Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I don't entirely agree with the way you talk about it, maybe you were just in more of a hurry at festival time whereas I had half a day to think about it and write about it.

No, I wasn't in a hurry when I wrote my review. We'll have to mark anything you didn't like about it as a difference of opinion or style because I would post it again as is.

I think by "predacious" you mean predatory.

Yes, "predatory", "predacious" and "predaceous" are all correct and mean the same thing.

I don't think Jonathan is the only Guatemalan since another guy is his brother and says he's Guatemalan. Remember and the 90210 prick says "Oh, a Guat!"?

Maybe you're right. I'd have to watch it again. I don't know that the word "brother" was used to mean biological brother though.

It's a bit of a misnomer to call Jonathan a "Casanova" -- though I'm sure you're knowingly using the word very loosely. He hasn't really seduced that many women but he's confident that women fall for his looks and charms easily.

Jonathan is only 14 and, naturally, well below Casanova's alleged 122 sexual partners. He exhibits great potential though. Early on he introduces Iris as his "girlfriend" but Iris seems absent from his thoughts whenever there's a cute girl around. Wikipidea on Casanova: "Though he is often thought of as a great seducer, he much preferred to consider himself the object of female desire".

"Debutantes with a taste for brown" is also pretty loose phrasing and a bit offensive. It's highly unlikely that they're society girls and there's no cause to think they're really Latino-fetishers; they just think the boys are cute and decide to dabble briefly in the exotic.

What the two girls find exotic about these boys has to do with race to a large extent. Saying the girls exhibit "a taste for brown" is more specific to the moment than the more permanent label "Latino-fetishers". I used the term "debutantes" loosely to refer to rich girls of a certain age.

Likewise "middle-aged floozie." Plastered she is, but not a floozie by any means.

"Floozie" is slang for "a woman regarded as tawdry or sexually promiscuous". I absolutely stand by my use of the word to refer to a grown woman who grabs a teenage stranger at the gate of her mansion, ushers him to her bathroom, and invites him to get naked and climb into the jacuzzi with her.


The movie is appealing, to me anyway (and to you) as a portrait of these good-natured boys, but not the strongest among Clark's films, which I wish more viewers and reviwers were capable of setting within his whole oeuvre since he is still arguably more important as a photographer and certailnly was important in that area long before Kids.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Clark met Kico and Porky while doing a photo shoot in Venice, CA for the French mag REBEL. This happened 18 months before production began for Wassup Rockers. Kico and Porky introduced Clark to Jonathan and the other boys. A photo series of these muchachos appeared on a 2005 REBEL issue (including Jonathan on the cover).

I haven't read a review that properly sets the film within Clark's ouvre as you wish. Nothing beyond stating the new film is less explicit or controversial than the previous ones, and that this one is funny or comedic. More reviews will be forthcoming when Wassup Rockers opens in Chicago and other cities. I'm curious about what Rosenbaum will say. He's stated before that he is "not a fan of Clark" and has labeled his films "pornographic" yet, paradoxically, called Ken Park "probably his best".