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The WanderersRating:
Release Date: 03 September, 2002 Retail Price: $19.98 OUR Price: $17.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
The Wanderers Reviews
Very enjoyable
It's 1963 in the Bronx. There are gangs of teenage boys that's either/and by turf or ethnic group. The Wanderers are Italian. They were not like today's gangs. They fought mostly among other gang and hung out for fun. But it did get nasty between the Italians and the Blacks (the Del Bombers). And the Ducky Boys are pretty frightening. The Fordham Baldies look scary but their antics gave me a lot of laughs. I recommend this film even if you don't remember the early '60s. It's fast paced in general. This movie is pretty good fun. Half comedy and half drama. It has a great soundtrack if you like music from this era.
This movie has heart
I love this movie.
It's one of the most honest ever made, even though it is a movie greatly inspired by nostalgia.
It has no particular agenda or view point, just a tremendous amount of warmth.
That warmth allows it to show urban street kid violence and racism, mafia brutality, and a host of poverty related social ills in a believable way, while still keeping the viewer sympathetic to almost every character and social group involved.
It does not do this by romanticising, it does this by keeping characters human.
There is one exception to this and that is the portrayal of the Ducky Boys - kids from a rival neighbourhood.
In sharp contrast to the other themes of rivalry in the movie, the Ducky Boys are shown to have no humanity at all and are one dimensional villians to such an extreme that it becomes surreal.
This is very deliberate.
Music, lighting and camera work all add to the nightmare quality the movie takes on every time these youths make an appearance.
Many people have a problem with this and see it as unrealistic and a weakness. I do not however.
As I said the movie is very much a work of nostalgia, honest though it is.
As such it has a general sense of heightened reality.
The movie shows the Ducky Boys as the protagonists perceived them.
The culmination of fear, ignorance and the real danger they represent makes them seem a shadowy nightmare enemy to the main characters.
I remember feeling the same way about some rival neigbourhoods during my own youth.
Boys that lived close enough so that conflict would occur from time to time, but far enough away so that there was absolutely no familiarity.
When you get older you realise that kids from one poor neigbourhood are pretty much like another.
When you are young however, though the dangers are in fact real, your sense of those dangers can be exaggerated to the point that other neighbourhoods seem forbidden and populated by inhuman murderers.
So for me the Ducky Boys are in fact one of the strongest elements of the Wanders.
I recommend this movie highly.
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