"For fast-acting relief, try slowing down." - Lily Tomlin
Directed by Joseph Khan, "Detention" plays like 3 decades worth of teen and slasher movies condensed down to 90 minutes, sprinkled with hyperactive glittter, shot with a cameraman high on Ecstasy and printed on film chemically engineered by Attention Defecit Disordered factory workers to zap your eyeballs with kaleidoscopic kangaroos.
The plot? Who cares about plot. Khan's film is so postmodern, it makes "Scott Pilgrim" look like a 19th century porcelain vase. When his tale is not looping back in time via a time travelling grizzly bear, Khan's suckling on the teats of body-swap comedies, 1980s teen movies, 1990s horror flicks and 21st century sitcoms. Watching "Detention" is like watching eyeballs affixed to a jet engine struggle to count street-lamps. One, two, three...forty four frickin' billion.
Proudly convoluted, "Detention" spends most of its time playing with films within films, darting in and out of shuffling Ipods, salivating over text messages and watching as ultra jaded teenagers bounce barrages of barbs like Bogart. When one kid, kitted out in Sigur Ros paraphernalia, chooses to rob another, his victim replies with a quote by Tolstoy: "Vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism." What the hell? And actually: hmmmm.
One chunk of dialogue succinctly sums up the film's approach: "Why are you dressed like a lame movie character?" one girl asks. "Read a book," comes the reply, "it's called post-irony". In the world of "Detention", regular postmodern irony isn't enough. If films like "Scream" put films like "Halloween" in quotation marks, then "Detention" puts the whole world in quotations, wraps it in a box of quotations, and lacquers it all up with yet more quotations. With sincerity thoroughly dead, the film then self-destructs into a giant ball of meta grotesqueries.
Fittingly, "Detention" ends with a young woman's ironic closing narration. She speaks of beginnings, ends, the past and the future, before her speech degenerates into incoherence as she admits that she can't "think straight to this song". Postmodernism, the schizophrenic, aesthetic of hyper-capitalism, itself has a parasitic relationship with the past. It's hyperactive, yet stationary, contemporary, but desperately nostalgic, always moving, but going nowhere. It's not that everything then becomes poses and surfaces, with character irrelevant, but that character is itself now understood as being inherently vacuous; a blank slate upon which the social forces itself, like so much graffiti. "Detention" ends with aliens arriving on earth and killing humans for eating vegetables. Seriously.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.
Directed by Joseph Khan, "Detention" plays like 3 decades worth of teen and slasher movies condensed down to 90 minutes, sprinkled with hyperactive glittter, shot with a cameraman high on Ecstasy and printed on film chemically engineered by Attention Defecit Disordered factory workers to zap your eyeballs with kaleidoscopic kangaroos.
The plot? Who cares about plot. Khan's film is so postmodern, it makes "Scott Pilgrim" look like a 19th century porcelain vase. When his tale is not looping back in time via a time travelling grizzly bear, Khan's suckling on the teats of body-swap comedies, 1980s teen movies, 1990s horror flicks and 21st century sitcoms. Watching "Detention" is like watching eyeballs affixed to a jet engine struggle to count street-lamps. One, two, three...forty four frickin' billion.
Proudly convoluted, "Detention" spends most of its time playing with films within films, darting in and out of shuffling Ipods, salivating over text messages and watching as ultra jaded teenagers bounce barrages of barbs like Bogart. When one kid, kitted out in Sigur Ros paraphernalia, chooses to rob another, his victim replies with a quote by Tolstoy: "Vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism." What the hell? And actually: hmmmm.
One chunk of dialogue succinctly sums up the film's approach: "Why are you dressed like a lame movie character?" one girl asks. "Read a book," comes the reply, "it's called post-irony". In the world of "Detention", regular postmodern irony isn't enough. If films like "Scream" put films like "Halloween" in quotation marks, then "Detention" puts the whole world in quotations, wraps it in a box of quotations, and lacquers it all up with yet more quotations. With sincerity thoroughly dead, the film then self-destructs into a giant ball of meta grotesqueries.
Fittingly, "Detention" ends with a young woman's ironic closing narration. She speaks of beginnings, ends, the past and the future, before her speech degenerates into incoherence as she admits that she can't "think straight to this song". Postmodernism, the schizophrenic, aesthetic of hyper-capitalism, itself has a parasitic relationship with the past. It's hyperactive, yet stationary, contemporary, but desperately nostalgic, always moving, but going nowhere. It's not that everything then becomes poses and surfaces, with character irrelevant, but that character is itself now understood as being inherently vacuous; a blank slate upon which the social forces itself, like so much graffiti. "Detention" ends with aliens arriving on earth and killing humans for eating vegetables. Seriously.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.