Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen BAD EXCUSES MOVIES FOR TEENAGERS A TEENAGE girl I know-she's fifteen, I think-saw an invitation to a preview of Bad Boys on my desk. "That's just the kind of movie I would hate," she said....
...It was as if, young as she is, she already knew better than what this movie had to tell her...
...Don't dream," Michael tells her solemnly...
...De Lello didn't invent this sort of coincidence...
...This girl's opinions carry a certain weight with me...
...As Michael arrives, amidst thunder and lightning, at the youth correctional facility to which he has been sentenced, what emerges from the van door is not the boy himself, but a pair of sneakers and leg irons in tight close-up...
...There is also an intentional heavy-handedness in the way director Rick Rosen-thai deals with visual detail...
...He must think he has to give it special glare in order to get through to moviegoers drowsing in the haze of their own hormones...
...I thought that was the neatest thing I'd ever read, as you can tell from the fact that I remember it still...
...In the next scene in which we see him, he uses the proceeds from the muggings to buy an illegal handgun...
...Your teens are when the pastels used for the illustration in the storybooks you read as a child deepen into more lurid colors-the splatter of blood on a wall that Rosen-thai shows us in another of his thumping close-ups, or the red suit that Michael's girlfriend J.C...
...Maybe they need equally clumsy stories to satisfy them...
...This is an image to which the movie cuts at the moment when Paco and a friend rape Michael's girl beneath the El line...
...The crude imagery makes a plea for us to accept the coarseness of the lives we see here, even to admire it...
...In the first place, it has commercial motive, which is to preserve the MPAA rating that certifies Bad Boys for teenage audiences...
...I can't stand movies like that...
...In the second place, showing us this garish metaphor in place of the incident for which it stands is a way to hedge about the inclusion of such material in the plot...
...The modesty that this cut-away represents, as if the filmmakers would avert our eyes, is a false gesture...
...I don't know whether the girl who babysits for my daughter actually guessed that a film like this must have a rape scene in it-a scene whose only point is to say, "Well, that's the way it is, such things happen...
...I feel that way myself...
...You see, the real problems of teenagers are universal...
...Even if the scene weren't there, her intuition about the movie would still be right...
...The happenstance is later compounded when Paco, convicted in a separate case, is put into the same cell block with Michael because that's the only space available for him in the entire Illinois correctional system...
...In this story, some young fugitives hide in an abandoned, rural church because nobody ever comes there...
...COLIN L. westerbeck, jr.rbeck, jr...
...I confess, in fact, that her rejection of the movie aroused my curiosity about it...
...Hinton's enormously popular novels for teenagers...
...The mere existence of the movie made her feel threatened not only socially or culturally, but, I sensed, sexually...
...It's a movie not only about teenagers, but for them, one made to appeal to what Hollywood thinks of as teenage sensibilities...
...This gives the boys a serendipitous opportunity to do something socially redeeming...
...What was it that this bright, lively, serious girl knew so clearly about Bad Boys without even seeing it...
...In his third scene, he won't turn down his record player, even when his mom asks him...
...In the running down of Paco's brother or the fire at the church in The Outsiders, coincidence of the kind seen in fairy tales has been fleshed out with adult realism...
...The chief misfortune to befall the characters in this film is that after a shootout with a teen rival named Paco (Esai Morales), Michael leads the Chicago police on a wild car chase that ends when he jumps a curb and runs down a little boy, who happens to be Paco's little brother...
...It tries to give its intended audience a way to identify with its characters...
...Though she may be smart enough to know she wouldn't like this movie, it has been made in the hopes that most teenagers won't be that sensitive...
...The visual detail and plotting of the movie make excuses for the nastiness of the action, as if bad art somehow gave credence or validity to these bad boys...
...It's a film that exalts violence and brutality by accepting them...
...She spoke with anger, with anxiety almost, that startled me...
...I remember when I was in my early teens reading a novel about a boy who built a hot rod and died in a crash while drag racing...
...In the first scene, Michael (Sean Penn) snatches a woman's purse and, for good measure, mugs a man who tries to retrieve it for her...
...One more of these details that I might mention is the sparking of the tracks as a train passes overhead on the El...
...The portentous visual detail that we find in such movies is just the pimple on the nose of their gangly plots...
...Her reaction cut off all further discussion, so I didn't ask her what she thought there was in Bad Boys that could be this upsetting...
...It's a convention of teenage fiction, as can be seen from another current movie, Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, which is based on one of S.E...
...Ally Sheedy) dreams he wears in his coffin...
...Such coincidences, when they occur on the larger scale of the plot, make the melodrama here seem hopelessly juvenile...
...She babysits for my daughter, and I've come to realize that one of the pleasures of a a flight out to which I look forward is chatting with her when I walk her home afterwards...
...yet she still feared she might not be able to deal with its pernicious-ness...
...But I wanted to know...
...His girlfriend put a model he had made of his car on his grave...
...It is a fact universally acknowledged that the teens are an awkward time for kids...
...The bad timing that produced a thunderstorm just as Michael arrived at the gates of the correctional facility is evident throughout Richard De Lello's script for Bad Boys...
...You don't have to be a teenage girl to feel threatened at such a vision...
...but the first time they leave for a few hours, they return to find the building a roaring inferno full of children...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
