Volume 123: Spacked Out
The Voice of Energy Vol. 123
Hello, friends. Thanks for joining me for another newsletter adventure. This time around, a review of a re-released teen drama from the turn of the millennium and a new feature where I recommend a film hiding in the catalogs of one of the major streaming services. Enjoy!
Spacked Out (2000, dir. Lawrence Liu)
From 1939's Dead End to the recent HBO series Euphoria, producers of popular culture have long offered up cautionary tales of wild teenagers either as a sociological portrait of what the current generation is up to or a cautionary tale meant to spur gullible parents (or legislators) into action.
There's little information online in my research to suggest what side of that divide filmmaker Lawrence Liu and screener Lo Chi-leung had in mind when they made this 2000 drama. Shot in Hong Kong and released in China under the far more palatable name No One at the Wheel (the Anglicized title was, apparently, an entirely made-up phrase), Spacked Out leans toward the tone of Larry Clark's problematic 1995 film Kids with its parade of horrors: drug abuse, premarital sex, abortions, petty larceny.
The young people putting their bodies and brains through the cinematic wringer are a group of female middle schoolers whose parents have either vanished or checked out from their lives entirely. They all have cute nicknames — Sissy, Bean-Curd, Cookie, Banana — and spend their days and nights haunting karaoke spots or, in the case of Bean-Curd, helping smuggle illegal mobile phones to the mainland.
What plot there is to the film is perfunctory and introduced at strange angles. It's near the halfway mark that we learn that Cookie may have been impregnated by her awful lover — a fact that her friends treat with a casualness worthy of a terrible exploitation film as they discuss the many abortions they've undergone in their short lives. Otherwise, we are mere witnesses to their emotionally immature arguments and physical altercations, and the corporal punishment meted out by the headmaster of their school.
By modern standards, Spacked Out feels quaint and tame, even if the film did earn a rare Category III rating in China (basically, a hard R). But even viewed through the lens of the turn of the millennium, the abominations portrayed onscreen are fairly muted, not inducing the pearl-clutching that the filmmakers possibly intended. It's only in those moments when it is made clear just how young these young women are that film strikes a nerve. When Banana brings a boy back to the tiny apartment she shares with her clueless mom, her bedroom is filled with the stuffed toys and cute tchotchkes emblematic of her tender age.
Spacked Out apparently flopped upon its release in China in 2000 and, when it finally arrived in the States a few years later, barely caused a ripple in the cultural slipstream. Which only makes its arrival on the scene in a 2K restoration that much more befuddling. If it didn't connect then, why is there any hope of it finding its audience or its champions now?
Spacked Out plays for one week at New York's Metrograph and for two weeks on Metrograph At Home starting today.
FTA Pick of the Week
Today, I'm introducing a new regular feature to the newsletter — a recommendation of a movie to watch that is hiding below the fold on one of the major streaming services. In other words: fuck the algorithm.
Dragnet Girl (1933, dir. Yasujirō Ozu)
In the years before he became known for his methodically paced and stately dramas, Yasujirō Ozu made some fascinating genre films, including this silent crime film starring Kinuyo Tanaka as a young office worker who falls for a crook (Joji Oka) raising the ire of a femme fatale and causing the gangster to doubt his errant path. As formally composed as you would expect from Ozu but with an increasing sense of tension and dread.
Available on MAX and the Criterion Channel.
That's what I got for you, friends. Hope you liked it. Will be back next week with a new film review and my rundown of the movies I liked best in 2023.
Artwork for this edition is by Zhao Weinlang whose paintings were part of the exhibition Night Road: Works by Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu from Zhang Wei’s Perspective recently on display at Museum Seni Luar Dalam Beijing.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.