"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Harmony Korine’

Kids

Wednesday, July 29th, 2015

tn_kids

RELEASE DATE: July 28
RELEASE DATE: July 28

So KIDS is 20 years old – which is older than most (all?) of the actors in the movie. What I’ve discovered watching it now as an aging individual is that the older you get the more disgusting it gets. I mean, they have always been younger than me, but now they look like babies. The first shot of the movie is an endless closeup of skinny, shirtless sixteen-years-young Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick, now better known as a junkie on The Wire) awkwardly french kissing a girl who looks even younger than him (I believe he says she’s 12). I don’t think there’s any nudity in this movie, and for all the sexual discussion and activity – enough that it had to be released NC-17 – it’s actually not very graphic. But there’s a whole lot of young teens sloppily kissing, which is almost more uncomfortable. Those scenes make me feel either like an old prude or a young kid who thinks kissing is gross.

This is the rookie movie of both director Larry Clark and writer Harmony Korine, and it definitely gives you an idea of the type of filmatists they would become. You got Clark’s eye for a gritty, documentary texture and his obsession with documenting sweaty, burgeoning teenage sexuality, and you have Korine’s weirdness and disdain for traditional cinematic storytelling. One long section of the movie is just cutting between two rooms, one full of boys, one full of girls, as they talk candidly/show-offily about sex. Of course they paint very different pictures. For example, in the boy’s room they’re pretty excited about how much they know girls love to “suck dick,” while at that same moment the girls are all commiserating about how much they hate that. (read the rest of this shit…)

Spring Breakers

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

tn_springbreakersI have this dumb joke that always amuses me: whenever they’re looking for a director to do a new MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or a Marvel Comics movie or something I suggest Harmony Korine. It’s funny to picture the director of GUMMO and TRASH HUMPERS selling out or deciding to do a normal mainstream movie, because it just seems like something he would never be interested in. I picture him as a smartass New York art kid for life.

So it was pretty funny to see his new one at a multiplex with an IRON MAN 3 trailer playing before it. I think this was by accident. In style and substance it’s not that much more normal than MISTER LONELY (the one about the commune of celebrity impersonators), it just happens that it focuses on a topic that can be very commercial: young girls in bikinis spraying beer on each other and jumping up and down and sometimes they have guns. And one of the stars is James Franco, who seems to have alot of interests in common with Korine, but is also the star of a $215 million Disney 3D fantasy movie that was #1 at the box office just last week. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mister Lonely

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

tn_misterlonelyHey guys, good news: I got another review of a weird little inaccessible arthouse movie from last year! This time it’s MISTER LONELY, the most recent movie about a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who convinces him to come live in a commune where other impersonators live inside a Scottish castle, raise sheep and build a stage where they hope to put on a show. And you can imagine where it would go from there.

In my opinion MISTER LONELY writer/director Harmony Korine is a weird dude. He wrote KIDS for Larry Clark when he was 19, became a director with GUMMO and later did JULIEN DONKEY BOY. His movies are freak shows of improvisation, arty photography and the complete rejection of any mainstream idea of what a movie is supposed to be. As much as I have tried to push the idea of him directing a mainstream movie like a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE it doesn’t seem to be something he’s interested in. Instead he hangs out with Werner Herzog, gets involved in that whole Dogme 95 deal, and makes weird books with titles like A Crack Up At the Race Riots. He’s also known for his bizarre interviews like on Letterman when he was younger or with a fan websight who he instructed to meet him in the projects, then spoke to them by phone for a while, then showed up and made them listen to Beyonce on a laptop while he sat in a lawnchair petting his dog. (read the rest of this shit…)

Vern gets his thing going with KEN PARK

Thursday, September 11th, 2003

Hey folks, Harry here with a review of KEN PARK by the guy we all love and adore… Vern. Vern is our hero and long do we wish we were him. Enjoy…

Hey boys,

Vern here and I just saw KEN PARK, Australia’s least favorite new movie by America’s most favorite pervert Larry Clark. Larry’s done four movies before this. All of them had teens getting high and fucking each other, and two of them were released unrated. He’s known for his uncompromising approach to teenage crotch and ass shots, but as far as I know this is the first time he got a movie banned in Australia. They even tried to show it at a festival and the pigs (or razorbacks, or whatever they are in australia) shut it down.

This movie is definitely a little more graphic than his others, but I’m not sure what it is that got it banned. At first I thought it was the goofy kid with the eyebrow ring eating out the soap opera star, because it looks like they did it for real. But it was probaly a pussy double. So then I thought maybe it was the bondage scene where the girl keeps rubbing the guy’s boner through his underwear. But then I figured maybe not, it might be the scene where the kid chokes himself while he jerks off on camera and cums all over his hand. I don’t think that was CGI, man. Also it probaly didn’t help when he went in naked and stabbed his grandparents to death while they were asleep and said in voiceover narration that it made him hard. (read the rest of this shit…)

Gummo

Saturday, January 1st, 2000

What this picture is about is these two kids who go around riding their bikes and hunting cats, and there are alot of filthy houses, and ugly rednecks talking shit about the blacks and punching each other. Then they find a dead cat and just keep shooting it with pellet guns. In the opening scene two kids are making out in a junkyard and the boy finds a lump in the girl’s tit. Later this guy is trying to make out with a black midget and Chloe Sevigny teaches her little sister how to pull hairs out of her nipples with duct tape. (read the rest of this shit…)