Recently I rented My Life as a Dog. I watched maybe 40 minutes of it, got thoroughly bored by its "My interesting life as a Swedish boy" plotline, went out to smoke a cigarette and never finished the movie. Honestly, if you're going to do a movie about adolescence, have something happen for chrissake.
Now Kids, that was a movie that had some shit going down. A bunch of 12 year olds getting high and fucking. That's entertainment, dammit. Harmony Korine wrote the screenplay, Larry Clark directed. Both went on to do more movies about the young'ns, and those actually tended to be better, pretty much because sex and drugs was the only thing that happened in Kids, and it really just felt like porn - all shock and nothing else.
So there's a flick out now called Thirteen which is kinda similar. It's about a 13 year old girl who hangs out with the wrong crowd, starts stealing, doing drugs, getting laid...all in all, having a helluva time. Unlike Kids, Thirteen focuses on one person, making a much more coherent and watchable film. The film also has several nice scenes of manipulation on the girls' parts (jesus, they were just plain nasty to the mother, played by Holly Hunter). Anyway, the movie was cowritten by a chick in the movie, who based the story on her life. It's well worth watching.
So what's Larry Clark been up to? Wondering this myself, I flipped through the imdb to find that he had done an interesting little film called Teenage Caveman. Yes, you read that right. Larry Clark directed a remake of Teenage Caveman. Now, I've seen the original on mst3k, and it's pretty fucking bad, so I of course ran out and rented this one right away. Larry even has a little cameo at the beginning. The film starts out fairly faithful to the original, but since this is a Larry Clark film, about halfway through all the kids get naked, do coke, and fuck in a massive orgy. Only, because this is a horror film, they then blow up. Literally. The only actor (other than Mr. Clark) that I recognized in the flick was the guy who played the douchebag in 10 Things I Hate about You - Mr. Black Shirt/White Shirt. This film was extremely entertaining, though I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's good.
And finally, I just watched John Carpenter's Christine. Not bad, the guy who plays the buddy in the movie grew up to make Blue Crush (I did not know this prior to renting the film). It's a pretty good thriller and it looks fucking a plus. Wonderful camerawork.
So there you fucking have it, another fucking set of fucking movies.
Posted by mattb at September 08, 2003 01:12 AM