On February 12, 2008, in Oxnard, California, grade 8 student bully Brandon McInerney shots his effeminate classmate Larry King twice in the back of the head in class and then just walks away. Brandon is caught a couple of blocks away. He is supposedly the good one according to his family and friends. Larry King is overtly flamboyantly gay and even declares publicly that Brandon is his Valentine. This documentary examines the troubled abused lives of both boys.This is a more in-depth examination of a passing story in the headlines. It shows that the story behind the story. The documentary seems to be trying to rehabilitate Brandon and then the prosecutor shows his fights in detention. The movie takes a turn into white supremacist area and the tension ends for me. It's kind of a drop-the-mike moment. At that point, there is really nothing to learn from Brandon. I would have argued for Brandon to be interviewed for the documentary but quite frankly, I don't see the point after the neo-nazi stuff. Maybe he'll reform in prison but it's hard to see that happening.

In the opening minutes, I thought this documentary would be about another school shooting -- and it was, but not the kind I assumed. Valentine Road exhaustively documents the events surrounding the murder of an openly queer (and stunningly brave) middle school student by one of his classmates, a killing at the intersection of numerous questions of homophobia, race, education and justice. One of the many talking heads says early on that every adult involved in the situation failed to do their job, and that's just about right.There are moments when the film demonizes the killer, showing close-ups of an intimidating hooded figure, but also moments where he comes across as tragic, the victim of parental neglect and a social environment that lead him to hate. This makes the latter part of the film, dedicated to the murderer's trial, somewhat awkward -- it's hard to root for any possible outcome.Valentine Road allows each side a chance to explain themselves, with the only common ground being a tremendous well of pain. Most of the speakers don't acquit themselves well, with several winding up blaming the victim for just being too flamboyant. Formally, it's a fairly ordinary TV documentary, with some thuddingly unsubtle touches. The closing montage set to "Same Love" is particularly cringeworthy, and leaves the viewer with an easy-to-swallow message of gay acceptance instead of the lingering complexities of the case and the seemingly insoluble question of how to respond to such an act of violence. But for presenting those complexities for most of its running time, Valentine Road is definitely worth watching.

Reviewing a documentary like this one becomes as much a review of the actual event as a commentary on the cinematic production. And since thoughts about this actual event are fraught with emotions on either side, or on many sides, the reviews I skimmed through seemed inclined to see this presentation of the events as being biased against whoever the reviewer felt was the "real" victim.I'm gay and personally experienced the bullying & name calling from classmates (and lack of support from any adults who might be expected to provide guidance to young people) while I was in school in suburban Chicago many, many years ago. I would, therefore, be inclined to see Larry as the victim and Brandon as the bad guy, at least before getting into the facts of the case.I think the documentary has done a laudable job showing that both children … and they were 14 and 15 year old children at the time … were victims of both parental & societal neglect, abandonment, abuse and mind boggling stupidity. Both lost their lives from preventable and curable problems. Larry quite literally was denied the opportunity to ever find out if "It Gets Better" and Brandon doesn't fare a whole lot better although he continues to live.I applaud the emphasis that the documentary puts on the adults involved. It may take a village to raise a child, but the cabal of idiots involved in this case demonstrates the damage a "village" of adults can cause in the pathetic attempt to raise its children. The homophobic, bitter 7th grade teacher is as bad as the foolish 8th grade teacher who gave Larry a second–hand dress and treated him like a Barbie doll. Equally to blame were the school officials who were more interested in toeing the legal line than serving the interest of their students … including Larry and Brandon before the crisis and all the other children following the event.The parents of the two boys and others who were meant to care for them were, for the most part, sadly inadequate. Apparently the care facility in which Larry ended up was a good place, but otherwise these two kids were left to deal with their own circumstances as well as with the drug addled failings of the adults in their lives, with no help. The prosecuting attorney seemed fairly level headed, although I don't really understand why Brandon was not allowed to be tried as a child. Possibly his outward appearance seemed more adult than his fragile personality would suggest. The defense attorneys seemed reasonable in their desire to have Brandon not tried as an adult, but the woman attorney who, at the end, kept announcing she loved Brandon and started crying, was acting in an irrational, far too emotional manner. Her interest in Brandon seemed anything but professional.Certainly some of the jurors were totally incapable of making a valid judgment. Since there was no question about what Brandon had done, the only decision that needed to be made was what to do with him following the murder. Society had failed to protect him (or Larry) and now some inadequate representatives of that failed society were expected to decide what should happen next. If it weren't so sad, it would be funny. Had Brandon been raised in a reasonably normal family situation and developed into a self-assured, confident, loved young man, when Larry approached him while he was playing basketball with friends, Brandon could easily have laughed it off or even hugged Larry and turned it into a joke. But he saw it as one more attack on his personal dignity and from someone far less intimidating than his father. Neither of these two children should have been made to feel so hated, to have developed such self-loathing and to have been abandoned to deal with life on their own. Based on the letter that Brandon sent to the one teacher, maybe incarceration provided some protection for him and allowed him to develop into a more self-assured, sensible individual. It would be easy to argue that incarceration for 21 years was too little or too much. Was it meant to be punishment or as an attempt to provide a remedial environment? It did save him from further abuse from his father (who died soon after the incident anyway) and the self-absorbed drug addicted mother, but that should have happened before he murdered Larry.I think the documentary was quite well done. I know some people with limited attention spans may have found it slow moving at times, but that may have been appropriate since neither of these marginal children ever generated much in the way of speedy action from the local community and that lethargy & indifference extended even to the collateral damage inflicted on the other children in this story.

This documentary was awfully slow. Many of the interviews are simply irrelevant, children rambling on and on about one or other of the boys. Other interviews seem edited to making certain Brandon supporters look stupid, and the prosecutors beyond question. For example, it doesn't bother exploring the reasons why Brandon was tried as an adult, which probably led to the first mistrial. The prosecutors show video of Brandon fighting while in juvenile detention, but if you Google the incident, guards at the facility said he was actually very well behaved and the incident was not serious. It looks for answers for this senseless tragedy. It gives the full background on the dysfunctional childhood of both boys, and makes a strong case to tie the killing to homophobia and racism, although the real life evidence of that wasn't quite so strong. Due to the sheer numbers of interviews however, the film is very useful to anyone exploring this incident. Overall, it gets a passing grade, but just barely.