Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I’m astonished by the reports that screenings of this film keep getting shut down in Sydney. Personally, I’m not much for Larry Clark. I think he’s a voyeur who makes the audience complicit in his own personal fetishes, and BULLY struck me as particularly grotesque for the sake of it, like a skankier wanna-be RIVER’S EDGE.
Even so... the film should be screened if there are adults who would like to see it. The idea of a film being banned for content in this day and age just pisses me off. A few weeks ago, Harry called me from Geek Headquarters in Austin where he was celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to make sodomy legal. I could hear Ravvy in the background, trying to scream something around his ball gag, and I assume he was expressing his joy at the decision. We discussed the way this film is becoming a cause celebre just because of its banning, and I realized I may well see this, even though I have no desire to see it, just to establish my right to see it.
In the meantime, here are a couple of reactions from the film’s latest festival screening:
The Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival showed KEN PARK last night to a sold out audience (mostly male, half-divided between 20-somethings and an older crowd). Larry Clark was present to introduce the screening and for Q&A after. The reaction was respectful, appreciative and very mature (nervous laughter only once, long loud applause at the conclusion).
This movie, good as it is, will never be widely shown. It's too raw. Its life will come on DVD, and the sooner the better. The film starts with the suicide of the titular character, graphic and startling, but we have no investment in it -- the character is a cipher. So is much of what follows, yet Mssrs. Clark, Lachman and Korine have fleshed out their characters with humor and real vulnerability in the meantime, so that the cumulative effect is devastating. The final 30 minutes or so are quite harrowing as the film cuts from one nightmare to another (the more left unsaid the better for your eventual viewing). The audience was transfixed. I think the success of the film is its unflinching honesty. Witness the ambivalence of Amanda Plummer as she begins to understand and wordlessly deny what her son has suffered at the hands (and mouth) of her brutish husband. Or the touching need for another character to be rated positively for his sexual prowess by the mother of his girlfriend with whom he has just had sex, and her bemused reaction when he compares both mother and daughter in bed. Or the graphic auto-erotic masturbation scene that is disturbing, not so much for its graphic full-frontal depiction as for it mundanity. The boy doesn't even look at the tv screen on which his fantasy is performing, he just listens to her grunting as she plays a tennis match.
The film is packed with such observant details that raise it high above the level of "filth" for which it will assuredly be condemned by the righteous and the mighty, who will never bother to watch it, and whose kids are probably not much different from the kids in the movie. KEN PARK is an amazing collabration between writer, directors, and cast, most of whom are amateurs who don't make a mistep in claiming their characters. Not one. It's an ensemble of the highest order. The argument that KEN PARK is pornographic is bullshit. Life is pornographic. Not enough can be said for the courage and trust evident in every frame of film. Why can't more films be this honest, this intelligent? Thanks to Clark, Lachman, and Korine for giving us credit for having brains. It is a film that will talked about for years. It will not go away.
As a side note, Clark deflected a Q&A query afterwards about the whereabouts of Harmony Korine, who is reportedly MIA. Any word from readers on this mystery?
The opening film of the festival, LATTER DAYS, is an engagingly romantic boy meets boy story that might break through to a wider audience than the standard gay films corral, largely because of the script, which has more on its mind than sex and beautiful people, and its two leads, who are charming, likable, sexy, and very good actors. Steve Sandvoss is especially appealing as the Mormon missionary who is eased out of his repressed homosexuality by his party-boy neighbor and who suffers severe consequences as a result. Sandvoss has Brad Pitt looks as well as the presence, and unabashed charm for stardom. Ditto for Wes Ramsey, who palys the party boy. Jacqueline Bisset is on hand for some by the numbers emoting, Overall the film looks like a winner for TLA Releasing when it opens early next year.
The festival has just begun. I'll check in with more reviews if the films warrant.
Troofire
Please do. In the meantime, here’s another review of the film:
Har-Bear:
Okay, so after seeing the KP preview you put up the other day I was very intrigued. I've always had a certain fascination with Larry Clark, at least the world of material that he mines. So, lo and behold, just a few days after seeing the preview, I got word from a friend of mine that there was a screening of KP this very weekend as part of the Philly International Gay & Lesbian Film Fest (when asked about why PIGLFF got a hold of the film - which really doesn't have any overt gay themes or characters - the Festival Curator said simply "Because we can.")
Needless to say, it was a packed house. Clark himself was there for the screening and did a bit of an intro and q&a post-screening. More on him later. As far as the film goes, it was actually surprisingly good and cohesive. Part of what's always interesting in Clark's films is his obvious affinity for his characters (and, by proxy, the always young - and generally inexperienced - actors he has portraying them). This film is certainly no exception and in fact, I would go so far as to say it's his most intimate film to date.
Plot-wise, we're not really dealing with much of an arc, per se. The narrative follows a group of teen-aged friends as they skate, have sex and interact with their completely fucked up parents. Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay, uses the Ken Park character himself as a bookend device to loop the story back on itself. Interestingly, even though the film's opening monologues suggest that the story involves a particular group of friends, we see very little of the group as a whole, everyone just deals with their various struggles and issues on their own until the penultimate threesome scene.
As is his want, Clark uses a lot of inexperienced non-actors in the kids' roles. His idea (as he explained it to us) was to use established adult actors for the parents, and totally raw, inexperienced actors as the young brood. It's a gambit that largely pays off. The performances are pretty much top notch throughout, and the pay off is that Clark gets excitingly daring work from almost everyone. For the most part, he's dealing with sympathetic characters, he takes pains to infuse nearly everyone with some degree of pathos (even Wade Williams' drunken lout of a father is shown to be helplessly, hopelessly lonely).
Perhaps the most interesting character is Tate, played with absolute fearlessness by James Ransone (whom you can watch in HBO's "The Wire" this season - apparently, this acting gig really suited him). Tate, we are told in VO, 'thinks differently than most people.' When we first see him, he's amusing himself by looking at pictures of starving African children and writing down made-up names for them, when his grandmother comes into his room to sweetly offer him a plate of fruit as a snack, he snaps, calls her a "fucking bitch" and bum rushes her out of his space. He is at once, funny, demented and strangely sweet (later on, he hangs out with some girls on his street and goofily double-dutches with them, looking for all the world like a happy little kid). That his story turns strangely and inexplicably violent takes us by surprise and we get to see the other side of the coin with Tate's hitherto amusingly benign type of insanity.
No mention is made of Tate's parents, but throughout the film, the adults prove to be that much more fucked up than their kids. We see a seriously pregnant mother smoking and drinking beers; a father who is so obsessed with his dead wife that he 'marries' his only daughter, who is a dead ringer for her mom; a mother who not only has sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but enjoys the sexual comparisons he makes between the two of them afterward. The kids might be a bit lost, Clark would seem to suggest, but they are nowhere near as off-course as their folks.
And then, there's the sex. Well, it's true, the sex scenes are absolutely more graphic than you would ever see in a major studio-released film. There is (seemingly) real oral sex, strongly implied intercourse, an auto-erotic masturbation scene that goes to filmed climax, and so on. By making the film as graphic as he does, though, Clark manages to make those scenes strangely beautiful and compelling without having to follow Hollywood's usual standards and protocols. Thus, there is an element of realism to them (not unlike, say "Y Tu Mama Tambien") that keeps the scenes grounded. As weird as it may sound, because the scenes are so far beyond what you'd normally see in a narrative (non-adult) film, it adds a powerful element of cinema-verite: in a way, it forces us to see these young actors as real as the characters they are portraying.
In that manner, as graphic as the scenes are, I can't agree with the critics who accuse Clark of being merely prurient and exploitative (though reports that he's romantically involved with his 21-year old leading lady - if true - certainly makes for a more troublesome and problematic reading of the film). Here, despite the slippery slope Clark might be on, the sex does amount to something, it grounds his characters and gives us real insight into whom they are.
After the film, Clark did a brief Q & A. From memory, here are some paraphrases from a couple of his answers:
Q: What is the status with you and Harmony?
Clark: (smiling) Missing in action. Next?
Q: How did you two work together [Clark was credited with creating the stories, Korine, the writing of the screenplay]?
Clark: I came up with the characters and their stories. I told Harmony about them and what I wanted to happen, and then he wrote the structure and the dialogue. The structure is really extraordinary and the scenes he wrote really, really worked. He was worried about doing some of the scenes [here, Clark goes into a pretty spot-on imitation of Korine's famously high-pitched warble] 'Oh, Larry, I don't know if I can do the father sucking his son's dick' but he did it and it was really amazing.
Q: This is the first film of yours I've seen and it was extraordinary. How did you get such great performances from the novice actors?
Clark: That's just something I can do. The conventional wisdom was that you couldn't use novices with pros, or it would really look bad. I knew that wasn't true. My thinking was you could use these young kids and they could give you a raw performance. The adults really liked working with them. They said it was unlike working with other pros, in which you more or less know how the other person is going to respond to you. The kids were so surprising that it brought out even better performances from the adults.
He also went on to say that a couple of the young actors were skaters from the small California town the film was shot in (I believe it was Visalia); that he's watched this film many, many times and still loves it, and that the idea for the film was one of the original things that got him into making movies instead of taking photos.
Overall, I really would have to recommend the film, though with all the obvious caveats. If you get the chance to see it at a Festival or whathaveyou, I would tell you to jump at the chance. It is surely never to be released in this country in any kind of widespread way.
Just calls it the way I sees it. You can call me Kafkaesque, if you'd like to use this here piece.
Definitely two thoughtful reactions to what is, by all accounts, a difficult piece of material. Thanks, guys.
"Moriarty" out.
