Gummo: Classic or dud?

Anyway, as part of the horrible ice-breaking set-up, we had to garner several pieces of information from the person sitting next to you and relate them to the rest of the group. One was 'what was the last film they watched and what was it about'.

My counsellor type person sitting next to me really struggled, when she said 'Dave saw Gummo, which is about, er, a young boy who kills cats to sell to a takeaway so he can pay his friend in order to have sex with his friend's disabled sister.'.

I wasn't swamped with offers to sit at the same table with my fellow group members at lunch, oddly enough.

Film - dud.

Moment described above - classic.

http://www.etrangefestival.com/NewPixsEFWeb/Gummo.jpg

where? not that i'm gunna look or nutn

That tennis player with the shaved eyebrows does trip me out tough.

Hickgore is done better in The Hills Have Eyes. And I'd probably call that a dud too.

and it's ART SKATEBOARDER mark gonzales...not ART SKATEBOARDER Tommy Guerrero.

http://www.ryecast.ryerson.ca/dmpstreams/2004Kodak/index.htm

(will be archived too apparently)

I assume you mean another Adam cos I never said any shit like that.

OP forgot to mention- the chair wrasslin' scene ("kick it's ass!")- had a GAY African American dwarf with an Israel T-shirt.

Classic. I had a worse reaction to the "mean voyeurism" feel of American Movie... I thought that was making fun of losers, but Gummo just didn't feel like it was reinforcing conformity, it felt like you had to be wierd to enjoy it, and that was why I loved it.

'cause everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh..

I prefer "Julien Donkey-Boy" though. I really wish Korine could get his shit together & start being a filmmaker again.

This is possibly my favorite movie. I'd like to try and netflix some others that are as bizarre/disturbing/funny/insane as Gummo.. (I remember a thread not too long ago that mentioned Begotten and I Stand Alone among others, but I'm having trouble searching for it. Any help?)

I watched the first five minutes and thought it was brilliant...that eery home-video style footage fit perfectly with the dark, creepy narration--what a great set up! I should have kept watching.

RABBIT YOU SMELL LIKE FUCKIN PISS.

I think the ideal way to have seen this would have been Chaki's take upthread - not knowing anything. But when it was released, it was (for me) overshadowed by nauseating profiles of Korine in horrible fashion magazines, paparazzi snaps of Korine out with David Blaine and Leonardo DiCaprio at horrible NYC 90s hotspots, Korine "writings" being published (Please resist all urges to search his book, "A Crack Up at the Race Riots"), and on and on - so I found it totally impossible to not see the movie as condescending, appalling class-tourism.

I own A Crack Up. I like it. But I deliberately know as little as possible about "personalities".

i liked "a crack up..." too" - it made me laugh a lot. Korine had a new film at cannes this year.

i liked "a crack up..." too - it made me laugh a lot. Korine had a new film at cannes this year.

i eventually saw Gummo on video. yeah i liked it, it's really a collection of moments. many don't go anywhere, some memorable.

my prior experience with Gummo was at a Whitney Biennial a few years back. i walk into this screening room expecting a video installation or a short and it's these two people up on the screen sitting in a beat up car.

the girl goes "they found a lump in my titty. they gon' chop my titty off". i didn't find that funny at all when I later rented it, but in the context of being in a sober, serious museum it was entirely unexpected and such a shock i started WTF hysterically laughing. all the cinephile snobs turned and shushed me so I just hightailed it out of there.

HK on letterman:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i7nrhGQteas

I remember being confused at the time as to why he wasnt wearing a Locust t-shirt.

i still haven't seen this

Can't find a link, but I read a profile somewhere that talked about Korine's post-"Gummo"/"Donkey Boy" years; he left New York and the "Pussy Posse" to go home to Nashville, where he became a very serious drug addict and spent all his time hanging out with the singer for the Silver Jews, who was also having some troubles. Then they both cleaned up and Korine (who had burned investor-types for a long time) was somewhat miraculously able to put financing together for this next movie, "Mr. Lonely," about a colony inhabited by celebrity impersonators.

A Crack Up pissed me off, because I had friends slaving over much more interesting/funny/clever/unique 'Zines which they were struggling to distribute past their bedrooms; while Korine's stuff (which I really found awful- and I like the films) was in every Borders in America via Doubleday.

If I had known that book would someday fetch over $50 on eBay, I would have bought 25 copies from the Skylight Books fire sale table those many years ago.

Also, is there a thread on "Ken Park" - the movie Korine wrote and Larry Clark directed (they don't speak anymore) that never technically got released in the U.S. or U.K.? It's... somethin'.

I saw Ken Park in the cinema. Can't say I liked it as much as Gummo. Quite the contrary. Didn't really hate it, but didn't really enjoy it either.

I don't think he actually filmed it near Xenia, that's why the accents are off, I think it was shot somewhere further south in Appalachia, perhaps HK's hometown in Tennessee ? Anyway, the film kind of annoyed me, b/c of the very 'let's-stare-at-the-freaks' aesthetic. Example - the scene where HK shows up and is hitting on the dwarf, which is meant to be absurd/disturbing I guess, and at that point I started to realize that none of the people in the picture treated each OTHER like freaks/weirdos, it's only when HK shows up with a camera that the element is brought in. Which is kind of rude, you ask me. Maybe it's a bit perso, I'm from Appalachia, and every time I go home I have to resist copping an HK sort of attitude - I suppose I should thank him for showing me how pathetic it is.

In that sense you could say, he confronts you with being a voyeur, something the characters aren't (and couln't be?). So I wonder why it bothers you, Daria (is she still here?)I still like it, I mean, I remember liking it immensely.

xxpost

It's worth 50 DOLLARS? I'm not that attached to it.

this movie has an awesome sonudtrack! it still fuckin funny too! the only thing that ruins it is the dumbass artsy parts that segway between scenes with the really really bad pretentious poetry.

"Also, is there a thread on "Ken Park"

Ken Park

this movie is great.

Larry Clark is an unforgiveably shitty filmmaker.

You crazy Shakey.

I thought it was filmed in Nashville.. I could be wrong.

the really really bad pretentious poetry.
Wasn't that the point? "i can't understand what the FUCK is wrong with people in this world, they- they sit around.. in their, pretend little lives, FUCK they're ignorant, i FUCKING hate myself" -- call me crazy, but this isn't supposed to be poignant, its just funny as shit.

I would love to see footage from the abandoned Harmony Korine film he was making about Norweigian Blackmetal.

or the fighting one

Okay, sorry to bump this again.. this will be my last request for this, but can anyone give me help with finding that thread that mentioned Gummo and there were pics posted from I Stand Alone and Begotten among other movies? I think it was regarding "disturbing" films, but that word wasn't used.

Gummo and there were pics posted from I Stand Alone and Begotten

I have all three of these on VHS. Someone should book that as a triple feature somewhere.

Besotted is such a great word

i just saw this, finally. i liked it for the most part.

i have to agree with chaki here:

this movie has an awesome sonudtrack! it still fuckin funny too! the only thing that ruins it is the dumbass artsy parts that segway between scenes with the really really bad pretentious poetry.

i am watching this for the first time. and it is really brilliant.

i actually can't believe that i've never seen it.

when he's lifting the 'weights' in the basement to "Like a Prayer" and the mom is tap-dancing....jesus, i am crying with laughter.

that's the stuff the movie does really well^

julien donkey boy is better

never saw JDB because the idea of it freaks me out for personal reasons.

the scene with the queer boy's grandma and the masks is actually quite gorgeous.

At the very least this movie had some totally righteous hair.

I thought it was great the first time I saw it - which was "by accident" - it was playing at the SF Film Festival and we were going to go to an earlier movie, but we didn't make it in time, so we ended up seeing Gummo instead. Seeing it a few more times, it felt more uneven. The scene with Harmony Korine and the dwarf and the scenes with the rabbit costume kid felt like gratuitous weirdness. Most of the rest stood up.

Saw this a few weeks ago for the first time in years. It holds up pretty well. Great use of soundtrack. The scene with the kids biking downhill to Sleep is a total classic:

A lot of the negative hysteria surrounding the film at the time it was released seems kind of silly in retrospect. Also, love Herzog's musings on it: "When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair."

I was really impressed by it when I first saw it 2 years ago or so, now I'm afraid to watch it again because I think I might hate it.

I still very much enjoy saying "selling candy, making money", though.

It's been a while and I'm afraid to see it again, too, though I'm totally comfortable with gratuitous weirdness and can probably give it a pass on the freak-finger-pointing angle.

i really liked this the first time i saw it but maybe that was the kind of person i was. the second time i kind of cringed a lot and didn't want to finish it. though yeah, there are a handful of things like 'selling candy, making money' that are pretty great.

Yeah I saw it when I was 19 or 20, just a few months after leaving the nest (a very small, rural, sheltered nest), so even though I just thought the movie was sorta lol, underneath all that was this constant puzzling feeling of "hmm so this is an 'art film'"

what an enormous waste of my fucking time this is

DERPY DERPY I'M FRUM RURAL AMURICA, YEW SMELL LIKE A DEWKIE DERP DEP

RACIAL SLUR WHOOOOAAAAAAA SO REAL!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

on a serious note, like we've discussed in length how this flick is pretty much ground zero for hipsters liking/prentend to like metal. But also like entire Vice photo issues look like they are still of this shit. Unless someone directs me otherwise pretty much like invented this washed-out, "IM AN URBAN HIPSTER BUT ISN'T RURAL AMERICA WEIRD AND CRAZY AND REAL" aesthetic of of like naked kids burning shit in the woods which ultimately led to

http://lemonochrome.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/levis_go_forth_ryan_mcginley_04.jpg

at least with John Waters this shit was funny, not OH WOW SO EYE OPENING

dude was like 24 when this movie came out so maybe i'll give him a pass but FUCK

so... I'm guessing you fall pretty strongly on the 'classic' side

Don't forget Simon Cowell's citation!

Whiney has this incredible insight-free way of writing about things he hates that makes me automatically want to jump to their defence and love them forever even if I know nothing whatsoever about them.

Whiney has this incredible insight-free way of writing about things he hates

http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fcdc8970c-pi

yr so wrong about this Whiney

Unless someone directs me otherwise pretty much like invented this washed-out, "IM AN URBAN HIPSTER BUT ISN'T RURAL AMERICA WEIRD AND CRAZY AND REAL" aesthetic of of like naked kids burning shit in the woods

Paradise Lost is a year before FYI

even so, hating something for the imitators it spawned and for the audience it ultimately resonated with is fairly stupid, as I'm sure you've been told before

the actual content/vibe of this film is pretty great imho - more in the vein of Herzog or Lynch than Waters. Dunno why you are expecting LAFFS, unless yr unable to engage with rural America on any level besides lol joeks. The film has a very absorbing drugged/dreamy quality. Its rooted in fairly mundane material but punctuated by occasional violence/casual cruelty, childishness, tenderness and I like how it just kinda wanders around town, drifting from one setpiece to the next. in my experience a lot of rural America really does have this kind of atmosphere, nothing happens very much (if at all), there's a certain aimlessness and glassy-eyed withdrawal going on. I guess it doesn't seem so "inauthentic" to me given the number of former huffers and metalheads I've known over the years from Arkansas and Indiana and Oregon...

also seems to me "hipsters" have been ironically/unironically into metal since at least Greg Ginn's Black Sabbath phase...

"Unless someone directs me otherwise pretty much like invented this washed-out, "IM AN URBAN HIPSTER BUT ISN'T RURAL AMERICA WEIRD AND CRAZY AND REAL" aesthetic of of like naked kids burning shit in the woods"

>>Paradise Lost is a year before FYI

But surely ppl did not watch Paradise Lost for backwoods lols or cultural tourism did they? I mean that film made me cry with rage. Vernon, Florida it ain't.

the film is similar to Gummo aesthetically - metal sdtk (w/ slo-mo!), details the depressing antics of "white trash" losers, alternately grim and comical.

WHY people watched something is immaterial. I watched it cuz it was a movie that sounded interesting.

whiney, as a factual matter, let me ask: have you spend much time in rural america?

Whiney has been to Waldo Flea Market and seen Ray The Trader, so the answer is yes.

whiney has a beard and a twitter acct he doesnt need empathy

also 1 time he went to a gallery show that had flat harshly lit pix of lil white trash kids eating burger king

O THE HUMANITY

Dudes srsly north central florida is pretty gdamn backwoods once you get outta town.

I watched this movie on youtube a while back and enjoyed it

what does Florida have to do with anything, btw...? Gummo is set in rural Ohio and Paradise Lost is in West Memphis, Arkansas

Whiney and I both lived in Gainesville for a long time, u guys were basing on him for not having hillbilly cred.

went to a waffle house just outside of gainesville once. made gummo seems like a frothy romantic comedy.

hahahahaha

just a head up, korine like waffle fries

heads

I don't get what Whiney's criticisms are at all really, so I'm not sure how personal authenticity (either Korine's or Whiney's) fits in

xp

'just outside of' is key. Actual Gainesville is one the best towns in the US, but you drive for 15 minutes and you've got a shirtless guy in front of a wooden gas station selling tadpoles out of a bucket.

whiney, as a factual matter, let me ask: have you spend much time in rural america?

― goole, Monday, June 7, 2010 1:36 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

like Whiney do you think Korine was some interloper trying to ridicule/objectify the people depicted in the film or what...?

xpost yeah, no, i liked gainesville -- i seriously considered moving there at one point. but you're right, it felt like an enclave in a sea of pretty intense hillbilly-dom.

xpost

i dunno if it was actually ridicule or objectification but it was definitely EXPLOITATION. And done in that same corny way of Kids where the film dealt almost solely in extremes to where figuring out any reality is nil.

Like what's really more bleak, a kid fucking a retarded prostitute or actually confronting the monotony and hopelessness of rural america?

it's a supposedly serious film that deals exclusively in WHOOOAAAA CRAZZZZZYYYYYY shock

I won't defend Kids cuz Larry Clark is fucking horrible.

do you think Even Dwarfs Started Small is an exploitation flick?

i've never seen a herzog movie btw try another example

i remember liking this movie but kind of eyerolling, not really at the hicksploitation of it, but the arty bits. shirtless kids whipping a dead cat with wires and screaming faggot at each other didn't seem totally out of line to me, but chloe sevigny with farrah fawcett hair? too far!!

your average ep of beavis and butthead mined the same territory better

otm

like the pedo-vibe in Kids is just gross and really clumsy and off-putting. Clark unfortunately obscured a lot of what makes Harmony interesting... really I think Gummo just needs to be seen in the appropriate context, and Herzog (and Fassbinder?) and the films of Korine's parents have a lot to do with it. I don't think its an exploitative movie. I find it kinda meditative tbh.

i've never seen a herzog movie btw try another example

okay I give up then

its not exactly a coincidence/marketing gimmick that Korine's next two films featured old Werner

the actual content/vibe of this film is pretty great imho - more in the vein of Herzog or Lynch than Waters. Dunno why you are expecting LAFFS, unless yr unable to engage with rural America on any level besides lol joeks. The film has a very absorbing drugged/dreamy quality. Its rooted in fairly mundane material but punctuated by occasional violence/casual cruelty, childishness, tenderness and I like how it just kinda wanders around town, drifting from one setpiece to the next. in my experience a lot of rural America really does have this kind of atmosphere, nothing happens very much (if at all), there's a certain aimlessness and glassy-eyed withdrawal going on. I guess it doesn't seem so "inauthentic" to me given the number of former huffers and metalheads I've known over the years from Arkansas and Indiana and Oregon...

also seems to me "hipsters" have been ironically/unironically into metal since at least Greg Ginn's Black Sabbath phase...

― in my day we had to walk 10 miles in the snow for VU bootleg (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 7 June 2010 17:13 (1 hour ago)

good post

he films of Korine's parents

whoa hold the phone

whiney go watch some herzog ffs

Sol Korine produced documentaries for PBS in the ‘70s about an "array of colourful Southern characters"

is that a euphemism for the carter campaign?

hahaha

Peanut Farmer Skins Cat (5 min)

Hamper McBee: Raw Mash, by Blane Dunlap and Sol Korine. 30 min. color videotape. Pie Productions, Atlanta, Georgia.

Showdown at the Hoedown, by Blane Dunlap and Sol Korine. 60 min. color videotape. Pie Productions, Atlanta, Georgia.

Mouth Music with clip

Herzog is really interested in the way people deal with extreme adversity - the limits they can be pushed to, the coping mechanisms they develop, the absurd lengths people will go to to entertain themselves or stave off fear or boredom - and Gummo is all of a piece with that. It's just coming from a slightly different cultural and geographical place, Korine as investigator of his native America (Herzog is more like detached German globetrotter investigating the entire world)

so does anyone wanna hear me talk about this movie some more haha

Did u go see Trash Humpers Shakey?

not yet, but I will! Mister Lonely was okay, didn't really play to his strengths as a filmmaker, but had some great acting/character bits.

love this! i actually felt like he really loved and was fascinated by the people and culture in the film, not simply pointing his finger at lol hicks. and obv it's not a documentary anyway - agree v much with shakey on the herzog-like mix of the mundane and absurd with violence, casual depravity, etc, and setting that somewhere believable. i think he pulls off the collage approach in a very creative way that doesn't force a big overarching point like a more structured narrative might. cool to see that clip from his dad! could def see that influence in gummo, meeting it with something like stroszek.

mouth music is pretty cool

i go back and forth on gummo though

I haven't seen this & probably never will but the soundtrack is a quality metal mix and any metal supporter who denies it is posing imo

love this movie.

I haven't seen this & probably never will but the soundtrack is a quality metal mix and any metal supporter who denies it is posing imo

― get your bucket of free wings (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Monday, June 7, 2010 4:54 PM (9 minutes ago)

well, if there was any confusion as to what underrated aero's former username was, there's none now - i agree about the awesomeness soundtrack, though, and am really unconcerned about who is or isn't posing, except as far the film itself, goes.

hahaha, me in the past made me laugh!

Yeah, Gummo is great, but did you see American Job? I don't know why I loved that movie so much. I guess I could relate to it. I'm actually sorta surprised that there isn't more Gummo hate on this thread. It seems like something ILE could get a good whine going about. Sorry to underestimate you, ILE.
― scott seward (scott seward), Friday, October 14, 2005 2:41 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the only film to be given an NC-17 rating for "nihilism". how great is that?

did you see American Job? I don't know why I loved that movie so much.

top 5 all time movie for me! high five!

the gummo soundtrack is pretty dope tbh

so ur annoyed bc this movie made ur neighbours like a good album?

no, whiney likes things, other people pretend to like things

Whiney I think yr a good writer n all but maybe you should cut down on the self-loathing (or are you somehow not a "hipster")

um, this movie rules, if you feel otherwise get flayed

I saw "I Stand Alone" sometime between 2007 and now and I recall not enjoying it at all. I have yet to see Begotten, but if it's anything like I Stand Alone I'm not interested.

Also most of my friends who love Gummo really hated Trash Humpers, so I'm in no rush to see that either.

gummo is clearly great

RIP Bryant Crenshaw, the little man

http://www.indiewire.com/article/harmony-korine-remembers-late-gummo-actor-bryant-crenshaw-20150207

Supreme x Gummo reviewed by someone who doesn't know Gummo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfYTUqSm0SY