Afterschool

I really can say I don't think I liked this. But it's not necessarily for the same reasons some are giving for similar dislike. I didn't like it because, despite the mind-numbingly slow pacing, I still sat through it until the end.

I went to film school (legit), and I hate films that are well aware they're of that " independent" variety. Unfortunately, you can't just use that moniker and expect everyone to forgive your film for being pretentious or boring.

Yes, this movie had several boring scenes. Unnecessarily boring. Don't try to find art, it's boring. I don't feel that long, single shots with heads cut out of the picture to be edgy or unique. I find it as forced art. Trying to show you have a way of breaking from traditional cinematography. I got news...it doesn't always work. This film is evidence.

The acting was pretty good, so i will say the characters really played their parts well. I felt what Rob was feeling because he's talented and did what he could with his part. Same with some of the others. That being said, I think the director had too many things he wanted to squeeze into one film. Perhaps this would've been better as a limited series.

You can't give us a compelling plot only to make us crave the real aftermath we believed we were entitled to. The director makes us wait and gives us a tiny little steak at the end as a final, disappointing meal.

There was a lot that could've done to make this film better. Develop characters better. We get it....teens, depression, isolation, discovery...bla bla bla. But not all are pathetic, confused worms.

Run-time...if you're not planning on delivering some kind of denouement, then go for a quicker Hollywood ending so we don't sit up late writing reviews on how we wasted time.

Stick with one story. Don't try to start sublots and abandon them because you can't remember where you're going. You're the storyteller. You're the one who takes us on the journey.

You're all wondering why I gave it a 6? I'm not sure....can't decide.

Though it undoubtedly bears promise, this is a film which will test your patience like few others. The film is slow-paced, which one could argue is a way for Campos to build further isolation from the main character, yet fails to depict anything interesting in its entire running time.

The characters are all cardboard-thin, save for the protagonist whose loneliness and eccentricity is apparent yet inaccessible. Believe me, I tried to feel some sort of emotional connection with him, but never achieved much except a strong yearning to fast forward the film through conversations that initially felt pointless and ultimately proved to be so. If Campos can take his skills of plot-structuring and possibly add more dialog to further reveal other aspects of his characters, then I strongly believe he has the potential to make an excellent film, but I just found this one to be an inaccessible drag.

I remember first seeing the trailer for this a long while back and wanting to see this, but I just never got around to doing so. Now I don't know why I waited so long. I think this is a great film that takes a serious and realistic look at high school life. The characters mumble and show little emotion in an effort to blend in to their surroundings and not stick out, yet they all hide their own dark secrets and personality flaws from the rest of the world. They adapt voyeuristic tastes and view the troubles of others instead of deal with their own, whether through watching cell phone videos of student fights on YouTube or making such spying videos of their own. The acting does get a bit dull at times and tedious to follow along with, and the quiet audio and super-steady camera shots may start to drag on one's patience. But for the most part that fits along with the amateurish, voyeuristic mood of the piece. And the performances, for how plain they were, do captivate the audience in a neo-realistic sense. This is a director to keep an eye on in the future.

I am going to take you to "Afterschool"!!! OK, maybe after reading my pun-infested movie review, you might think of it more as puntention (I mean detention), and think that I have no class. But please just swim with these school of puns for a little while. "Afterschool" is a dark, quirky and semi-interesting film about an isolated prep-school teen named Rob who witnesses fatal drug overdoses of preppie female twins while working on an audio/visual school club project. Therefore, he is able to gather video footage of the twins' deaths. Rob is traumatized from the experience, and has difficulty coping with it. Rob's roommate is Dave, a cocky & arrogant bully who manipulates Rob on a daily basis and may or may not had a hand in the cause of the twin overdoses. Mr. Burke is the school director who is more concerned about the image of the school and its funders then of the ordeals and stress that teenagers go through. Amy is Rob's student partner in the audio-visual club and this Amy might be aiming for some Roboco**. Writer-Director Antonio Campos did develop an intriguing narrative on teenage angst, trauma, and insecurity; however, the immensely slow pace was more of an afterschool exercise of futility. Hey, I am down with slow pacing films, but Campos was too much of a "campesino" on the doldrums that hamper a slow-paced movie. His scribe was not a screenplayer valedictorian classic, but it did warrant a passing grade. I would not say it is Hollywood Miller Time yet for this young actor, but Ezra Miller's starring performance as Rob was a credible one even though it was a bit too monotone for my taste. Michael Stuhlbarg, of "A Serious Man", was superb as the self-centered school director Mr. Burke; Stuhlbarg is one seriously good actor that will probably garner a few Oscar nominations in his future. The rest of the supporting acting of "Afterschool", primarily comprised of teen actors, is not really worth mentioning, it's a D=Needs Improvement in my gradebook. "Afterschool" does barely make the grade, but it does not graduate itself to teenage movie genre superiority. *** Average

The 24-year-old Campos has been winning prizes for his short films for the past eight years; started film-making at thirteen and completed his first short film at seventeen; has been a Presidential Scholar; and wrote the script for this film at the Cannes Residence in Paris in fall 2006. It premiered at the 2008 Cannes Un Certain Regard series. Campos, who was a scholarship student at an exclusive international school himself and then went to study film at NYU, has been rejected from many festivals, but Cannes has led him to the NYFF. He has a group of friends and associates from NYU, and has founded Borderline Films. (See the interview "Filmstock: Antonio Campos 'After School'" on PlumTV.)

'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy East Coas prep school video club, of the boy's roommate, and the death of twin Alpha Girl classmates, is a film of and about the YouTube generation. It begins with Rob (Ezra Miller) watching an online porn site called "Nasty Cum Holes" (or something like that) in which a man, unseen, is talking dirty to a young prostitute. Rob is in his dorm room, which he shares with Dave (Jeremy Allen White), who deals drugs. The video club links him with Amy (Addison Timlin), with whom he loses his virginity. While ostensibly making a sort of promotional video for the school he is shooting a hallway and stairway and all of a sudden two twin girls, the most admired in the school as it happens, appear overdosing. Robert rushes down the hall to them and the camera continues to watch as he sits on the floor with them as they die. Links between all this and Michael Haneke's 'Caché' and Van Sant's 'Elephant' are almost too obvious to mention.

In what follows there is a lot that shows the hypocrisy and confusion of the teachers, the headmaster, and the kids. Rob is so full of emotion throughout the entire film that he finds himself almost completely shut down. Mr. Wiseman the therapist or counselor (Lee Wilkof) succeeds in getting him to open up a tiny bit by trading obscene insults with him. (Campos' admiration for Frederick Wiseman's 'High School' led him to pay homage with the character's name.) A lot of 'Afterschool' is seen either as a video camera (or even a cell phone camera) see it, or as Rob sees it. When his lit teacher is talking about 'Hamlet,' he is watching her crotch, legs, and cleavage and that's what the camera sees. At other times the camera is fixed and one speaker is cut out of the picture, or you see only the edge of his head. Campos is not of the shaky, hand-held school of realism. His evocation of the sensibility of his young characters goes deeper than that. When kids today see something like a girlfight (or a boyfight) at school, somebody films it, and when it's filmed it's going to wind up on the Internet. There's a girlfight Rob and his roommate watch on the Web and then they're in a boyfight with each other in which Rob lets out his sudden pent up anger. Maybe his roommate is guilty in the twin girls' death. But as the school headmaster somewhat facilely says, maybe they all are. A wave of repression follows the incident--perhaps evoking the aftermath of 9/11, which Campos interchanged with the girls' death to get kids' reaction shots.

Campos likes moments that make us and himself uncomfortable, starting with the opening porn video, but continuing with Rob's experience and the world seen through his eyes. (Campos made a short film in which a young girl sells her virginity on eBay and loses it for real on camera to an older man.) Rob's safety is continually compromised and his emotions are uncertain. He doesn't know who he is, and neither does the filmmaker. Rob is a cleancut, even beautiful, boy, but he is almost clinically shut down--not an unusual state for a male teenager, maybe even more likely in a privileged setting like a New England prep school.

Rob and Amy are assigned the task of making a 'memorial film' about the dead twins. However the film he makes is too abstract, existential, ironic and just plain crude to be acceptable. When his supervisor sees it he thinks it's meant to be a mean joke. Later a more sweetened up and conventional version of the film is shown to the whole school, which we also see. Altering and re-editing reality is a continual theme of 'Afterschool.' As Deborah Young of 'Hollywood Reporter' writes, 'Afterschool' "is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos." It may seem in the watching more crude than it is. The cobbled-together vernacular images are clumsy, but the filmmaker is supple, deft, and sophisticated technically and bold intellectually--still-beyond his years. He has also captured a world he himself knows personally with rather stunning accuracy.

(Note: I am not sure of all the characters' names and may have got some identifications wrong here.)