New Port South

The guy did a lot of title design for a bunch of movies and I guess one day he said; I should pick a cheap scenario, try to put as much title in it as a can ( cause after all i'm a title designer ) and try to persuade people that this is in fact a movie. One of the worst i've even seen that's for sure. If you fell the urge to see nice titles, go check out some posters don't waste your time watching this.

It kinda ironic don't you think, did you saw the poster? the only part of his project that SHOULD had title work done have almost none !

About five minutes in, and I saw where this was heading. Bunch of high school kids get annoyed by the school's administration and thoughts of rebellion start fomenting. I said to my girlfriend: if it gets below a 5 on IMDb, I'll go and read a book. It got 5.0, so she persuaded me to go on watching. What are the good things? Well, it is a good thing this film does not have a story, because you would surely be distracted from it by the editing. It's like the student's drawing that was torn up by one of the teachers, all the footage for this film was cut up in a freak accident involving a meat-grinder, and left half the stock destroyed, with the other half spliced into two-second bits. Even in a ten-second scene of the local TV news, there are about six cuts and three different angles. And then there are the montages. These are all set to electronic music, which forewarns you of yet another montage, so that like Pavlov's dog you start cringing every time you hear it, which is about every three minutes. Oh, I was supposed to say what's good about this film. Well, the film was shot very well, with a nice color palette, that nicely matched the emotional content - such as there was - of the scenes. Okay, now with the film's major flaw, and it wasn't the story, or lack thereof. The director made that fatal mistake of leading you astray about people and situations, not by clever storytelling, but by being highly selective about what to show about the main characters. That's just cheating. I guess he did it in order to make the central character more likable. But it just became plain annoying. If the story is full of holes, it's no good trying to patch it up by misdirecting the viewer. And often there wasn't even any point to it. And then the ending. Basically, the main villain of the peace turns out be an okay guy, if a coward. Plus it turns what seemed to be the whole point of the movie, that you should stand up for a just cause on its head, by the already mentioned misdirection, and makes it into a point about the nature of revolutions, that was already made, and much better, by animal farm. It also committed what I call the Bill Cosby sin: no matter how things may seem at first, in the end adults are always right, and children always wrong. And let's face it: unless you're me, that's just not true.

This was a one of the greatest movies I've seen in a long while. I is very entertaining for high school students, I might add. This movie is about a 17 year old (Maddox - Blake Shields) wanting the staff at his high school to lighten up on the students. He uses the excuse of a former student, (Stanton - Michael Shannon) who was placed in an institution two years ago, to manipulate his friends (Clip - Kevin Christy and Chris - Will Estes)to help him in putting posters up and making trouble for the teachers. One teacher (Walsh - Todd Field) is their biggest rival in this dramatic, and yet, funny and ironic-twist ending, film.

New Port South is the kind of movie you have to see for yourself. I know that if it had been marketed more, it would have been A LOT more successful. When my friend and I went to see it, there were only four people in the theater. We're 14 year old girls, the other two were a middle-aged couple. (The older couple didn't like it too much.) The man even went as far as to say, "Now I know why there were only four people here..." I completely disagree with him. I loved the movie, it was very thought-provoking, and I didn't understand it until the ending quote. It's basically about a group of students who decides that their school system isn't right, so they go against it, playing tricks and showing the administration that the school population can think for themselves. Any student can definitely relate to New Port South because every once in a while, every student feels like getting back at "the system."

I came to NEW PORT SOUTH expecting a surrogate movie about the Columbine school massacre similar to Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT and certainly the synopsis in the TV guide stating that a student sociopath rebels against the system did give me that impression but this is a very boring movie where little happens so consider yourself warned

The story is about Maddox , a Chicago high school student who decides to strike back at what he perceives to be an authoritarian regime . The major problem is that the character is underwritten and the actor who plays him Blake Shields is unable to embellish any script deficiencies . You have the gut feeling that Maddox should have the evil charisma of Hitler , Saddam or Bin Laden but he never comes across as anything more than a petulant truculent teenager and it's impossible to believe he could rally any disciples . The subtext of you overthrow one manipulative authoritarian regime only to replace it with another manipulative regime is too obvious which means NEW PORT SOUTH is an entirely unconvincing drama that's not worth going out of your way to see