School on Fire

reibureibu

Starts within the realm of the innocent before immediately flinging itself into terror, the school as sanctuary destroyed in the opening scenes. From there one might think Lam would dial it back, building upon the conditions that led to this moment as an isolated burst of rage within the system, but instead he opts for continuous escalation where rage is responded to only with more rage and bloodshed is the only constant within these students' lives. Education become an impossibility when not a day goes by without violence trespassing these grounds and learning from the curriculum seems so utterly frivolous when survival itself is uncertain. Lord of the Flies but even the adults cannot help, and those who try are gutted like pigs. Ends in the realm of the doomed: the school as hell, as it always was.

Sean Gilman5.0

The Hong Kong New Wave pulp-exploitation version of A Brighter Summer Day. Unlike Dangerous Encounters-First Kind and The Happenings, with which it shares a ground-level, ultra-violent aesthetic in examining the lives of doomed HK teens, its anger isn't a generalized generational explosion of angst, but rather an anguished indictment of the specific institutions which, through systemic incompetence, corruption and/or impotence have utterly failed to offer the youth of the city's Walled City-like slums any hope of escape, of a future outside of drug abuse, prostitution, street crime and gang violence. Even the Triads are a failed institution: their norms and rituals of respectability overthrown by Roy Cheung in a career-best performance as the archetype of the new nihilism in gangster ideology.

PlaguDocta5.0

Of age and doom. On this (4th) re-watch of mine. with my dad joining me, he recalled a story back when he was younger about a student who reported to the teachers on a fraternity (which are like considered the gangs here in the Philippines) and got death threats (to which he connects on how the triads operate here in this film); because of this, a bodyguard was hired to stay outside around the school in order for the situation to de-escalate. I always wondered if this film would appeal to Filipino film circles, or if maybe Ringo Lam has seen a couple of Lino Brocka's social dramas. I also never considered Ringo Lam's films to be apart of the heroic bloodshed style (with the exception of Full Contact), but I did see him as the punkish post-hardcore counterpart to John Woo's sentimental rock n' roll.