(or, Some Fits of art that belong to Harmony Korine.)
This is a throwback piece originally published in the Jan. 2010 issue of the Central Wisconsin newspaper The Scene.
Sometime this year I pray to hold the privilege of catching a potentially life corrupting piece of no-rent cinema by the name of 'Trash Humpers' (view what passes just barely for a trailer here, www.harmony-korine.com). The 'plot details', such as they are, involve the day to day misbehaviors of a small mob of apparently geriatric assholes (embodied by a cast that includes Korine himself in grubby old timer masks and wigs) as they seek to raise the bar on all out anti-social deviance. The film sports a deliberately dodgy aesthetic, like some kind of oft viewed VHS bootleg derived from a clandestine tape trading circle. This intriguing mess was wrestled together in a reported few weeks time for change by an erstwhile enemy of the mainstream named Harmony Korine.
Korine is a singular artistic voice out of Nashville, Tennessee that first left scars on the public conscious as the father of the script that became Larry Clark's unwavering debut 'Kids', a movie that addressed many of the darker truths of juvenile delinquency. That picture's critical and art crowd notoriety earned Korine the freedom to adhere to an unfiltered exploration of some of his own thematic whims and obsessions via a series of films, publications and exhibitions that would nurture a fervent cult status.
Among the films, the first (and, by far, finest) would be a one of a kind number, built to polarize called 'Gummo'. The first time I laid eyes on this glorious little eyesore, I was boozing it up proper at a house party that resisted in the hateful majority when I popped the tape in (circa 1998) convinced we would all be changed for the better. I found myself imprisoned in its' gut level fairytale ramblings and way left field visionary tendencies to the point where I became completely fixated, I couldn't tare my sockets away from the screen.
Korine's pseudo apocalyptic chronicle of a bleak living atmosphere in small town Ohio (post tornado) is like a trip through the most criminally endearing and car crash compelling hell the mind can fabricate. One lasting image follows another for one and a half hours and then it's gone, leaving one with the sizable task of processing just what has transpired. The very loose sketch of a storyline involves two bottom feeder protagonists (Nick Sutton, Jacob Reynolds) and their interfacing with peers and perpetrators in about the streets of what can best be discerned as an 'impoverished' neighborhood. To a manic soundtrack of droning narration, death metal and sludgy ambiance one can bare helpless witness to the loopy sights of redneck royalty drinking, fighting, sporting mullets, drowning cats, being gross, open heart confessing to a homosexually inclined midget and defying political correctness at every open opportunity.
Two
specific moments that encapsulate the bent worth of the picture for me
are; 1-a junkyard showdown of sorts between two grubby pre-pube cowpokes
and a poor fella sporting large fake rabbit ears that they proceed to
attack, rob and berate at beautiful length. 2-a portly retarded chick
dressed in a Krokus t-shirt holding a plastic baby doll and reciting her
'A,B,C's'. That's not to mention the
shirtless wrestling match involving a fold out table or the guy who
pimps his obese, half-wit sister or the kid eating spaghetti while
bathing in filthy water or.....get the picture yet?
As can be easily gleaned from the above rambling, this is a particular work for a particular mind set. If you ever find that you are growing impatient with the big budget, formulaic narrative standards long established as commercially viable, if you have trouble forcing yourself into caring for Sandra Bullock and her forced good Samaritan routine with some poor homeless football prodigy or John Cusack outliving the end of the world, then I think Mr. Korine has the antidote for your wayward soul.
With 'Trash Humpers' still lingering on my 'as yet to see' wish list, I will have to lend passing nods to the rest of Harmony Korine's directorial efforts.
'Julien Donkey-Boy' came close on the heels of the almighty 'Gummo' and suffered immediate letdown syndrome brought on by over zealous expectations on my part. It just goes to prove, one can only be taken aback the way Korine's crazed debut did me once, all coming after begins to feel redundant. So with 'Julien' there was an initial impression of 'seen this sorta thing before', as the film indulged in many similar themes and ideas though with a nod more to the linear in terms of the narrative pattern.
Repeat visits to this sophomore effort after I managed to vacate any pretentious expectations allowed me to extract the jewels of eccentricity that help 'Julien Donkey-Boy' triumph on its own malformed terms. This saga of the manic titular individual (played by 'Trainspotting' alum, Ewen Bremner) his quasi-militant pops (the great German director Werner Herzog, who dives in full force) and the sister (Chloë Sevigny) with whom he is expecting an offspring actually rests upon a basic domestic drama outline, adhering to more linear terms in juxtaposition with 'Gummo'. But, if you think Harmony Korine is about to safely coast through this thing on formula alone, let me tell ya folks, not going to happen.
Korine and his cameraman, Anthony Dod Mantle, have conspired to rep the obvious mental shortcomings of dear Julien care a multi layering of the initial footage. They've taken it from digital and dumped it onto 16mm film stock and blown the result up to 35 mm to really grain drench the imagery into a remarkably erratic level. Never, to me, has such manic delirium held this type of dreamy appeal. The employment of heavily distorted visuals and even the occasional sharp switch to still photography and random blurring effects at first may come off as pure stunts of artsy self gratification, but, upon further digestion, read more as the spill over of the warped energy emanating from the eccentricities contained herein.
Korine even manages a fair collection of stand alone moments (though markedly less so then in 'Gummo'). Prime among there are the sight of a group of blind people getting down at a bowling ally and Julien's heavily put-upon brother (Evan Neumann) wrestling viciously with a plastic garbage receptacle (this director sure digs his humans battling inanimate objects). Oh, I cannot disregard the diminutive Black Albino ('straight from Alabama, way down south and you know that I'm a...') busting loose on the freestyle.
The film was created under the guidelines of the Dogma 95 manifesto (which can be retrieved here-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95#Goals_and_rules) set forth by Danish mavens Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, though Korine managed to take liberties when it suited him. The finished film ended up in the loving arms of cult cinema nerds after some scattered play-dates (mostly fests) and Korine stepped away from features for several years to focus on various other outlets (shorts, music videos, a script for another Larry Clark film-'Ken Park', photo exhibitions and a dabbling in substance abuse and depression) before landing his biggest scale project in 'Mister Lonely'.
The problem with this tale of love, angst and endless daydreaming shared by a commune of celebrity impersonators is that its higher end production values and semi-name actors work at some opposition to the Harmony Korine methodology in favor of the stranger things in this here human race. There is a measured stifling quality on hand as we follow a faux Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) and Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and various others as they struggle to mount an ambitious performance piece for the locals in a remote section of Scotland (!!). Yes, absurd, but played far too straight too much of the time to truly work. Only an altogether out of place side plot involving Werner Herzog (again, a scene stealer) as a priest flying relief missions in Central America with a handful of fearless, sky diving nuns provides any true link with the inventive retardation of either of the director's previous films.
Korine himself has suggested some dissatisfaction with both the greater demands of a more expensive (for him-$8-9million) project and the finished result. Thus we come full circle to the film he has created partly as an antidote to said misgivings and partly as an extension of the freak voice that made his freshman and sophomore pictures so worthy. 'Trash Humpers' could very well be the apex of Harmony Korine's love affair with the romantic abnormalities of human behavior and the ever crooked paths they nurture into the kind of storytelling he finds priority level film making material.
I hope I will not be the only fool waiting in anticipation for a shot to spend some screen time on some random Nashville street with a few filthy degenerates giving blatant irrationality a good/bad name.
One more thing, it should be noted in passing that both 'Gummo' and 'Julien Donkey-Boy' are available on the cheap ($5.79 each) at the friendly Internet warehouse Amazon.com.
Anything crude and/or impolite that anyone would wish to add can be submitted here-killpeoplenamedrichard@yahoo.com
This is a throwback piece originally published in the Jan. 2010 issue of the Central Wisconsin newspaper The Scene.
Sometime this year I pray to hold the privilege of catching a potentially life corrupting piece of no-rent cinema by the name of 'Trash Humpers' (view what passes just barely for a trailer here, www.harmony-korine.com). The 'plot details', such as they are, involve the day to day misbehaviors of a small mob of apparently geriatric assholes (embodied by a cast that includes Korine himself in grubby old timer masks and wigs) as they seek to raise the bar on all out anti-social deviance. The film sports a deliberately dodgy aesthetic, like some kind of oft viewed VHS bootleg derived from a clandestine tape trading circle. This intriguing mess was wrestled together in a reported few weeks time for change by an erstwhile enemy of the mainstream named Harmony Korine.
Korine is a singular artistic voice out of Nashville, Tennessee that first left scars on the public conscious as the father of the script that became Larry Clark's unwavering debut 'Kids', a movie that addressed many of the darker truths of juvenile delinquency. That picture's critical and art crowd notoriety earned Korine the freedom to adhere to an unfiltered exploration of some of his own thematic whims and obsessions via a series of films, publications and exhibitions that would nurture a fervent cult status.
Among the films, the first (and, by far, finest) would be a one of a kind number, built to polarize called 'Gummo'. The first time I laid eyes on this glorious little eyesore, I was boozing it up proper at a house party that resisted in the hateful majority when I popped the tape in (circa 1998) convinced we would all be changed for the better. I found myself imprisoned in its' gut level fairytale ramblings and way left field visionary tendencies to the point where I became completely fixated, I couldn't tare my sockets away from the screen.
Korine's pseudo apocalyptic chronicle of a bleak living atmosphere in small town Ohio (post tornado) is like a trip through the most criminally endearing and car crash compelling hell the mind can fabricate. One lasting image follows another for one and a half hours and then it's gone, leaving one with the sizable task of processing just what has transpired. The very loose sketch of a storyline involves two bottom feeder protagonists (Nick Sutton, Jacob Reynolds) and their interfacing with peers and perpetrators in about the streets of what can best be discerned as an 'impoverished' neighborhood. To a manic soundtrack of droning narration, death metal and sludgy ambiance one can bare helpless witness to the loopy sights of redneck royalty drinking, fighting, sporting mullets, drowning cats, being gross, open heart confessing to a homosexually inclined midget and defying political correctness at every open opportunity.
As can be easily gleaned from the above rambling, this is a particular work for a particular mind set. If you ever find that you are growing impatient with the big budget, formulaic narrative standards long established as commercially viable, if you have trouble forcing yourself into caring for Sandra Bullock and her forced good Samaritan routine with some poor homeless football prodigy or John Cusack outliving the end of the world, then I think Mr. Korine has the antidote for your wayward soul.
With 'Trash Humpers' still lingering on my 'as yet to see' wish list, I will have to lend passing nods to the rest of Harmony Korine's directorial efforts.
'Julien Donkey-Boy' came close on the heels of the almighty 'Gummo' and suffered immediate letdown syndrome brought on by over zealous expectations on my part. It just goes to prove, one can only be taken aback the way Korine's crazed debut did me once, all coming after begins to feel redundant. So with 'Julien' there was an initial impression of 'seen this sorta thing before', as the film indulged in many similar themes and ideas though with a nod more to the linear in terms of the narrative pattern.
Repeat visits to this sophomore effort after I managed to vacate any pretentious expectations allowed me to extract the jewels of eccentricity that help 'Julien Donkey-Boy' triumph on its own malformed terms. This saga of the manic titular individual (played by 'Trainspotting' alum, Ewen Bremner) his quasi-militant pops (the great German director Werner Herzog, who dives in full force) and the sister (Chloë Sevigny) with whom he is expecting an offspring actually rests upon a basic domestic drama outline, adhering to more linear terms in juxtaposition with 'Gummo'. But, if you think Harmony Korine is about to safely coast through this thing on formula alone, let me tell ya folks, not going to happen.
Korine and his cameraman, Anthony Dod Mantle, have conspired to rep the obvious mental shortcomings of dear Julien care a multi layering of the initial footage. They've taken it from digital and dumped it onto 16mm film stock and blown the result up to 35 mm to really grain drench the imagery into a remarkably erratic level. Never, to me, has such manic delirium held this type of dreamy appeal. The employment of heavily distorted visuals and even the occasional sharp switch to still photography and random blurring effects at first may come off as pure stunts of artsy self gratification, but, upon further digestion, read more as the spill over of the warped energy emanating from the eccentricities contained herein.
Korine even manages a fair collection of stand alone moments (though markedly less so then in 'Gummo'). Prime among there are the sight of a group of blind people getting down at a bowling ally and Julien's heavily put-upon brother (Evan Neumann) wrestling viciously with a plastic garbage receptacle (this director sure digs his humans battling inanimate objects). Oh, I cannot disregard the diminutive Black Albino ('straight from Alabama, way down south and you know that I'm a...') busting loose on the freestyle.
The film was created under the guidelines of the Dogma 95 manifesto (which can be retrieved here-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95#Goals_and_rules) set forth by Danish mavens Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, though Korine managed to take liberties when it suited him. The finished film ended up in the loving arms of cult cinema nerds after some scattered play-dates (mostly fests) and Korine stepped away from features for several years to focus on various other outlets (shorts, music videos, a script for another Larry Clark film-'Ken Park', photo exhibitions and a dabbling in substance abuse and depression) before landing his biggest scale project in 'Mister Lonely'.
The problem with this tale of love, angst and endless daydreaming shared by a commune of celebrity impersonators is that its higher end production values and semi-name actors work at some opposition to the Harmony Korine methodology in favor of the stranger things in this here human race. There is a measured stifling quality on hand as we follow a faux Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) and Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and various others as they struggle to mount an ambitious performance piece for the locals in a remote section of Scotland (!!). Yes, absurd, but played far too straight too much of the time to truly work. Only an altogether out of place side plot involving Werner Herzog (again, a scene stealer) as a priest flying relief missions in Central America with a handful of fearless, sky diving nuns provides any true link with the inventive retardation of either of the director's previous films.
Korine himself has suggested some dissatisfaction with both the greater demands of a more expensive (for him-$8-9million) project and the finished result. Thus we come full circle to the film he has created partly as an antidote to said misgivings and partly as an extension of the freak voice that made his freshman and sophomore pictures so worthy. 'Trash Humpers' could very well be the apex of Harmony Korine's love affair with the romantic abnormalities of human behavior and the ever crooked paths they nurture into the kind of storytelling he finds priority level film making material.
I hope I will not be the only fool waiting in anticipation for a shot to spend some screen time on some random Nashville street with a few filthy degenerates giving blatant irrationality a good/bad name.
One more thing, it should be noted in passing that both 'Gummo' and 'Julien Donkey-Boy' are available on the cheap ($5.79 each) at the friendly Internet warehouse Amazon.com.
Anything crude and/or impolite that anyone would wish to add can be submitted here-killpeoplenamedrichard@yahoo.com
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