Also on Trash Film:
Interview with director Jason Trost
Interview with actor Lee Valmassy
Interview with costume designer Sarah Trost
Can you remember back to the year 2010? Think hard. We may all be but granules in a Grand Comedian's hourglass sport, but if our synapses synchronize our collective unconscious will project this history upon the wall as if we sat in The Gromble's chair. My god, we can see...Shirley Sherrod! And Ryan Reynolds in Buried! But there was something else, a trailer I encountered while combing the Online Internet⢠that simply could not be real. This is not the desert of the real, Mr. and Ms. Wachowski, this is Real Life. What...is....this?
How could this be anything but a joke? I forced many others to watch, most with a Gom Jabbar held to their neck, to see if they saw what I saw. Through endless shrieks of "this looks stupid", "fucking retarded", and "you're an idiot" rose a chosen few who saw the light. And by few I really mean one friend from high school. How often can it be said a film has no target audience? This was made for us, and seemingly us alone. The faux-hard, overwhelmingly white culture that liberally pilfers a hip-hop dialect mirrored our stupid upbringing in a suburban hellscape so accurately that to write the script the Trost brothers could have left a tape recorder in the halls of our godforsaken high school and transcribed the results verbatim. There seemed to be no winking at the audience (unless JTRO's eyepatch was more symbolic than I accepted), this nigh-farcical send-up of 70's exploitation and 80's actioners was playing it completely straight in a world of Dance Dance Revolution-inspired death matches and I couldn't be happier.
My friend and I became obsessed. Lines from the trailer worked their way into our everyday discourse, for reals. I heard about the premier at SXSW and thumbed through rancid reviews of those who instantly dismissed the film for it's sheer outlandishness, yelling "moronic" to the high heavens while clearly not engaging with it on its own terms. "It's stupid, cuz, stupid dumb dumb!" is not a review, it's a dismissal. Disliking a film is fine, but at least see it for what it is before trashing it like a half-eaten hoagie. All through 2011 I hoped for a screening near me but experienced radio silence. The reason I joined Twitter in the days before Jaden Smith would share his bizarrely capitalized rants on public education and emancipation was so I could ask star/co-director Jason Trost about a release. There was none in the pipeline at the time. I sat in my beer-encrusted barcalounger a defeated man.Seasons changed, hairlines receded, Tom fucking Hooper won an Oscar, and we arrived in swingin' March 2012. In the distance at the mountain's summit I see a beacon of hope: The FP pre-release screening at NYC's Rerun theater with Jason Trost appearing for Q&A afterward. Radiant splendor engulfs the land and crops flourish for a bountiful harvest. I crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women. This is all to say I went to a movie.
I convinced about 10 friends to accompany me including my original co-conspirator in obsession. We wore eye patches in solidarity for...something. I had always feared that The FP worked as a trailer, but stretched out to 83 minutes it could be a slog that killed my faith in humanity. Granted this could have been the endgame of the Bene Gesserit to squelch my voice in this dying world. Alas, the prophecy was incorrect and The FP proved to be almost exactly what I had pined for since falling madly in love with its advertisement.
Its near-future dystopian gangland revenge plot is a template so well trodden that it's humorous by default. JTRO's older brother BTRO is killed during a Beat-Beat Revelation match (How does death-by-videogame occur? Well, shit's hard in the FP), the vicious 245 gang led by Mr. T mohawk-wearin' L Dubba E take over Frazier Park (The titular FP) and JTRO, years after the incident, must train in montage form to reclaim his home and allow his 248 gang buddies to exert benevolent control once again.
Allow KCDC, played as a force of nature by the criminally-underrated Art Hsu, to sum it up thusly:
Shit's all fucked up in the FP JTRO. After BTRO got 187'd, the 248 lost its shit. The 245 has taken over. L Dubba E's got even more street cred now 'cause his pops took a dirt nap and left him Dawn's Liquor Mart, son. So now, no one drinks unless L Dubba E says so. It's the end of days out there JTRO. The darkness has come. God damn drunks goin' straight edge right on the street. Resortin' to meth and shit. And now with no drunks there ain't no bums. And with no bums there ain't no motherfuckers to feed the ducks at the park. What's a fuckin' town with no ducks, JTRO? It's nothin'. It ain't nothin'! How's a nigga supposed to sort his shit out without no ducks?
Yes, there are nods to Rambo, Rocky, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Death Race 2000, The Road Warrior, Kickboxer, etc. and the score is a perfect mix of 80's nostalgia in a modern techno style with occasional references to John Carpenter, but I'm not here to list every influence and the "funny moments." I want to look at this as a real film, not the instant-kitsch so many categorize it as since I feel this is ignorantly dismissive. Amidst all the absurdity lies a fully realized personal vision that often goes unnoticed.What struck me initially is the texture of the world. The neon starburst lighting, Sarah Trost's ingeniously silly costumes, the dilapidated shack-dungeon of the Beat-Beat Revelation tournament. Everything has a handmade feel that adds a tangible TLC to every shot. The closest thing I can compare it to is a GWAR performance, where the art-direction IS the show. The FP does not exist without it's superbly crafted no-budget thrift store design, as it brings the world to life.
This design also acts as a comment on the world. It often seems like these characters simply reside in a traditionally dull town, no different from most that litter the US, so they invented their own dystopia and pointless conflicts to give their lives some sort of meaning. This harkens back to the beginning of this piece where I mentioned the faux-hardasses I grew up with. They were so bored and often so over-privileged that they concocted their own characters and narratives of anger just to give themselves a purpose in an empty world. This usually resulted in feigning a lower-class existence while driving BMWs and enacting a kind of primal yet Eminem-inspired thug masculinity which really meant these wealthy white boys could not string a basic sentence together without saying "gay" or "fag". Sometimes I'd overhear this exchange:"Yo, we gonna fight the kids from [insert adjacent town] at the carnival."
"Why?"
"They said some shit!"
The FP may be an absurdist take on this infantile maleness in a less-wealthy context, but it seems based in a frightening reality I know all too well. The universe of the film has its own dialect of pseudo-ignorance and immaturity that helps define the characters and place them in a specific social strata. While I am clueless as to whether this was an intentional layer added by the Trost brothers, it excites me that I can honestly read class commentary into a film featuring DDR cage matches. Either that or I've gone full-on Room 237 and should be banished to the Phantom Zone.
Brandon Trost's cinematography is generally excellent and further proof that micro-budget features have no excuse for bland visuals. Over the top kinetic camera moves meld with aware-artsy-ness to create a humorous melange of inappropriate self-seriousness and genuinely fun action/drug/dance-combat sequences. When obviously intelligent and skilled filmmakers trip over themselves to convey an idiotic world, the results can be immensely gratifying.
There then lies a question of whether The FP is a cult-on-demand title. Is it fair to marginalize a film because it seems like an ironic play to the hip crowd who laughs at something like The Room rather than with it? Despite the complete insanity in every frame and its knowing references to the culture of the filmmakers' respective youths, I sense this is an earnest film at every turn and in no way a cynical "look at these fools" narrative. Of course it is ridiculous but there is a personal touch apparent throughout that one cannot fake. The Trost brothers clearly have affection for their cartoonish concoctions and reverence for the films and cliches they send up. It would be disingenuous to condescend based on these aspects. The FP somehow exists outside of time and space as an honest, hilarious labor of love willed into existence with a shoe-string budget and the sweat of real filmmakers.
We roll together.
We die together.