ginandtacos.com wrote:Complete, utter, unadulterated shit. Frequently praised by the plurality of the American population who confuse "offensive" with "high quality art".

If this movie stands above the Tom Green Show on the "I have no talent and I'm simply going to do everything I can to shock you" spectrum, it's not by much.

The MayorofRockNRoll wrote:

ginandtacos.com wrote:Complete, utter, unadulterated shit. Frequently praised by the plurality of the American population who confuse "offensive" with "high quality art".

If this movie stands above the Tom Green Show on the "I have no talent and I'm simply going to do everything I can to shock you" spectrum, it's not by much.

Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Jesus, I cannot believe the gullibility of some of these fucking people, but what the fuck ever.

This movie is a joyless, ugly and unfun Jackass stunt. Harmony Korine is...

warmowski wrote:

The MayorofRockNRoll wrote:

ginandtacos.com wrote:Complete, utter, unadulterated shit. Frequently praised by the plurality of the American population who confuse "offensive" with "high quality art".

If this movie stands above the Tom Green Show on the "I have no talent and I'm simply going to do everything I can to shock you" spectrum, it's not by much.

Thank you, thank you, thank you...

Jesus, I cannot believe the gullibility of some of these fucking people, but what the fuck ever.

This movie is a joyless, ugly and unfun Jackass stunt. Harmony Korine is...

I'm not gullible. I know that, if called upon to select a single sequence that most readily and broadly exemplifies life in the 20th century US, I would first think of this film.

The bit where the kid is in the basement. He stands near a mountain of crap, toys and clothes and such in this dingy basement.

This mountain of surplus shit is piled in front of a wall-length mirror - making two mountains of surplus shit. That's just where this scene starts.

The defining trait of the characters AND setting is their excess-to-requirements nature, which is very well portrayed.

I am certainly unaware of HK's career conduct and social circle, so it's a good thing I couldn't care less about them.

Gummo: Not crap.

-r

cjh wrote:I believe it was called Fight/Harm and exists only in an unfinished form (apparently he was about to fall foul of the '3 Strikes' law after continually getting arrested for brawling and the project had to be canned). It might have been aired in a gallery somewhere and I think I read it will appear as extra material on a DVD at some point. Have a sniff around the boards on IMDB for all the usual fanboy gossip.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote: The only of Harmony's movies that I've seen is Gummo. I like it a lot, but I like it in a very different way than I like other movies.

It's pretty hard to follow narratively, more like a bunch of disjointed scenes and events strewn together than a discernible "story," which is pretty much how our lives are until we step back and ascribe meaning to them--even moreso if we happen to be living in a fairly downtrodden, directionless manner, as they characters in this film seem to be doing. It is, after all, set in a small town decimated by a tornado. If you filmed in New Orleans, post-Katrina early on, I bet you'd have gotten a stranger film than this.

One formal thing I like is how the shots often linger beyond what we're comfortable with both emotionally and in terms of our moviegoing expectations. I'm thinking specifically of the scene where the mother is tap-dancing in front of the mirror in the basement while the son works out with his homemade dumbbells. (I can't recall what they're made from--something fucked up.) Anyway, this scene could have been played like a quirky interlude in just about any oddball independent film, but Harmony keeps rolling, past the point where it's cute or funny and you begin to sense the real compulsion at work here--people not in control of themselves and whose reasons for doing what they do are as mysterious to them as they are to us.

And anyone who doesn't dig the chair-wrestling scene didn't get drunk in the times and places that I did. That's a priceless bit of documentary filmmaking right there. I'm not as enamored of the scene where the director casts himself trying to seduce a black midget, but that's just me.

As my defense of Skynyrd and various and sundry Southern "causes" on this board hopefully suggests, few people are as sensitive to the grinning exploitation of disenfranchised Middle Americans as I am. I don't think Harmony is making fun of these people (I think people are reading into his supposed intentions based on what they know or think they know about his background). I think he is depicting lives that are, yes, by turns pathetic, horrifying, hilarious, and beautiful. As many lives (most lives?) are.

I think Gummo is a beautiful film--physically beautiful, filled with garish, stark, and stunning shots. This suggests that Harmony might be saying, "Look, even if someone's life contains violence and pain and confusion, it can still be, in some ways, a beautiful thing." Such lives can evoke wonder and humor along with whatever horror or sociolpolitical disgust one has been conditioned to feel in response to the lives of poor, undereducated Americans.

I watch Gummo like I read early 20th century surrealist poetry. Not for a narrative or story, not for any didactic "message" (though I obviously got one from it), but as a series of unforgettable images that move me in vague and sometimes confusing ways that include horror, glee, hilarity, compassion, disgust, desire, and dread.

Isn't this one of the way art films are supposed to work?

Not crap!