Movie #38 – American History X (1998) - 119 min, cert 18.
Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) is a major figure amongst the Venice Beach white supremacists. He proudly wears a large tattoo of a swastika on his chest, and preaches hatred of all racial groups that aren’t White Protestant. When two black youths attempt to steal his car one night, he executes them, one of them in a particularly gruesome manner, and gets sent to prison for three years. While inside, he is assigned to work in the laundry, and he gradually develops a bond with a black co-worker. Over time he comes to realise that there is more to a person than the colour of their skin. Upon his release he discovers that his younger brother is following the same path that he himself has already been down and tries to do something about it.
Norton is excellent in a role that he clearly must have bulked up considerably for. Fight Club came out only a year after this, and he was nowhere near as muscular in that. The rest of the cast is pretty one-dimensional, mainly just performing to stereotype. It’s a decent hard-hitting movie with a good shock ending, but I’m not convinced it deserves to be as high up the Top 250 as this.
Score – 7/10. A good film, but not a great one.
At this point I realized that I had accidentally missed a couple of movies out, so I went back to watch them. Therefore, next up is the classic Citizen Kane. This film probably more than any other, is what prompted me to undertake this task in the first place. It’s a film I feel I really ought to have seen, but never really expected to round to otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment