Wated on the Young

Yesterday I whisked my lovely hard working friend away from her workplace early and raced down to the Sun Theatre in Yarraville because it was the last day they were playing this

and I really wanted to see it. Two weeks it ran for at Nova, pathetic really considering it is Australian and everything the critics have said about it has been positive, yet people still won't go and see it. Anyway, let's get back to the film.

We had the cinema to ourselves so we had the comfort of being in a homely-living-room type setting which allowed us to whisper about what we were watching and to exult shocked squeals without reserve when shocking events prevailed. I was not prepared for the level of violence in the film at all and I sat clenched and anxious the entire film thinking someone was going to shoot some one else, or get shot themselves.

The themes dealt with in the film are rather intense but fitting considering the school yard and cyber bullying epidemic news and current affairs programs have told us is going on right now. In fact this epidemic has gotten so bad that the clip of an Australian boy fighting back against his supposed bully going viral was headline news on NBC in America.

This film basically centres around two step brothers - Zack is the cool, rich sporty, jocky guy who holds parties in his mansion for everyone on a seemingly weekly basis, and Darren the dorky, sciencey brother who stays in his room when the parties are on doing his physics homework. The parents of these boys are no where to be seen and the popular Zack has been getting away with too much for too long. When the beautiful and intellectual Xandrie develops a crush on Darren, Zack and his band of sluts and thugs decide she needs to be taught a lesson about the social hierarchy of the school. Drugged by Zack's two slutty girlfriend's and lured into the out of bounds basement of the house by the boys, you can basically guess what happens next.

In such a modern world, it doesn't take long for rumours to start spreading around the school, and that's when things really get crazy. I found the flashes of "what if" moments clunky and distracting, making it a little hard to follow what was actually happening in the film or in the imaginations of the character's, but these moments did work to make the tension almost unbearable.

The story twisted and turned and ended rather unexpectedly, which was refreshing, but overall I found the film rather surreal. The lack of adult figures throughout made the school setting almost fantastic and the film rather bizarre. I have been thinking about it non-stop since though, so I guess it did it's job.