Something wonderful happens about 45 minutes into Wassup Rockers, the nutso new film by teen-exploiter Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). Now, this may seem like a long time to indulge any film, especially one by Clark, who fills the first half with the kind of pervy details we’ve come to expect from him: shirtless 14-year-old boys speaking laconically to the camera; excruciatingly long vrit skateboarding sequences (these kids are Latino South Centralites); a suspicious number of torso close-ups.
But suddenly, we find the boys on a bus to Beverly Hills. They disembark, planting their boards on the well-manicured sidewalks, and seem to roar into an entirely new movie, a sex comedy from the silliest reaches of 1980s bizarritude. (This is praise, in case you’re wondering.) Cute white girls check out the invading horde and invite them back to their luxe homes; asshole snobs with gelled haircuts roust them out of their sisters’ bedrooms and the cycle begins anew, always to jackhammer punk music.
If this is Clark’s idea of class commentary, we can only raise our 40s to his deceased sense of nuance, which was already on life support. The most delirious stuff is yet to come: A drunken trophy wife (Janice Dickinson!) lures one of the boys into a hot tub; a scowling, gun-toting mansion dweller—with a slanderous resemblance to a certain Oscar-winning director—shoots another one down. Only Spanish-speaking maids offer any help. The rest of Hollywood wants them dead or in bed. Cutting? Try totally bonkers. Who cares if Clark was in on the joke? (Opens Fri; Angelika.)—Joshua Rothkopf