American History X

"Vengeance brought about by hate...and fear. When it points its head in our direction, we take notice and everything changes. The way we choose our friends, the way we protect our families, the way we create enemies out of strangers. Welcome to America."

        This is by far one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.  And not only because Edward Norton is in it.  It takes a lot for a movie to really "get to" me, but this one really got to me.  It's one of those movies that makes you think about things.. Like the way the world is and what's really going on with some people in this world we live in.  It's rather sad...
        American History X is about a guy named Derek who spends a few years in jail for killing a few black men.  His little brother Danny idolizes Derek, and creates a skin head reputation for himself to try and live up to his brother.  Eventually, Derek gets out of prison and comes home a changed man.  He tries to persuade his little brother and the rest of the skin heads to stop the violence and the hate, but no one will listen to him.  They, instead, turn on him for trying to change them.  So, now he has all the skin heads hating him, and all the black folk hating him, and the cops on his back trying to get him to pursuade the skin heads to stop fighting with the black guys, and then something totally unexpected happens.  But you'll have to watch the movie to see what happens because I don't want to ruin it for anyone.  I was actually disturbed by this movie for a few weeks.  They made everything seem so real...
        One of the things I thought was cool about this movie was the way they flashedback.  All the flashbacks were in black and white so it wasn't the least bit confusing.  I thought that was kind of neat cuz I hate it when movies are hard to follow and you don't know whether the person is awake, asleep, daydreaming, or flashbacking.  They made it all very easy to follow, yet still had parallel stories going on (past/present).
        I was reading an interview with Edward Norton about this movie and here's one of the things he had to say that I thought was interesting:

One of the things that Tony, (writer) Dave McKenna and I all connected on, very early on, was that we thought that this guy has got to be the king of the skinheads. And Tony used to say, very rightly, I think, that with the first scene of this movie, and the way that you're introduced to this character, that any skinhead kid sitting in the audience ought to look up at that guy and go, "Oh, my God, that's it." That's exactly how I see myself, how I want to be. Because then you proceed to entrap that person, I think, if you can give the character heroic dimensions then when he falls, when he goes through this process of transformation, it's like you have to contend with the fact that the ultimate skinhead is coming, if he's relating to him at all, then you have to kind of grapple with why does he go through this transformation. You know, it's almost like a trap

        Well, I guess that's about all I have to say about this movie for now... I definately would recommed it to anyone of legal age to see it of course... Because there are some fairly graphic scenes.. But I definately think the graphic scenes are necessary to cause a greater effect on people.  I think everyone should see American History X at some point in their life though.  Definately.

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