo-nazi skinhead tries to prevent his younger brother from going down the same wrong path that he did.
AFTER: I'm still trying to come off of vacation time and re-integrate myself into society - but I'm viewing everything through the lens of vacation sensibilities. There's something very selfish about being on vacation, of course, when all you want to do is have experiences in various locations, base the trip around the things YOU want to see, and YOU want to eat.
This selfishness can be seen in full force in any airport, which is full of people asking, "Where is MY seat upgrade?" and "When can I get MY bags off the carousel?" and "Where is MY beverage/blanket/headphones/packet of peanuts?" On the plane, I like to just go to my seat, look out the window, read a magazine and not cause any trouble, but I appear to be in the minority. On the way back from Florida we were surrounded by a kid behind us who did not realize that kicking the seat could be felt by the people ahead of her, a guy who kept getting up from his seat to either take off or put on an article of clothing from the overhead bin, throwing his bag onto the seat each time with incredible force, and people ahead of us who refused to put their seats in the complete upright position during take-off - don't they know that can cause a fiery death for all of the other passengers?
Perhaps I'm more aware of this since I live in New York, which means co-existing in close quarters with other people. One man's ceiling is another man's floor - and the smell of decomposition can carry through a vent from one apartment to another. So what the police might call "improper disposal of a corpse" can also be viewed as being downright considerable toward one's neighbors.
My point is, people are not always aware of the impact that their actions have on others - which brings me to skinheads. Norton's character in this film cannot see the results of his racist actions, at least not until he gets sent to prison for killing two black men who might have been stealing his car.
This is another film where the scenes are not presented in proper order, instead they're dumped in front of the audience like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and we're forced to assemble it ourselves. We see Derek Vinyard released from prison, then later we see the actions that sent him there, and even later still we learn who planted the seeds of racism in his mind, and what actions led to another change of attitude.
The present scenes are depicted in color, and the past scenes are in black and white, which is a help, but plenty of problems still result from the randomness of the format. You know exactly what I'm going to say about this, right? I strongly believe that if the narrative were presented in linear fashion, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. At least, that's what the director believed, or was led to believe. Defending the scrambling of the timeline as an artistic choice, is a shortcut, a narrative crutch or a cover-up for a weak story. Why make people sit through a three-year prison sentence, it's not like you can just put writing on the screen that says "Three years later". Oh, wait, yes, you can.
Once I (finally) got all the pieces of the puzzle, I was left questioning whether Derek's transformation out of the racist lifestyle was sincere or not. What changed Derek's outlook more - his prison friendship with a black man, or the violent retaliation he received for that at the hands of the white Supremacists? The desire to not see his younger brother in a violent gang, or the realization that both gangs, black and white, might be gunning for him? So what appears to be a softening of his racism could be merely self-preservation.
And because of the mixed-up timestream, it's difficult to assign a cause/effect relationship to Vinyard's racism and subsequent transformation, and the events that take place later (or is it before?).
And without that, then any points the film strove to make about racism got pretty muddled as well.
We may take pride in our country's freedom of speech, but then what about hate speech? People are still free to think whatever they want, which is why it's taken so many decades to deal with racism. You can enforce a person's actions, but changing minds is much more difficult. I once caught my grandmother sort of sticking up for Hitler, I think she said he just "took things a bit too far". (ya think?) Grams came from a different time, obviously, and left Germany well before Hitler was elected. Of course I don't share her feelings, but I do think that the real takeaway should be that we should all support struggling artists, because there are probably a few of them that you wouldn't want to resort to entering politics.
Relating back to the events of last week, did we Americans collectively think that we could wage a war for over a decade in 2 foreign countries without any long-term repercussions? That we could kill, directly or indirectly, large numbers of people of various ethnicities without creating more anti-American sentiment? Yes, it appears that's exactly what we thought. Whether that represents an appalling level of jingoism or just a fatal misunderstanding of world affairs, I don't know. But it's another example of not realizing the impact of certain actions.
Also starring Edward Furlong (last seen in "The Green Hornet"), Beverly D'Angelo (an F.O.B., last seen in "The House Bunny"), Avery Brooks, Jennifer Lien, Ethan Suplee (last seen in "Unstoppable"), Fairuza Balk (last seen in "Return to Oz"), Stacy Keach (last seen in "W."), Elliott Gould (last seen in "Contagion").
RATING: 5 out of 10 tattoos
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