Rooftops - roofs of death
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Rooftops - roofs of death |
| Original title | Rooftops |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1989 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert Wise |
| script | Terence Brennan |
| production | Howard Koch Junior |
| music |
Michael Kamen David A. Stewart |
| camera | Theo van de Sande |
| cut | William H. Reynolds |
| occupation | |
| |
Rooftops - Roofs of Death ( Rooftops : English for house roofs) is an American feature film drama from 1989 by Robert Wise , which was to present his last feature film.
action
Lower Eastside, Manhattan, New York. The adolescent Squeak is an avid sprayer. His trademark is his long coat, covered with his own graffiti art. With his spray skills on a wall directly along a subway line, Squeak one day gets in the way of four gangsters who hire themselves out as crack dealers, this " Hood ". The leader of this group threatens him massively and calls the little Squeak disparagingly "Cockroach" (cockroach, cockroach). When this spokesman for the full-body tattooed, bald-headed crooks threatens him with a knife, Squeak sprays paint on his face with his spray can and at the last moment he escapes behind a rushing subway. The four guys run after him and chase the nimble boy through the shabby district, along the filthy streets and all over the place through gray subway shafts and demolished house skeletons. Arriving on one of the rooftops, the house roofs, Squeak immediately runs into T, a young man who has set up his home there in a disused water tower. He takes Squeak's unmistakable coat off, puts it on and instead runs on over the rooftops that T knows inside out, while the teenager hides and can therefore take a breather. Three of the four guys run after the fake squeak, when they think they have caught it, break one after the other through the ramshackle roof ceilings and fall one floor down.
The "Hood" is controlled by the Hispanic Lobo, a slippery handsome boy who maintains his rule as a drug dealer through sheer violence and brutality. Lobo desperately wants T to work for him, but he wants to stay clean and, much to Lobo's annoyance, stays away from this kind of business. In the evening, the young people of the area meet and, illuminated by burning garbage cans, party on the street and in the backyards. T also gets to know a new dance style that is currently spreading in New York, the Brazilian Capoeira , a mixture of dance and martial arts. Also there are Squeak and the pretty, slim and rather shy colored Elana, who has her eye on T from afar. He, too, quickly falls in love with her, especially since he saves Elana from a pushy drunkard. Both first attempts at approach remain shy and cautious at first. Later they dance a little in another locality, then T she, a very gentleman, drives his motorcycle to her front door. The next morning Lobo shows up with two of his lackeys, bad thugs, in T's demolished house and tries again to put T under pressure. Elana is waiting in front of the house, and T is disappointed to find that his new flame is obviously on the payroll of Lobos, who is her cousin. When T returns to his roof a little later from a Capoeira dance session, he finds that Lobo and his henchmen have completely devastated his “home”. Meanwhile, the police have tracked Lobo and are planning a raid. But thanks to an electronic warning sign that Elana uses to signal an impending danger to her cousin and his people from the street, the drugs in the demolished building can be flushed down the toilet at the last minute. The removed Lobo sees T on the street next to a police officer and assumes that T has informed the police.
In the evening Elana appears on T's rooftop and a discussion takes place. When T asks Elana to leave, she cannot get out of the water tower because the entrance has been blocked by one of Lobo's thugs. On Lobo's order, he finally sets fire to T's ailing accommodation. With their last bit of strength, the couple can escape from the burning case along the water pipe. The next morning, Lobo and his men were released again as nothing could be proven of them. They take revenge on T, whom they meet on the roof at Squeak's side and beat up despite T's first learned Capoeira martial arts. Elana rushes to the roof, but is too late. Despite falling from the roof onto a fire escape, T was largely uninjured. After the cheeky Squeak has verbally challenged Lobo and his men, the drug lord decides to teach the snot a lesson once and for all. Meanwhile, T and Elana spend their first night of love together. The following morning, T sees one of Lobo's guys on a rooftop looking for Squeak, who is once again decorating a wall with his graffiti. T runs to the roof to help the Squeak, who is clearly in danger, but Lobo has already caught him and throws the helpless boy out of the window onto the street, where he lies lifeless. Deeply shaken, T picks up Squeak's trademark, the graffiti coat, and resolves to avenge the boy.
That night he still trains like crazy to be in top shape for the final battle with Lobo's gang. With a sledgehammer he smashed the entrance door to Lobo's meeting place the next morning and dismantled the building piece by piece. A spy Lobos informs him immediately, who drives up with his two henchmen a few minutes. A wild chase breaks out in the house. Lobo shoots around wildly, but does not hit the fast-paced T. Lobo's lackeys are quickly eliminated by two friends of Ts who hurry to help; then it comes to a duel between T and Lobo, man against man. Elana rushes over and tries to stop Lobo from shooting T, but T is knocked down. Because of Lobos shooting around, his revolver is finally without ammunition, when he can finally conquer T and wants to murder coldly. There is a wild chase over the roofs of the demolished houses. When Lobo tries to pounce on T, he breaks through the dilapidated roof and falls to death in the depths. The last scenes determine Capoeira dance interludes and a look at Squeak's last graffito.
Production notes
The 1988 film Rooftops - Rooftops of Death marked Robert Wise's last return to the cinema after ten years as a director. Then another ten years passed before he directed another film: " Summer of Friendship ", which two years later, in 2000, was to be broadcast for the first time on American television and which was to be Wise's final directorial work.
Rooftops - roofs of death also meant Wise's return to the New York of the lower social classes, gang crime and Latinos, but also to that of dance and music: central ingredients that had already made his most famous and successful film, the musical adaptation, almost 30 years earlier West Side Story , specific.
Jeannine C. Oppewall designed the film structures, Taylor Hackford and Stuart Benjamin were the production managers. Kathleen Detoro designed the costumes.
The film opened on March 17, 1989 in the United States. In Germany, Rooftops was not shown in theaters, it was first broadcast on May 30, 1995 on the pay-TV channel Premiere .
Reviews
“In rooftops , the makers of B-films, those sociologists of the big screen, picked up the latest trends in crime and teenage life. They made a thoroughly modern film about crack dealers who break into a bombed-out apartment building, from whose water towers you have an excellent view of the distant Empire State Building. (...) Rooftops is also thoroughly modern in other areas. Instead of the traditional shootings between gangsters and police, we have ballet-like choreographed kung fu battles, graffiti-smeared building ruins, single households, homeless teenagers who have to grow up quickly ... But when it comes to the point, rooftops are very old-fashioned . It's the usual crime-and-excitement formula, spiced with plenty of energetic stunts and tarnished by a script. (…) But there should be a deeper message than the one here, which means that the good ghetto kids can find their happiness and fulfillment if they follow the rhythm, if only the crack dealers finally leave them alone. In the end, Rooftops shows the most American of all cultural tricks. It then drifts off into entertainment, manages to be lovable. "
"Routine, urban B-musical (...) The only thing that stands out: that the film was directed by veteran Robert Wise, who won an Oscar for the thematically similar West Side Story."
"... Underdog drama" Rooftops ", a fashionably pepped up, all too cheap variation of the" West Side Story "..."
“I didn't believe the characters or their people, let alone those around them, that all of this existed, but least of all I bought the film's three villains, who are supposed to be the drug dealers. In the film they know the names of everyone in the area ... They are like the movie gangsters of days long gone. (...) "Rooftops" is not realistic and also adds some elements of pure fantasy. The children in the neighborhood, for example, dedicate themselves to a duel in a ritualized way in a mixture of dance and karate ... (...) That may be the case in the "Fame" dance talent show, but I doubt that this happens in slums ruled by crack. (...) "Rooftops" comes to life in the music and dance passages that feel like musical moments in which the performers dive into a song. But then the film tries to translate these glimpses of fantasy into a melodrama about drugs. Too much was packed in. "
In the lexicon of international films it says: “Film with a lot of music about urban violence, drug crime and racial conflicts. In structure and message and through its seemingly impossible love story, the film is reminiscent of the "West Side Story" that Robert Wise filmed in 1961. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rooftops - Roofs of Death. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed November 13, 2015 .