![]() ![]() The linchpin to American History X's success is that Norton makes Derek not merely charismatic, but frightfully and prodigiously sonot to mention articulate, well-schooled, and physically striking. Sweeney hopes, of course, to awaken Danny to the folly and the cruelty of the views and behaviors he has, by all estimations, inherited through the rosy-lensed idolatry that a kid maintains for his celebrated, charismatic brother. Sweeney takes it upon himself to educate Danny, and, to commence their new one-one-one tutorial which he titles "American History X," he assigns the young man to write an expository piece about Derek's own career as a militant white supremacist and convicted killer. ![]() Principal Sweeney, who was the elder Vinyard's literature teacher in the not-too-distant past perceives Derek's spectre in Danny's shaved head, dark tattooes, deplorable attitudes, and, above all, his formidable, if undisciplined, intelligence. Derek's younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) is spending the same morning defending to his high-school principal the truth and validity of his recent book report, which asserts Hitler's Mein Kampf as a civil rights manifesto. The central figure of American History X is Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton), a lean, strapping man in his 20s who finishes and departs from a three-year prison term on the morning that the film's action commences. The tones and developments of the two pictures, of course, could hardly be more different, though both films also cast a pair of siblings in the center of the drama. Like Pleasantville, the other major fall release from New Line, American History X juxtaposes color and black-and-white photography to tell a story of a disrupted, vaguely complacent society that is fundamentally shaken by a youth contingent of noticeably radical ideas. Still, some of the American cinema's tastiest dishes have been whipped up by "too many cooks" Gone With the Wind, anyone?and while American History X seems hardly destined to be a classic, it deserves at least toīe watched and discussed as more than the Director's Guild's puling orphan child. Also, as befits a film of such disputed, ambiguous parentage, American History X is a fabulously uneven picture that packs several indelible scenes into a too-often clunky and mechanical framework. Woe to a film (and its $2.2 million at the box office means woe, indeed) that tries to speak daringly and persuasively about a punishing national problem and finds itself silenced by, of all things, the steady hum of back-hallway studio gossip.Īs with most stories, that of Kaye's disavowal of the picture has at least two sides. A lacerating and visually audacious examination of stateside neo-Nazism, the film's renunciation by its own ego-tripping director, Tony Kaye, has somehow managed to overshadow one of the most conceptually and stylistically incendiary films of recent years. The next time you are asked to define irony, you could do worse than observe the public reaction to American History X. Cast: Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Avery Brooks, Beverly D'Angelo, Fairuza Balk, Stacy Keach, Jennifer Lien, Ethan Suplee, Elliott Gould, Guy Torry, William Russ. Note: the violence, blood and dismemberment have properly earned the film an R rating.Director: Tony Kaye. So no haunted high schools, giggling, drinking beer in cars, and no skinny dipping in the local lake. All of the vampires and their hunters are portrayed by adult actors who play the situation seriously. ![]() One key reason this picture works so well is there isn't a teenager in the cast, and it's not juvenile in any way. Carpenter holds nothing back in creating scene after bloody scene (the film is also filled with some smart talk). James Woods stars in a surprisingly entertaining horror film as a vampire slayer out to destroy a legendary opponent, a vampire master named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), and the many bloodsuckers he controls. "American History X" has been rated R for its extreme violence and language, but it would seem to be hard to deal credibly with the phenomenon of skinheads without displaying their hate and its consequences.
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