![]() ![]() Interviewed by filmmaker Bruce LaBruce at Ryerson University in Toronto in 2005, Korine responded to the film by saying, “Why does it look like a commercial?” It deals with the same themes of disaffected, sexed-up youth found in KIDS, but everything here is inferior to both KIDS and Clark’s 2001 film Bully. ![]() But by the time it was filmed Korine had moved on and Clark seemed to be treading water. On paper you’d think collaboration between the KIDS dream team would yield a powerful result. This is a film written by Korine and directed by Larry Clark. A particular ear-worm from this 15-minute short is, “I’m old enough to breed, I’m old enough to bleed, I’m old enough to crack a brick in your teeth while you sleep.” Korine often employs slapstick characters, but these two are not particularly relatable compared to what would come in shorts like Snowballs and Act Da Fool. It’s also an early entry in Korine’s ‘vaguely-annoying nonsense refrain’ oeuvre. Their strange actions include firing machine guns while smoking comically-oversized joints, riding in wheelchairs, and buying hologram mags for said wheelchairs. This was the first in a series of short films that all loosely fit under the category of “strange people walking around Nashville doing and saying strange things.” Here the strange people are Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er of the South African rap group Die Antwoord. Lonely is preachy, maudlin, and least characteristic of all for a Harmony Korine movie: boring. Lonely stands as one of Korine’s finest images, but too often Mr. The opening shot of Diego Luna’s Michael Jackson impersonator riding an extremely small motorcycle around a race track to the tune of Bobby Vinton’s Mr. The plot sounds like classic Korine: a Michael Jackson impersonator living in Paris joins a commune to live with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Hitler. Written by Korine’s brother Avi, this is the obvious outlier in the canon. More significant to the purposes of this list, he’s released a number of short films that are often as original and transformative as his better-known work in features. Though Korine has made only four feature films since Gummo, he has been anything but idle: he has co-penned lyrics with Cat Power and Bjork, directed a number of music videos, and had his art featured in prestigious galleries. His films approach the disabled and the dispossessed, the racialized and the societally-rejected, in a way that may offend the self-professed allies of these groups, but where Hollywood advocacy films tend to patronize these people by way of saccharine, feel-good stories, Korine simply let’s them exist on screen. And yet his films possess staying power not for their unique vision, not for their shock value, but rather for their immense humanism. But soon after his 1997 debut directorial effort Gummo, no less a figure than Werner Herzog called him, “the last foot soldier in the army,” and since then Korine has produced a body of work that seems to exist entirely outside the confines of contemporary cinematic language. Detractors account for his success by referring to an experimental visual style and subjects that tend to be, as Variety called the Humpers, “riveting beyond rationality.”Īt the beginning of his career he reinforced the enfant terrible stereotype with goofy appearances on Letterman and erratic public behaviour that came as a result of drug addiction. Too often Harmony Korine is dismissed as a mere provocateur, the dubious character behind films like Gummo and Trash Humpers that are aesthetically, well, trashy. ![]()
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