"Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead." - Solomon

This is like what Tree of Life would be like if it listened to screamo and sniffed glue. I'm not kidding. I really don't know what to say about this film, other than the fact it contains some of the most powerful and vicious scenes that I've seen so far. Here are some examples:
- The gratuitous portrayal of extreme cruelty against cats, both stray and domesticated.
- A play-fight that is really quite violent between two brothers.
- Two children verbally and physically abusing a boy dressed as a rabbit, while he plays dead.
- The ruthless destruction…

A glue-sniffer's reverie and an aestheticized episode of Beavis & Butthead, explicitly and bracingly set up as an act of cinematic vandalism. The location (Xenia, Ohio) fuses Kansas and Oz, or perhaps the twisters are meant to be Rimbaud's vortexes. In any case, Harmony Korine plunks his camera in Mulletville and turns on the mélange of stocks and styles, gags and limericks. Skinhead brothers pummel each other laughingly, a whispery voice recounts child abuse, a reverse tracking shot guides a handicapped girl clutching a plastic baby doll and singing "The ABC Song." The presiding image is the family portrait that reveals a nest of insects, the unifying strands are guerilla juveniles (Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton) who sell burlap bags of cats…

Films don't get any more bizarre than this. It's twisted, it's morally polluted and it damn sure isn't an easy watch (to many it will be downright reprehensible), but if you can look past the face-value ugliness you will discover a grotesque beauty to Harmony Korine's debut film. The narrative loosely follows several characters simply going about their strange lives in backwoods, white trash Xenia, Ohio. Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton plays two boys who pass the time by killing feral cats and causing trouble. Chloë Sevigny plays the oldest of three young girls who also live in the same area, there story line is less focused but ultimately has them searching for their cat. Jacob Sewell plays Bunny Boy,…

Writing a review for Gummo is probably the hardest assignment that I have ever given myself. It is always difficult to write about the films that you love, trying to put into words what it is about them that so dearly appeals to you. But writing about Gummo is truly a case of its own. What is it about this film that has caused it to become one of my all-time favorites? And what is it that has caused it to be classified as one of the worst films ever made by others?

It would be easy to dismiss Gummo. Hell, I could throw out words like exploitative, trashy, and pretentious. But to do so would simply be missing the…

So the bathtub scene really bothered me and has totally made me rethink eating pasta in the bath. Other than that, this film has a really good vibe about it.

I do have a problem with the fact that none of the characters have an original voice. Everything that is said in the movie is completely Harmony Korine. Thus, watching this movie felt to me like the cinematic equivalent of reading Korine's book, A Crackup at the Race Riots. Everything jumps all over the place and is funny and interesting, but everything is Harmony Korine's voice. I think that this problem is entirely because of Korine being an inexperienced filmmaker. His flicks like Mister Lonely and Trash Humpers have a…

This movie haunts me. I've seen it several times and I still can't identify the emotions that it causes me to feel.

It's set in a small Ohio town, after a tornado devastated it. The movie is a chaotic collage of residents and the pointless things they do to pass the time.

With the exception of about three people, director Harmony Korine cast the entire movie in 45 minutes, by asking people that worked around town to be in it. One of the main characters he picked because the kid huffed a lot of paint and was still alive. About 75% of the movie was scripted, and the rest of the time he just let the camera roll on the…

After having watched Spring Breakers and it being my first Harmony Korine film experience, I was totally on board with checking out more of his work since IMO Spring Breakers is fucking amazing. I'd heard some great shit about Gummo from multiple sources, and figured I'd start there.

Well, I didn't know what quite to expect, heard some of the story on the Film Junk podcast, but I really didn't expect it to be as random as it was. There were so many scenes that were fucking off the charts crazy that I almost didn't know what to think about the film as a whole. I will say that I was entertained, but I don't know if I l would…