Green Room
Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier
Written by: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Mark Webber, Macon Blair, Kai Lennox, Eric Edelstein
Crime/Horror/Thriller - 94 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 Apr 2016
Written by: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Mark Webber, Macon Blair, Kai Lennox, Eric Edelstein
Crime/Horror/Thriller - 94 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 Apr 2016
Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier grew up in Alexandria, Virginia and in between breaks from playing around on his mother’s camcorder teaching himself how to film, he dabbled in Washington D.C.’s punk scene. For his third feature film and follow-up to 2013’s breakout indie hit Blue Ruin, Saulnier infuses a revenge-minded siege thriller with his experience and knowledge of punk. A rural concert venue transforms into a house of horrors for a threadbare punk band as they must confront a bloodthirsty band of neo-Nazi white supremacists to get out alive. Just writing that sentence is so much fun.
The Ain’t Rights are a punk band with serious integrity. Nobody in the desolate, but inclusive, contemporary punk scene has ever heard of The Ain’t Rights because they have zero social media presence. Band spokesman and guitarist, Pat (Anton Yelchin, Star Trek Into Darkness), proclaims music should be shared and experienced live, not through some shapeless online medium. This goes a long way in explaining why the band is broke, must siphon gas in out of the way parking lots, and are excited at the prospect of $350 to play an out of the way shack in middle of nowhere Oregon.
The Ain’t Rights are a punk band with serious integrity. Nobody in the desolate, but inclusive, contemporary punk scene has ever heard of The Ain’t Rights because they have zero social media presence. Band spokesman and guitarist, Pat (Anton Yelchin, Star Trek Into Darkness), proclaims music should be shared and experienced live, not through some shapeless online medium. This goes a long way in explaining why the band is broke, must siphon gas in out of the way parking lots, and are excited at the prospect of $350 to play an out of the way shack in middle of nowhere Oregon.
Saulnier lays on some mood music as his aerial shot tracks the band’s beat up van winding its way through heavily forested back roads. He even based the band members on people he knew growing up in D.C.’s hardcore scene. While no character is a one-for-one representation of a real person, there are personality characteristics tucked into his creations based on his former band mates and friends. We get to see the band play twice and while punk may or may not feature on your personal mixtape, Saulnier captures the energy and even violence of the music.
The Ain’t Rights are not a band averse to personifying the punk image they try and portray. When they realize the political ideology and fascistic tendencies of the audience they are about to play for, they lay into a song called, “Nazi Punks, Fuck Off!” This earns them projectile beer bottles and spit, but hey, that’s what you get form an earnest punk band. However, just like any good genre jump, the gig’s success turns south on a dime as Saulnier begins to transfer his nightmares onto the audience.
The band stumbles onto a murder scene and just like that, they are kidnapped as the skinheads try and figure out what to do with them. Jeremy Saulnier’s favorite actor, Macon Blair, who appears in all Saulnier’s films and led the way in Blue Ruin, is the pragmatic skinhead who tries to keep it all together but finally realizes he needs to call in the big guns, local recruiter and concert venue owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart, X-Men: Days of Future Past).
In a quiet, but authoritative performance, Stewart as Darcy never raises his voice; he commands orders and people move. Seeing Patrick Stewart pop up in a punk slasher flick like Green Room is unexpected; however, Stewart recognized how good the script was when halfway through reading it in his comfortable London estate, he got up to lock the doors, set the security system, and pour himself a scotch before he sat down for the second half. Anybody who pens a script and unsettles one of England’s finest Shakespearean actors to such an extent has a talent and Saulnier proves once again he is a force to be reckoned with.
Check out Green Room’s poster. That is Yelchin wielding a machete just like bassist Paul Simonon wields a guitar on The Clash’s London Calling album. Punk through and through in both music and atmosphere, Green Room is a thrill ride for fans of this particular genre. Not as mind-blowing as Blue Ruin nor as violent as torture porn movies like Hostel or the Saw films, Green Room still stands on its own as a proudly waving middle finger to the establishment.
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