First things first, the Clint Eastwood thing is the best. Larry Clark must hate him. Anyway, Wassup Rockers actually de-labels a group that could only be described with common idiomatic phrases (South Central, Latino, Skater, Punks, etc.) And it still places those kids so correctly ("we're from the ghetto"). Oh yes, you are.
In Rockers, Clark has made Hollywood hand-held realism look like the cutting room floor at Troma. And the images! Tracking the kids while they skate, the fucked up teeth, the 14-yr-old packages. He's like the Herb Ritts of the docu-drama.
But here's the thing. The movie is a big romantic jaunt through the Hills. There's no element of Aristotelian tragedy as in Kassovitz's Hate. There's no referential/archetypal weight as in The Warriors. These kids are nothing more than what Larry Clark fancies them to be. "You could be a model, I'm just trying to help your career." At least he knows full well what he's doing, and is having as much of a blast doing it as we are watching it.
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