Lakeside and Rainier Beach are far apart, and not just in miles.
Geographically, athletically, and dad’s-yacht-havingly, it would be tough to find two Seattle schools further apart than Lakeside and Rainier Beach, but the two will contest the same prize tonight: The Metro League Boys Basketball Championship.
At private Lakeside, with its collegiate-style campus on the northern edge of the city, tuition is $27,250 per year, 100 percent of students go to college, and they accept only one-quarter of their applicants.
At public Rainier Beach in the extreme southeast corner of Seattle, the median household income is $26,291 per year, the school was cited in 2011 as one of the 50 lowest-achieving in the state, and while the school can hold 1,200 students, fewer than 500 are enrolled.
This polarity is reversed when you talk basketball: Lakeside hasn’t won a city hoops title since 1991, while Rainier Beach has won eight just since since 2000.
If there’s anything the two schools have in common, it’s that their names are lies: Lakeside is not beside a lake. Rainier Beach is, but behold the “beach” that’s a few hundred yards from the school…. Let’s just say that Kauai is not formulating an action plan to handle this competition.
Lakeside and Beach played for the Metro League basketball championship 22 years ago and Lakeside came away with an upset win, the school’s first and only basketball crown. Since, basketball has not been one of the school’s “core competencies,” to put it in terms your average Lakeside grad — that is, current corporate executive — would understand. (I kid, Lakeside grads! But, seriously, hire me.)
Three seasons later, Hobson is the Metro League coach of the year. His Lakeside team still plays tough and disciplined basketball, but now they have talent. Guard Tremaine Isabell is one of the quickest players in the city, a slasher in the Allen Iverson mold. Fellow guards D’Marques Tyson and Matthew Poplawski are decent shooters and reliable ballhandlers, while 6’-8” Anand Rajesh and 7’-0” Peter French provide an inside attack teams must account for. I said this a month ago and I stick by it: Lakeside could win state.
Beach could, too — in fact they are the runaway favorites to do so. Along with the typical Vikings complement of speedy, fierce, skilled guards, Beach has talented 6’-7” wing Shaqquan Aaron, the best junior in the state according to ESPN, and possessor of scholarship offers from collegiate basketball powers from coast to coast. Aaron at times struggles to find his place in the Beach offense, but is unstoppable in the open court. Expect at least two thunderous dunks off of steals with Aaron on the floor.
The question for Lakeside will be: Who do we have who can match Aaron’s height and athleticism? And the answer will be — as it would for every other high school team in the state and most college squads — nobody. Lakeside will need to limit Aaron’s chances in the open floor and keep him away from the basket to have a chance of winning.
If you believe that a victory in this game would mean more to upstart Lakeside than to long-dominant Rainier Beach, then maybe the Lions are worth an upset pick. I’m not so sure, though. Rainier Beach makes winning this title a point of pride — the Vikings are 8-3 in the title game since 2000.
Both teams, I expect, will play their hearts out, and the schools’ small but vocal fan bases will be rooting like crazy. Come on out to Garfield High tonight: the game’s scheduled for 8 p.m.
Though I did not ask him, I feel confident that Shawn Kemp would agree: It’s tough to win a basketball game when you can’t hit an outside shot and your best player has been ejected.
I think NBAers Jamal Crawford and Spencer Hawes, who, like Kemp, attended Tuesday’s boys basketball game between #1-ranked Seattle Prep and #3 Rainier Beach, would nod in concurment [Concurment? Seth, like Shakespeare, likes to add words to the language when he needs them–ed.]. As would, I suspect, former Husky legend Will Conroy and current Seattle U head coach Cameron Dollar, who were also at the game.
Yet this dire scenario did not deter the scrappy, undersized Rainier Beach Vikings from pulling out an improbable 64-56 comeback victory in the hostile Seattle Prep gym, in front of a packed house–so packed that late-arrivers Kemp and Crawford had to stand the whole game. I have seen Kemp arrive late to Seattle Storm games, but there he is whisked to a court-side seat. No such treatment in the egalitarian world of the high school gym!
Beach was down seven points in the third quarter when Anrio Adams, their best player–the state’s best player, according to SeaTown Sports–got a technical foul for jawing with a Seattle Prep player. Wouldn’t have been a big deal except that Adams had been caught dunking during warmups–which, apparently, earns you a technical foul in high school basketball instead of a standing ovation. And, at every level of basketball, two technicals spells E-J-E-C-T-I-O-N.
With Adams out, the smart money was on a Beach collapse. Prep went on an immediate 7-0 run. Two other top Beach players, wing Dujuan Piper and guard Marquis Davis, were in foul trouble. Down eight points going into the fourth quarter. Beach’s fate was in the tiny hands of their two smallest players–5’9″ Will Dorsey and 5’8″ Naim Ladd. Inserted into the lineup by necessity, Dorsey and Ladd’s quickness changed the game.
On offense, both were able to drive past Prep’s larger, slower guards for lay-ins. On defense, they were able to help double-team Prep center Mitch Brewe, denying entry passes to the UCSB-bound senior, then sprinting back out to the perimeter to hassle Prep’s guards.
With Crawford pantomiming advice from the crowd, Beach’s defense earned stop after stop, inching closer with their dribble-drive offense (I don’t believe Beach hit a shot longer than six feet the entire second half). With about five minutes left, Beach pulled ahead on a drive and floater by Dorsey, who then stole the inbounds pass and dished to a teammate for a short jumper. The Vikings never trailed again. Dorsey ended up with six points in the fourth quarter, Ladd with seven.
Beach outscored Prep 24-8 in the final frame. The key was, as a friend pointed out after the game: “I thought they couldn’t win unless they started hitting their outside shots. But, instead, they just stopped taking them.”
Beach’s comeback emboldened their cheering section, which had been mostly quiet during the game–at least compared to Seattle Prep’s students, who stood for the whole game and unleashed a variety of classic chants. As the seconds wound down, Beach fans began their own classic chant: “Over-rated.”
Before abandoning the game narrative, I feel compelled to note that the three officials did an outstanding job staying in control of a physical, fast-paced game that could easily have gotten out of hand. I’m not saying they got every call right, but they made it a fair contest despite absorbing a lot of abuse from both coaches, both cheering sections, and players on both teams. Bill Leavy, however, still stinks.
A word on the notable players in Tuesday’s game:
Anrio Adams: Back in the Metro League after two years of ineligibility, the Kansas-bound senior displayed his outstanding leaping ability on a couple of plays–driving into the lane, jumping, floating, switching hands, and scoring. We didn’t get to see much of his outside shot (he actually started in the post for Beach, though he’ll surely be a guard in college), but chalk that up to Prep’s extending their defense out to the perimeter for most of the game.
Mitch Brewe: Seattle Prep’s senior post led all scorers with 22 points, but–tired perhaps–wasn’t able to get much going in the pivotal fourth quarter.
D.J. Fenner: Like Adams, Fenner (son of former Seahawks RB Derrick Fenner) is back in Metro after two years away. The junior guard, at 6’5″, still has the college-level height and body type, but we didn’t see him do many basketball things. A friend noted that he seemed to have trouble catching the ball. In Fenner’s defense, he was in foul trouble most of the night. Once considered one of the nation’s top freshmen, Fenner isn’t starting for Prep–though it’s unclear whether this is a tactical thing or a reflection on his ability.
For next Metro League Tuesday I will be at Roosevelt, watching the Rough Riders take on Bothell and guard Zach Levine, one of the state’s top scorers.
Most Likely to Direct a Surreal Meta-High-School Movie: Director Joseph Kahn. Photo/collage by Tony Kay.
Director Joseph Kahn has been working in music video for twenty years, directing big-time efforts like U2’s “Elevation” clip and Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” among others. But he’s managed to combine that experience with his love of 1980s and ’90s pop cinema to create one of SIFF 2011’s left-field surprises, Detention.
Kahn’s sophomore feature enjoyed the last of its enthusiastically-received SIFF screenings on Sunday June 5. The movie follows Riley (Shanley Caswell), a wisecracking Square Peg of a high school girl who deals with her infatuation for slacker dreamboat Clapton (The Kids are Alright’s Josh Hutcherson), even as a masked killer runs around making mincemeat of her classmates.
Very quickly, the movie branches off into a dozen different directions, augmenting a very sharp bird’s-eye view of the little nightmares that comprise adolescence with sardonic humor, a time-travelling stuffed bear, aliens, slasher cliches, and so many meta-movie references that you’ll need to see it a second (and third, and fourth…) time to absorb all of ‘em.
But it’s more than just pastiche. All of those disparate threads intersect by the movie’s end, and Kahn delivers the entire sensory-overloaded package with pinpoint accuracy. By backing up its relentless MTV-stoked pace with a distinctive sensibility (and a heart), Detention just might signal a sea change in music video-influenced moviemaking. As The SunBreak’s own Josh Bis said, “I left feeling won over by something that I probably should have hated,” and I too came out of the screening seriously, mightily impressed.
Not surprisingly, Kahn talks like he films: fast and precise, but with so many interesting tangents and layers that it’s a fun challenge to follow along.
You were saying at last night’s Q&A that Detention was made outside of a major studio’s involvement…
Yeah. Detention is pretty much like me writing a check…I found a few people that invested in it, but it was a weird financing deal to where I had to pay them back; so it wasn’t really like investment as much as it was loans. There was no studio involved; no studio executives. There’s not even a formal producer [on the film]. I mean, I had my music video producers on, but there wasn’t anyone on who’d made movies before, or had a [film production] company or anything like that…. I think it’s about as indie as it could possibly be.
The movie looks incredibly polished. It speaks to your background in commercials and videos. There are a lot of filmmakers who’ve been working in the last twenty years in music videos and commercials, but in a lot of cases they’ll downplay or dismiss that background. You embrace that experience. That’s a relatively new notion.
What I’ve seen in the last twenty years, in terms of the whole transition of music video and commercial directors is, when they finally go into the feature-film world, they always want to prove that they’re “serious filmmakers.” Every fucking single one of them toned down the style, and stopped doing what they do in terms of music videos. They almost want to emulate filmmakers, which I think is really strange…. I think there’s wonderful work being done in videos and advertising; groundbreaking stuff in terms of montage theory and structure, and how audiences process information. You can’t translate it one-to-one, but there’s a lot of stuff you can take that can push the art form a bit more.
To me, Detention really feels like maybe the most seamless absorption of those influences into a standard motion-picture format. In its own crazy-quilt cartoon way, it feels like it’s expanding the art form with those elements; which is almost a first to me.
Wow [laughs]: That’s a great perspective.
But that feeds off of you embracing this background that you’ve had in commercials and music video. That said, could you talk to me about some of the cinematic influences on Detention?
[In] a lot of what’s done in cinema right now, especially mainstream filmmaking, commercials specifically have affected movie-making to the worst. They’ve pulled in all these commercial directors, but what they really wanted was this “Coverage Concept” of filmmaking, where you shoot medium/close-up/wide, shoot a ton of angles, you shoot with multiple-cameras. It’s sort of like the Jerry Bruckheimer style of shooting something. It looks slick, and it’s lit slick, because you can light things from certain sorts of angles and stuff with your cameras. But ultimately, it’s shot for coverage, and then you piece it together in the edit. Producers and studio executives love this style.
That’s actually not what I do, personally, in music videos. It’s harder to do in commercials, because it’s all sort of boarded out by the agency, but when I personally do my music videos, I always try to do a construction that is often blocking-intensive; where people move inside the camera space, and there’s a mise-en-scene to the thing and you can’t really edit around it.
Going to your question, a lot of that is influenced [by] the filmmakers that I loved that were doing pop movies in the eighties…specifically Steven Spielberg; the way he blocks his camera and the actors. Whenever you see a Spielberg film, he always does these long takes–I call them “mise-ettes,” light units of mise-en-scene. If you look at an average film, it’s always, like, one thing happens visually: Someone turns his head, or a person walks up to something. It’s one unit of screen space happening. And Spielberg ties it together; you could have fourteen mise-ettes happening, where one person walks in and suddenly the camera pans; another person walks in–rack focus to his hand, rack focus to someone’s head. It’s like these long layers and planes and things like that.
So Detention, if you look at its main influences, is like this weird fusion of hyper-editing here and there; also constructed with these intricate mise-ettes. That’s heavily influenced off Spielberg, and some Scorsese theories of smash cuts and things like that.
Although Detention has a pretty wicked, jet-black sense of humor, there’s actually a certain amount of sweetness to it, especially at the end. Could you speak a little about that?
Well, even though I have a pretty jaded sense of humor, I’m not a jaded person. I have a lot of hope for humanity. Also, as I get older, I’m not one of those people that looks at the younger generation and goes, “They’re all screwed up, and nothing’s ever gonna happen.” […] What’s really interesting is that I feel like, having done music videos and pop videos for the last twenty years, I’ve seen how kids today are so much more integrated than ever before; the idea that white kids love rap music, and black kids love rock music, and there’s fusion things…. It’s just such an interesting, integrated perspective of the world. I see nothing but positivity.
There are always gonna be missteps and things like that. But we elected a black president. That’s an incredible statement. So from my standpoint, humanity’s only getting better and better. I feel like maybe, in the 21st century, we are really seeing the emergence of this really sweet new culture where everybody is really, really getting along; and I like it. So I can’t make a high school movie and lie and say, “Everyone’s fucked up.” I don’t see it that way. I truly like the kids today.
It’s interesting that you talk about that duality. In Detention, you see a lot of the pains of high school and the pains of not fitting in that we all felt. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
There’s no question in my mind that everyone shares the pain of growing up. And I felt it was really important to put a universal message out there that, no matter how hard it is, it’s just high school. Not that your problems aren’t big, but…if you notice in the movie, it’s like every problem that happens to everybody is, like, the worst problem ever. So you have titles [in the movie] like “The Terrible Ultimatum of Clapton Davis,” “The Lonely Ballad of Billy Nolan.” In high school, everything is just so magnified, ’cause you’re experiencing all these things for the first time. And that’s really where it comes in for me. It’s like, can these kids really experience all these things, and how the hell do you survive that when the emotions are so powerful?
The visual language of all the horror scenes is quite effective. Are you a horror movie fan?
Yeah, especially from the eighties. One of the ways that I learned how to do filmmaking was reading Fangoria magazine…. When you saw all the blood and guts and effects [in the magazine], they would break it down and show you behind-the-scenes. You’d see there was a logical construction to all this stuff, how the illusion was made. And if you think about horror movies for a filmmaker, on a certain level, if you study [the genre], it’s a very clean way of saying, “How do I achieve a [goal]?” which is to scare somebody, or to make them think that someone died…. You reverse-engineer that stuff, and you start becoming a filmmaker, because you realize that one shot must lead to the next. You have master shots, you have close-ups; how do you arrange that stuff? Then that opens doors to very specific filmmakers like Hitchcock….
So as far as Detention goes, what’s the exhibition trajectory like? Is this your first film festival screening?
This is my second one; I had one in Austin [at South by Southwest]. The weird thing is, every time I screen the movie, it seems to get stronger and stronger reactions. I don’t know if it’s like a wine that’s aging–I haven’t done anything new to it since Austin–but this [Seattle screening] is one of the strongest screenings that I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure it out, except that maybe it’s because people in the Pacific Northwest are just so damned smart [laughs]. They got every reference. I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s a high-school movie, so it’s going to skew towards that demographic. But I think it’s distinctive enough, and smart enough, and there’s enough going on, to where you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy it.
Yeah, it was a tricky balance, too, since we have this big time-travel thing and all these references to the ’90s…. The reality is, if you’re a nineteen-year-old kid, a lot of those ’90s references may not really register. Then if you’re older, a lot of the new lingo that the kids know may not really register, either. So it was a weird balance of trying to hit the older and younger target [simultaneously]. Maybe the sweet spot might be someone around 25 that doesn’t hate people who are 18; and that’s a tough one [laughs]!
Three seasons later, Hobson is the Metro League coach of the year. His Lakeside team still plays tough and disciplined basketball, but now they have talent. Guard Tremaine Isabell is one of the quickest players in the city, a slasher in the Allen Iverson mold. Fellow guards D’Marques Tyson and Matthew Poplawski are decent shooters and reliable ballhandlers, while 6’-8” Anand Rajesh and 7’-0” Peter French provide an inside attack teams must account for. I said this a month ago and I stick by it: Lakeside could win state.
