A revealing examine contemporary youth culture, writer-director Mario Van Peebles “We the Party” shows teenagers as they are, not as adults would really like them to be. Set amidst the most recent trends in music, dance and fashion, “We the Party” is usually a colorful, cutting-edge comedy set within an ethnically diverse Los Angeles secondary school during Americas first dark-colored president. The film focuses on five friends because they deal with romance, money, prom, college, sex, bullies, facebook, fitting in, standing out, and finding themselves. Evoking such classic teen comedies since the Breakfast Club and House Party but through an attitude and style all its own, “We the Party” records the hopes, confusion, challenges and dreams of todays teenagers as they plunge headlong into the uncertain future.
We the Party is usually a coming-of-age story of a generation which could think in tweets, or tweet instead connected with think, but still has to deal with very material and all-encompassing anxieties. The fact that the film opens having an unsmiling African American teenager wearing a dark hoodie jogging to school is nothing lacking chilling in these instances of lethal fashion options for kids of color. Director Mario Van Peebles, who also stars inside the film alongside several involving his sons, has crafted a remarkably well-edited and authentic bit of filmmaking thats both exhilaratingly entertaining (think an a smaller amount self-indulgent, and definitely less queer Kaboom) along with socially conscious-to a limit.
The narrative is largely driven by the old notion that boys will probably be boys and will make the relentless search for pussy a full-time group effort, including taping an apple iphone camera to ones sneaker to broadcast skirt-wearing girls private parts towards nearest iPad screen. But while the film might be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia from the general culture (the actual token gay teen is really a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and course quite seriously.
We the Party practices the daily lives of a group of mostly privileged and black Los Angeles-area high school students as they deal together with such troubles as having to lose their virginity before prom or convincing their parents to purchase them a car. Not everyones problems are so petty. One of the schools outcasts, the hoodie-wearing rapper D. C., for Conscious Criminal (played by rapper YG, n? Kennan Jackson), has been held back his grade several times, lives in poverty, and is constantly confronted by his thuggish previous brother (played through the jarringly casted Snoop Dogg).
Van Peebles, who plays the class teacher, does his best to be able to pepper the film together with his politically conscious mottos, some of which can feel heavy-handed (bare minimum effort now means minimum-wage after and insecure people buy lots of stuff they dont require). But the fact that the We the Party is, from the beginning, so clear about the pro-education message gives their many spectacular party clips and rap battles an expression of gravitas. Its like booty-shaking for just a noble cause, or something like in which.
Its also rather impressive which the 52-year-old Van Peebles may be able to represent present day teenage culture so entreatingly well not just in his dialogue, but in the very visual type of the film, which turns each scene into a bombardment of broken-up products with unexpected speed adjustments and cuts.