Gummo

Remember when you were in grade school and the weird kids down the block were doing something that looked, well, interesting, and your mom told you to stay away? Did you? Did you ever wonder what it was they were up to down there, behind the garage, in the basement of someone's house, over by the bowling alley?

Rent Gummo and find out. Mama wasn't as stupid as you thought.

Gummo is a film of substance, a rare thing in this time of Estee Lauder actresses and pec enhanced tree trunks stumbling around the kindergarten dialogue. Reality TV before it became anachronistic. A film that demands a second viewing to truly understand the director's vision is a rare thing; my initial impression was of a mockery of Red Necked America, but now after several viewings I understand it as a celebration of the sidelined aspect of American culture. Unafraid to pull its punches, unafraid to deal with the shocking, the jarring, the discomforting; it is a film that is mostly about killing cats and sniffing glue. Possibly a freak show, but one done in the style of the old freak shows - the freaks call the shots and they revel in their opportunities. A piece best enjoyed at 5 am on a Sunday morning after burning the midnight oil, when your nerves are raw and you need something with bite to cut through the fog. Nobody has created such vivid set pieces and each time you review the film there is a new mullet to admire, a chair to be beaten, a Down's Syndrome prostitute to mull over. Prepare to be shocked and provoked whilst being entertained; when the film finishes you are compelled to take stock of what you have seen and in my eyes that is what films are for. A hearty thumbs up.

Harmony Korine did this when he was 24 years old and everything else aside I like it a lot that a young person gets to tell us what it can be to be young. Irrespective of whether or not a young man has yet found something important to say at 24, I don't like it that professional directors' careers start well into their thirties. There's a big age gap there that is only talked about in hindsight, after the fact. Perspectives and values change as we grow older, whether or not a young man will mature to the point of recognizing the follies and dreams of his youth or he'll embrace the anger and grow up to be GG Allin, and whether or not settling down to a regular life is a personal betrayal of a former self, I think something like Gummo needs to be made and more of it.

This is punk filmmaking at its scummiest, the vibe of antisocial angst despair and anger is pure necro punk rock like GG Allin throwing feces at his audience and smashing beer cans open on his head, it's about being violent and eccentric right now as a means of killing time and making something out of tearing down something else. Yet it's also oddly poetic for the same reason. It's not poetic because a kid will eat spaghetti and chocolate in the bathtub or because a kid with bunny ears rides his bike around a post-apocalyptic landscape of trailerpark white trash, but more because it assumes important things can be said through all this. When Korine speaks of life and death, whether or not life is worth living, when he attakcs society as complacent and apathetic, the results feel immature to me: this is reaction from a vantage point of being too young to start caring, an act of vandalism from the safe point of having your own thing wrecked. But it's good to have these things captured on film then thrown away for anyone who might wanna find them.

I read a bit about Trash Humpers and it seems Harmony Korine doesn't feel there's anything to grow out of. Watching him in his Letterman interviews gives me a clue to all this: the guy is awkward but he's cute awkward, the kind of awkward women want to hold in their arms. I know a skater guy like this, he's 30 years old but looks 25, has his face pierced and hair colored blue or magenta for as long as I've known him, and is endearingly weird. He's never had a shortage of girlfriends. He reminds me of Gummo where despair and malaise plays like a sort of lifestyle. Real awkward people, people who really can't get anywhere in life, don't make movies. I'd like to see their Gummos, this is a bit too cute.

I will admit that the reason I rented this movie was because of the numerous reviews that I read about how unbelievably bad and pointless this film was. It only took me a few minutes to realize why so many critics hated it, which was the very reason I liked this film.

Gummo is a classic case of style over substance. If you're looking for plot development, you'd better go rent Good Will Hunting or something like that. But if you want to see a movie that is cutting-edge and well ahead of its time, then rent this one. I praise the director for simply doing something different.

What impressed me the most about this film was the framing of one memorable image after another. I think Director Korine was trying to leave people with impressions and feelings. Whether you like this film or not, its impossible to forget. Plus, this film has what I think is one of the greatest lines in recent movie history. A little girl, holding a picture of Burt Reynolds with the mouth ripped out, chants incessantly, "I want a moustache, dammit!"

This movie is worth the three bucks to rent it if nothing more than to see the scene where a fat redneck takes out his aggression on a kitchen chair while his friends cheer him on. It's more frightening than anything in the Scream series.

Set in Xenia, Ohio, Gummo feels like a deliberate riposte to Hollywood by its creator, Harmony Korine, whose penchant for subversion was already evident in his screen writing debut for Larry Clark's Kids (1995). Eschewing linear narrative, Korine explores, through the use of vignettes and bizarre episodes, the cat-killing escapades of its two protagonists and weaves this quest around a set of unrelated but bizarre events taking place in Xenia. There is no sense of a story, only a mood, and that mood fluctuates wildly from revulsion to surprise. By giving voice to those marginalized from society, Korine paints a startling portrait of landlocked America, one at odds with the Hollywood cliché of its inhabitants. There are many unforgettable scenes and yet it's not an enjoyable film, but it challenges, provokes and pushes the margins - and that in itself is worthy.