Product: Kids (1995)
Rating: 3.0
Eh. I got fooled by the hype.
Kids (Larry Clark, 1995)Once all the furor has died down, Kids will be remembered as the movie that started the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. Of course, it's been twelve years, and the furor hasn't yet died down. I'm a little confused as to why.The story, though it takes Clark a while to get around to it: Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce) are skate kids in New York. Jennie (Sevigny) is a girl Telly had had sex with in the past. She accompanies her friend Ruby (Dawson) to the clinic so Ruby can get an HIV test; Ruby turns out negative, but Jennie is positive. The rest of the movie is Jennie trying to track down Telly before he can sleep with anyone else and tell him.First off: watch the movie with subtitles on. It won't offer a complete translation, but it'll probably help. Telly and Casper's dialogue is often unintelligible. It may lend credibility to the characters, but sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of credibility so as not to lose your audience. (Interestingly, almost every male in the movie talks in the same odd patois; I can't remember a single female in the movie doing so.) Second, the pace here is all over the map; it seemed as if Clark were working entirely without an idea of pace until the main story starts up (which happens far enough into the film that it seems as if it's going to be a plotless slice-of-life flick for a while), and once the main story does appear, the movie wanders off into tangents that sabotage the pace even more. Parts of the film that should have been minor scenes to advance the plot are dragged out, while valuable character-building scenes are jump-cut.I got the feeling I was supposed to be shocked by the ages of the participants, as well. First off, that's a gimmick at best, and a transparent one; second, are there really people who don't know what teenagers are like these days? (And "these days" is a misnomer-- it's been a long, long time since I was a teen, and we were like this then, too.)It's not bad, and does contain some good performances, but it's certainly not the groundbreaking masterpiece I'd been expecting given the twelve years of raves I'd heard about it. **