The Beat
Original post date: 6 June 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
This was another last-minute substitution at the Seattle film festival. (There were so many last-minute schedule changes during the last week that the waggish deputy director was calling it the Seattle International Film Fiasco.) So what could a movie called The Beat be about? Disco music? Police? Punk rock? Try Jack Kerouac. This movie isn’t about Jack Kerouac, but that seems to be the kind of Beat they’re talking about. This is based on a play, and you can tell, although they’ve opened it up quite a bit. It plays sort of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an inner city high school. The lives of some street gang kids are changed when a new kid (Rex) moves into the neighborhood. It’s hard to tell whether Rex is crazy or a genius or both. Sometimes he sounds like a Kerouac for the Eighties. Sometimes he sounds like he’s read too many Marvel comic books. And sometimes he’s just really weird. But he becomes almost a mystical prophet for the other kids who, it turns out, are really poets deep in their souls when they’re not knifing each other in alleys. Very strange and very haunting film. No familiar faces except for John Savage as a dedicated English teacher, who is the only faculty member who does not want Rex locked up.
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
This was another last-minute substitution at the Seattle film festival. (There were so many last-minute schedule changes during the last week that the waggish deputy director was calling it the Seattle International Film Fiasco.) So what could a movie called The Beat be about? Disco music? Police? Punk rock? Try Jack Kerouac. This movie isn’t about Jack Kerouac, but that seems to be the kind of Beat they’re talking about. This is based on a play, and you can tell, although they’ve opened it up quite a bit. It plays sort of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an inner city high school. The lives of some street gang kids are changed when a new kid (Rex) moves into the neighborhood. It’s hard to tell whether Rex is crazy or a genius or both. Sometimes he sounds like a Kerouac for the Eighties. Sometimes he sounds like he’s read too many Marvel comic books. And sometimes he’s just really weird. But he becomes almost a mystical prophet for the other kids who, it turns out, are really poets deep in their souls when they’re not knifing each other in alleys. Very strange and very haunting film. No familiar faces except for John Savage as a dedicated English teacher, who is the only faculty member who does not want Rex locked up.
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