Pump Up the Volume (1990)

**A duel of generations, a school, angry teenagers and lots of rock.**

This is a film for young adults that takes advantage of traditional teenage rebellion and the talent of Christian Slater, a good script and a good soundtrack. It's not masterful, but it's ideal for a Saturday afternoon and has aged very well: thirty years after it was made and marketed, it's still young and fresh.

The story focuses on a clandestine radio station created by an angry and angry teenager who was forced to move house and is in a place where he doesn't know anyone and doesn't even feel comfortable. The radio is an outlet, it is a means of expressing inner anger, and it is nothing truly serious, but it becomes increasingly relevant as it acquires a very loyal local audience, who listen to him as if he were a guru without even knowing it. his identity, and allows himself to be carried away by his words in a wave of riots and protests that are directed, in particular, against the management of the local high school.

The story is quite good, it is well written, and the duel between the two characters (the young teenager assumed to be the radio presenter and the plenipotentiary director of the school) mirrors not only the oldest conflict of generations but also the permanent conflict between powerful and weak in society. None of this is particularly new, but the way it is served and presented was creative and wonderfully entertaining. The problem here is that it's a film for teenagers, it's too light, and it lacks secondary characters that are at least as complete and impactful as the two central characters.

Christian Slater lived in his youth, the happiest days of his career, and gave us good characters in good films. With time and success, he became a star and almost a synonym of rebellion and irreverence, an apprentice of James Dean who exploded onto the screen, guaranteeing the success of his films and the influx of young people to the cinema. Time, however, would show that Slater was, in each film, playing a single character, which was the one he tried to revive in his personal life, increasingly complicated by addictions and problems with the authorities. Annie Ross, on the other hand, gives us mature, well-developed work, suitably dark and dense, never allowing Slater to feel alone in the spotlight.

On a technical level, it is in the soundtrack that we find the film's strong point. The songs include hit songs by Leonard Cohen, Pixies, Ivan Neville and Cowboy Junkies, and most of them are very easy to know for anyone who lived through the 90s and 2000s, that is, everyone or almost everyone. The rest doesn't really matter: with no mistakes to regret, it doesn't exceed the average at any particular point.

Nov 19, 2023