Tweets ahead: Detention (2011).

Before we proceed, it should also be noted that Detention is a movie that, on paper, I thought I would absolutely hate. Everything I read described it as a fast-paced, disorienting paean to the mash-up age, a kind of Scream for the Twitter era. And while this description is apt, it also fails to do justice to what makes this movie so special: namely, its middle-finger intelligence (pictured), kinetic visual style, and a boundless enthusiasm that manages to break through its own Kevlar vest of referential irony to deliver something surprisingly thoughtful, and even touching.

But Detention is very much a love-it-or-hate-it movie. The algorithmic magic of Rotten Tomatoes suggests that coin-flip figure should be revised upward: I was honestly a little surprised to find that the film has a lowly 31% rating. But the user reviews tell a different story, with Detention earning a solid 66%.

Is this evidence of the yawning generation gap between a stodgy cadre of baby boomer film critics and a younger viewership of smartphone-wielding teenage hooligans? Or is it the same old critical snobbery towards anything even resembling horror that we've seen hundreds of times before?

Sony Pictures gamely attempts to summarize Detention as an "apocalyptic fantasy, horror, science fiction, action-thriller, body swapping, time-traveling teen romantic comedy", but even this mouthful falls short of capturing the film's dizzying sweep. Put simply, Detention is the teen movie to end all teen movies.

It's a 500 MPH live-action comic book gene-splice, with dominant and recessive traits from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Skins, John Hughes, Shaun of the Dead, Degrassi (if upgraded to a hard R), Heathers, Mark Millar, Buckaroo Banzai, Clueless, and about a thousand other reference points that whiz by like bullets fired from a pop culture AK-47.

In the growing pantheon of self-aware horror films, Detention occupies a unique niche: it may not be quite as charming as Shaun of the Dead or as artfully composed as Behind the Mask, but it has so much youthful zeal and raw energy that it nonetheless shoots straight to the head of the pack. And compared to, say, Shaun of the Dead's expert mix of horror and humor—a balance which could probably be confirmed by an electron microscope—Detention leans much further towards comedy, with the horror usually arriving as a welcome, bloody surprise.

I really think the closest point of comparison for Detention's singular style is Dan Harmon's brilliant and beloved sitcom Community, which seems to win critical esteem in direct proportion to how fast Detention loses it. Grizzly Lake and Greendale CC feel like they come from the same universe: the "schmitty"-spouting teen twerps that torment Jeff and Britta in one episode could have escaped from Riley's science class, and a slightly younger Abed would blend seamlessly into the film's cast (where he would instantly recognize Riley's Angela Chase costume at Sander's party).

Yet Community earns endless (and well-deserved!) critical accolades while Detention languishes, far from earning even a "Fresh" rating. Why? Again, blame the generation gap: while Community often culls material from fare like My Dinner With Andre or John Woo's The Killer, Detention's more masscult sensibility alludes to decidedly gauche sources like Steven Seagal or Saw.

But one piece of Detention's technicolor pop mosaic stands out to me as evidence of the subtle taste and sophistication that makes it so special: despite very ample opportunity, filmmaker Joseph Kahn resists the impulse to make his Breakfast Club references anything but oblique. Like fireworks prior to child safety regulations, postmodernism is a dangerous toy: witness the cloying, candy-binge preciousness of Juno, or the painfully try-hard pyrotechnics of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. But Detention is the movie that these and many other entries of the past few years were supposed to be.

Sometimes Detention admittedly feels more like a series of vignettes than a movie, and towards the end the quantum whipcracks of the plot do become a little vertigo-inducing. But that's all part of the fun, and also part of the point in a movie which features at least half a dozen kitchen sinks. 

Plus, it's hard to complain when there are so many loopy highlights: a hilariously left-field, Spider-Man style digression regarding the origins of "TV Hand"; a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie; a deadpan tour through 19 years of pop fashion courtesty of "the silent enigma" Elliot Fink (Detention's equivalent of Pulp Fiction's dance contest); and the alien abduction of an extraterrestrial, time-traveling bear. (Yes, really.)

So, watch Detention. Realize that there's a good chance you'll hate it—but if you do, you can at least take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. 

Then again, maybe you're just old.

The Gun Speaks: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)

This is a longform review of the film The Baader-Meinhof Complex that I wrote shortly after it was released on DVD. I ran across it recently and was surprised to discover that, unlike how it sometimes goes with writings of your own that you return to later, I still stand by it completely and feel like I sort of hit the nail on the head here. Thus, reposted!

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I spent an entire summer when I was in college researching left-wing terrorism in the ’60s and ’70s. This meant five or six hours a day in my school’s library, poring over every resource I could find that had even the most tenuous connection to the RAF, the Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, etc. I tried to put myself into the mindset of students who moved from staging protests and chanting slogans to planting bombs and taking hostages; I tried to understand the warped logic that led to grisly massacres such as the attack on Tel Aviv Airport in 1972. (If you played the last Call of Duty game, that attack is the closest real world corollary to—and the probable inspiration for—“No Russian.”)

My work had a particular emphasis on the Red Army Faction, who to me were always the most interesting group of the era. In some ways the RAF were unexceptional: they weren’t as politically potent as the Red Brigades or ETA, as bloodthirsty as the Japanese Red Army, or as psychedelically deranged as the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patti Hearst kidnapping and brainwashing infamy). But the RAF personified the self-absorbed romanticism of the western “urban guerilla”, stretching an intellectually paper-thin justification over what was in reality a brutal crime spree. And the group’s charismatic, loudmouthed ringleader Andreas Baader (alongside Carlos the Jackal, who he resembled in a great many ways) is the closest the western New Left ever came to having its own homegrown Che Guevara.

As such, my interest was instantly piqued watching the 2009 Oscars, when I heard that a German film called The Baader-Meinhof Complex had been nominated for best foreign language film. I'd somehow missed this movie entirely, but the title alone announced the film’s historical credibility to me: it’s the name of the definitive book on the RAF, and the key source for my research paper. Written by a former Der Spiegel editor named Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is an exhaustively detailed page turner chronicling the RAF phenomenon from the inside out, written by someone who was there. (Aust actually rescued Ulrike Meinhof’s orphaned daughters from a camp in Palestine, winning him death threats from the RAF in the process.)

Having finally seen the movie, I’m happy to say that it’s easily one of the most historically accurate films I’ve ever seen, while also managing to present a captivating yarn equal to the best thrillers. What impressed me most about the film was how perfectly the actors captured the outsized personalities of the figures in question. Martina Gedeck’s Ulrike Meinhof is the kind of engaged intellectual whose critical faculties fail her completely as she is swept in a wave of violent nihilism that she increasingly struggles to justify, both to herself and the world. As Gudrun Ensslin, Johanna Wokalek embodies the shrill, hectoring intransigence that veiled brutality in a cloak of dialectical rhetoric and self-righteousness.

But best of all is Moritz Bleibtreu, as the incomparable Andreas Baader. A surprisingly intelligent, sulky, and privileged mama’s boy, Baader was defined by his macho, anti-intellectual ferocity, dominating the group through sheer volume and bullying any dissenters into complying. While Meinhof and Ensslin both seemed to possess keener intellects than Baader, he commanded the RAF with bullying charisma and force of will, and Bleibtreu brings him to roaring, scenery-chewing life.

The film also captures the heightened atmosphere of the period perfectly, with the protest over the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin setting the stage for what is to come. The raw political theater of the street melee is removed from the dry accounts of newspaper archives and comes to bloody life before us; it’s as real as any battle in Lord of the Rings, and no goblin has ever seemed as menacing as the small group of smartly-dressed Iranian counter-demonstrators striding towards the barricades, snapping the handles off of their placards to use as clubs.

Inevitably, a film such as this will omit certain things, and as I mentally checked off each turning point in the RAF’s lifespan as it played out before me on screen, one major event was missing: Jean-Paul Sartre’s visit to Baader in prison. The decision here is understandable: attempting to present such a major historical personality so late in the film would risk derailing the story. But the event always stood out to me as a singular expression of the intellectual irresponsibility of Sartre and other European Communists who went to any length to apologize for atrocities committed on the road to socialism. Best of all was Baader’s estimation of the philosopher, who he said above all else gave “the overwhelming impression of age.”

In a welcome break from most films about the era, The Baader-Meinhof Complex uses period music only sparingly. When Baader and fresh recruit Peter-Jürgen Boock race down the highway to the strains of “My Generation”, the song suddenly seems fresh again—and it seems to say more about Baader’s ideological stance than any number of Frankfurt School theorists ever could.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an extremely graphic film, but it refuses to stylize any of its bloodshed. The violence is instead awkward and amateurish; none of the principals have been trained or conditioned to kill, but instead have chosen to, and the clumsy murders we see effectively convey the severity of the decision to “take up the gun.” At the same time, the film shows restraint, depicting the effects of the group’s actions mostly through montage and brief snatches of footage—effectively putting us into the RAF’s shoes, as they watched the fruits of their vicious labors on the evening news.

As viewers, we are left us with no easy answers. The film does not moralize, but largely because it does not need to; the RAF’s guns and bombs speak for themselves, defensible only to the most critically numb of fellow travelers. While it takes no more of an explicit stand on the issue of the first generation’s deaths at Stammheim prison than Aust’s book does, the implicit message is another story. We witness the despair over the “Dead Section” where the group is detained (in conditions that contemporary viewers raised on crime movies will likely find shockingly accommodating; the cells look more like studio apartments), and it’s hard not to see a group suicide as a fitting, final act of irrational aggression, striking out at the only target left to them.

The film ends with a sense of interruption, rather than closure. This is fitting, since the Stammheim suicides offered no closure for the families of the RAF’s victims, who didn’t even get the luxury of a verdict. And even as Baader and company are discovered dead in their cells, the next generation of the RAF—to say nothing of their contemporaries in groupls like the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground—still roamed free, plotting the next robbery, bombing, kidnapping, or hijacking. We are left with the familiar fact that terrorism didn’t die with the end of the ’70s and the ascent of neoliberalism, or even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the purported “end of history”—it remains all too apparently with us today.