Product Details
ASIN : 0780621573
Customers who bought this goods also bought.
Customer Reviews
Is this too much reality for you, folks? (2007-12-02)  Well, what can I say, director Korine seem to want to challenge the audience to find the justification for his debut film. Following by his screenplay, Kids, which he wrote at 19, further carves out his relevance in today's cinema as one weird director. This movie without a story or seemingly without a script can form many reactions. Korine follows various characters in a backwoods town at Xenia, Ohio which was once nearly devastated by a tornado. The lives followed here include mostly adolescents and centers on two boys, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). Solomon's father was killed during the Xenia tornadoes...and the film follows these boys on various destructive and self-destructive exploits that defy any cinematic validity. This is not film in most ways, it is real life. This "real life" includes glue sniffing, riding dirt bikes, sex and watching such challenging scenes as a man pimping his mentally ill wife who spends her days bedridden and dolled up like a 2-dollar hooker. At the same time we also meet two sisters, Dot (Chloë Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Glucksman), who want to become stripper's .Then there is also a boy (Jacob Sewell) who wanders around town wearing pink bunny ears.Korine constructed his movie as a series of vignettes depicting these characters and various others engaged in disruptive behavior. The episodes range from funny and beautiful to gratuitous and senseless. I found the cinematography of "Gummo" stark, depressing but oddly hypnotic. It's really the way that the director filmed it (scratchy montage, digital low-quality shootings), and the conversations between the two boys that make the movie compelling and fascinating to watch. . I found the performances, including that of Chloe Sevigny to be honest, authentic and sad.The movie is filmed like the lives of all the people in the village. There's no real development, people don't really do much to improve their situation, and it's a secluded world they live in. The weird southern-style music and the many unexplained characters like the pink-bunny boy make it a surreal experience. The most memorable scene: was Solomon bath scene.....tell me just how disgusting can a bath be and on top of that while eating dinner?!?It would be nice to think that, if they do exist, at least we shouldn't have to look at them... This movie is, indeed, a more gritty and honest version of "Slacker". They make a good double feature. Of course, after seeing "Gummo", you will see the cast of "Slackers" Many viewers have despised this film and it's good that people are offended. Maybe it just means that the movie accomplished its goal.
Odd little masterpiece (2007-02-09)  I first saw this film in the late '90s. I had mixed feelings about it then, but some of the images have stuck with me to the point that I recently bought a DVD copy. After repeated viewings I have to say that this is one of the most interesting and original films I have ever seen. This is a remarkable piece of cinema. Now, do not interpret this as an unqualified endorsement of the film - it isn't. There is much about Gummo that is puerile, self-conscious and pretentious in the extreme. On the other hand, the film is visually stunning (thanks in no small part to the acclaimed cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier) and many of the images and scenes possess unescapable power and beauty. And this is a highly visual film. The dialogue is sparse and appears to be be largely improvised. (I say "appears", because Korine has demonstrated a talent for scripting and a remarkable ear for natural dialogue - see Larry Clark's "Kids"). However, with some glaring exceptions, the dialogue works quite well.There is no plot or character development in this film. To critize Gummo on that basis is missing the point. Rather, it is a series of vignettes portraying the lives of lower-class inhabitants of a fictional southern town that had been devastated by a tornado. Much has been made of the fact that many of these characters are, to put it politely, marginalized (a midget, an albino, several mentally handicapped people) and Korine has been criticized for exploiting these people for their shock value. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth and the director has actually shown uncommon respect and compassion for his characters. Unlike Hollywood caricatures (a la Forrest Gump), Korine has managed to potray these characters as real people possessing self-awareness and dignity under difficult (or even tragic) circumstances. No small feat, this.Although far from perfect and NOT for every taste, Gummo is an original. Arguably the film shows such diverse influences as Werner Herzog (Even Dwarves Started Small), Terrence Malick (Badlands) and Richard Linklater (Slacker). However, it is a unique film that deserves a wider audience. Harmony Korine is undeniably talented and to dismiss him as a precocious wunderkind, while true to some extent, is far too facile. While you may disagree with his vision, it is nevertheless a valid one. I for one look forward to seeing his future output, even though he seems to have gone into hiding following the release of his equally impressive "Julien the Donkey Boy".
CRAPPO (2004-07-11)  A better title for this extremly annoying film would be CRAPPO.
Shampoo, Spaghetti, and a Crunch Bar (2004-06-21) This movie is not supposed to be some kind of "liberal arts" movie so quit attacking conservatives on this site
A Shocking Vision of America (2004-06-19) Most tattoo artists I know say they are inundated with customers requesting to have American flags etched permanently into their bodies. I only wonder if any of these patriots have seen the movie, Gummo, a disturbing portrayal by filmmaker Harmony Korine of life in one small American town that they might not be so proud of. The film begins with a shot of Xenia Ohio, and a voiceover of a child's deadpan description. "A few years ago a tornado hit this place. It killed people left and right ... Houses were split open and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees ... I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt." These few sentences suggest the tragedy, mystery, and humor that surge through this film. However, most fans of your typical Hollywood flicks with explosive action and character developments may not be able to appreciate these features of Gummo. The movie has no plot, just a series of situations, no big screen stars, just small-time and even amateur actors. The characters they play simply exist on the screen without growing or changing. Most of them are lower-class white children of the type we rarely see outside the realm of trashy daytime talk shows. In fact, Korine actually tracked down Nick Sutton to play Tummler after he saw him on an episode of "The Sally Jesse Raphael Show" called "My Child Died from Sniffing Paint." When Sutton, who's a paint-sniffing survivor, was asked where he thought he'd be in a few years he replied simply, "I'll probably be dead." It was at that moment Korine claims to have fallen in love with the boy's image. In the movie, Tummler is one of two boys who cruise through Xenia on BMX, looking for stray cats to kill and then sell to the local butcher. The other boy, whose odd-looking face and underdeveloped body made him the promotional poster boy for Gummo, is Solomon. Other characters include the local pimp whose only prostitute is an attention-starved mentally-challenged woman, a couple of local teenage girls with bleached out blond hair who spend their time doting on their youngest sister while trying to make their nipples larger, and Bunny Boy, who doesn't speak at all during the movie but haunts many scenes as he passes by donning little else but a hood of long bunny ears. One gets the feeling that none of these people has ever left Xenia, a place of grimy poverty, casual cruelty, and the type of boredom that gives way to drunken parties where men arm wrestle and in a make-shift ring pit themselves one by one against a kitchen chair. Although this film will likely disturb and disgust most viewers, it is a chance to see one man's unique cinema graphic vision-a dreamy yet poignant art project that is not meant to be defined but reacted to. Gummo is an electrifying succession of startling, strange, and tender images. Whether or not moviegoers can claim they were enthralled or they walked out halfway through-two perfectly legitimate responses-it is nevertheless a type of poetry on the screen.Towards the end of Gummo there is a scene where Solomon's mother is simultaneously giving him a bath and feeding him a spaghetti dinner. For dessert, after his hair is washed, he receives a candy bar that he accidentally drops into the brown bath water and then, completely unphased, eats. There is barely any dialogue in this sequence, no background music, and if you look close enough you can see a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall behind him with Scotch tape. This is Harmony Korine's idea of entertainment, bizarre images that stick with you long after the movie has ended. At one point, Solomon's mother joins him in the basement while he is lifting weights-really handfuls of silverware bundled together-in front of a huge mirror. We watch his puny reflection, his deadpan determination. There is a hint of tenderness in his mother's eyes as she looks at him, a hint of pain as she puts on her dead husband's tap dancing shoes and begins to flop ridiculously around in them. Also when she picks up a handgun, jokingly holds it to her child's head and tells him to smile, there is a hint of something else, though it is difficult to determine exactly what it is. For sure, however, it is something entirely unique to Korine, a different brand of humor or tragedy or irony or beauty or perhaps none and all of the above. Scenes like this seem just to happen naturally in Gummo, and Korine, with the eye of an artist and the help of cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, shows them to us without judging or condescending to any of the characters involved. The idea that places like Xenia actually exist in our country won't sit well with many people, yet Korine seems to want to play this lifelike texture up with grainy cuts from "home videos" of tornadoes and real people doing absurd standup routines for the camera. And while Gummo is confined to life in this one small impoverished American town, the soundtrack canvasses almost all aspects of American culture, ranging from Hoosier Hotshots to Madonna to Almedo Riddle singing the children's song, "My Little Rooster," to the death metal sounds of "Sleep," to Roy Orbison. Ultimately, whether its lurid images of life are upsetting to viewers or not, Xenia is undoubtedly one pocket of American culture that should not be ignored. Neither should Harmony Korine's vision; and one must not forget that Gummo is, in essence, a visual experience. Without a storyline or any character development there's little else to go on anyway. However, the subtlety of each camera shot, the way each scene can be shockingly real, over-the-top, dream-like, touching, cruel, funny, and beautiful all at the same time makes for one bizarre film that's not to be missed.
Look for similar items by category
Related Link
Powered by Amazon Web Services + Amazon Associates.
|
![]](http://resource.hanamoku.com/img/hanamoku_ca/00bar_top_right.gif){kind=small}
![]](http://resource.hanamoku.com/img/hanamoku_ca/00bar_bottom_right.gif){kind=small}
Goods, Product Information
