American History X (1998)

Despite having a somewhat weak cast, this is an incredibly poignant drama of one man's struggle to live a new life. Probably too violent and close-to-home for some.

There's really no point to the movie. Just a lot of violence. That's pretty much it.

You could use this as a skinhead recruitment film because it failed so miserably in the message it was trying to push, and it failed miserably because they were too concerned about pushing the message that they forgot how they were framing the film.

So a bunch of skinheads win a turf war basketball game, to stop the gang violence around the basketball courts, and then one of the Black people on the losing side tries to steal the car of one of the skinheads. And then the skinhead goes to jail for killing him. Then we have a flashback where the skinhead argues that Affirmative Action policies that put race before merit are racist because they put race before merit... to presumably illistrate how evil he is. Then his brother reads "Mein Kampf" for a book report and has to write a history paper titled American History X to teach him not to read books that should be banned... like the ACTUAL Nazis banned books. I mean that's not very free speech of them to tell people what they can or can't read. And before he turns it in, he gets killed by a Black kid, involved in the gangs, who took a gun into school.

Too often in the film you get those moments where you have to stop and think "Why do the Neo-Nazis look like the good guys in comparison?" That's not what they were trying to do, at least I hope it wasn't, but it certainly was what they succeeded in doing.

It's clearly supposed to tell you how the skinheads are the bad guys, I mean that was the intended message... but it doesn't really succeed in that, in fact it kind of makes the good guys, more often than not, with the exception of the prison scene... and people love it.

And people love it. That raises a pretty serious question, do they love it for the message that they tried to push and failed miserably at, resulting in the movie making Neo-Nazis out to be the better of two evils more often than not, or do they love it because they faild miserably at making the Neo-Nazis out to be evil?

It's sort of like "The Thin Red Line" where they pushed the leftwing message so hard that they made Americans seem like the bad guys in World War II.... when we were fighting actual Nazis and serious Japanese war criminals. They over did American History X on the narrative and because of that the message got lost in delivery.

You could use this as a skinhead recruitment film because it failed so miserably in the message it was trying to push, and it failed miserably because they were too concerned about pushing the message that they forgot how they were framing the film.

So a bunch of skinheads win a turf war basketball game, to stop the gang violence around the basketball courts, and then one of the Black people on the losing side tries to steal the car of one of the skinheads. And then the skinhead goes to jail for killing him. Then we have a flashback where the skinhead argues that Affirmative Action policies that put race before merit are racist because they put race before merit... to presumably illistrate how evil he is. Then his brother reads "Mein Kampf" for a book report and has to write a history paper titled American History X to teach him not to read books that should be banned... like the ACTUAL Nazis banned books. I mean that's not very free speech of them to tell people what they can or can't read. And before he turns it in, he gets killed by a Black kid, involved in the gangs, who took a gun into school.

Too often in the film you get those moments where you have to stop and think "Why do the Neo-Nazis look like the good guys in comparison?" That's not what they were trying to do, at least I hope it wasn't, but it certainly was what they succeeded in doing.

It's clearly supposed to tell you how the skinheads are the bad guys, I mean that was the intended message... but it doesn't really succeed in that, in fact it kind of makes the good guys, more often than not, with the exception of the prison scene... and people love it.

And people love it. That raises a pretty serious question, do they love it for the message that they tried to push and failed miserably at, resulting in the movie making Neo-Nazis out to be the better of two evils more often than not, or do they love it because they faild miserably at making the Neo-Nazis out to be evil?

It's sort of like "The Thin Red Line" where they pushed the leftwing message so hard that they made Americans seem like the bad guys in World War II.... when we were fighting actual Nazis and serious Japanese war criminals. They over did American History X on the narrative and because of that the message got lost in delivery.

You could use this as a skinhead recruitment film because it failed so miserably in the message it was trying to push, and it failed miserably because they were too concerned about pushing the message that they forgot how they were framing the film.

So a bunch of skinheads win a turf war basketball game, to stop the gang violence around the basketball courts, and then one of the Black people on the losing side tries to steal the car of one of the skinheads. And then the skinhead goes to jail for killing him. Then we have a flashback where the skinhead argues that Affirmative Action policies that put race before merit are racist because they put race before merit... to presumably illistrate how evil he is. Then his brother reads "Mein Kampf" for a book report and has to write a history paper titled American History X to teach him not to read books that should be banned... like the ACTUAL Nazis banned books. I mean that's not very free speech of them to tell people what they can or can't read. And before he turns it in, he gets killed by a Black kid, involved in the gangs, who took a gun into school.

Too often in the film you get those moments where you have to stop and think "Why do the Neo-Nazis look like the good guys in comparison?" That's not what they were trying to do, at least I hope it wasn't, but it certainly was what they succeeded in doing.

It's clearly supposed to tell you how the skinheads are the bad guys, I mean that was the intended message... but it doesn't really succeed in that, in fact it kind of makes the good guys, more often than not, with the exception of the prison scene... and people love it.

And people love it. That raises a pretty serious question, do they love it for the message that they tried to push and failed miserably at, resulting in the movie making Neo-Nazis out to be the better of two evils more often than not, or do they love it because they faild miserably at making the Neo-Nazis out to be evil?

It's sort of like "The Thin Red Line" where they pushed the leftwing message so hard that they made Americans seem like the bad guys in World War II.... when we were fighting actual Nazis and serious Japanese war criminals. They over did American History X on the narrative and because of that the message got lost in delivery.