Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Ken Park (2002)


Larry Clark directed, made in the wake of Kids and Bully. Those first two movies were disturbing but were taken seriously. The ones Clark made after that just seem perverse.

Four or five unconnected subplots. A suburban California teen is sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother, another is abused by his father who we see urinating with his pants around his ankles; a girl is forced into a strange marriage-like ceremony with her devoutly religious father after he catches her in her underwear sitting on her boyfriend who she tied to the bed and an awful kid is enraged at his custodial grandmother for not respecting his privacy which he needs because he practices autoerotic asphyxiation at odd times during the day.

The subplots never really come together, but three of the teens have a sex scene at the end without explanation. The sex in this thing was either unsimulated or not simulated enough.

Written by Harmony Korine.

In the ‘80’s, there were John Hughes movies and films like Stand By Me and the French movie Cross My Heart, movies where the adults were either mean or ineffectual while the kids were foul-mouthed but pure of heart. That evolved into movies like Clark's and Beavis and Butt-head. The grown-ups were about the same but now the kids were awful, too.

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