Product: Kids (1995)
Rating: 2.0
Boring, and not altogether shocking....
This film is nowhere as shocking as critics made it out to be, and, in fact, is rather boring. It shows a lot of kids smoking, sleeping around, drinking, sleeping around some more, talking about sex, doing drugs, etc., etc.. Most critics were in deep, deep shock that the children of American would actually indulge in this type of behaviour. I wasn't. Teenagers do incredibly stupid things (mostly revolving around drugs) and seem to enjoy wasting time (all in the name of so-called rebellion). This kind of stuff has been happening since time began, and while it may be more explicit nowadays, it's still not that shocking. Perhaps critics think of America as the TV shows they saw in the 1950's or something like that, some lame, completely unrealistic Norman Rockwell, My Three Sons type of America, which doesn't exist and has never existed. I don't really know. As for the film, I would have preferred Harmony Korine (the screenwriter of this film) to direct it. He has a much better sense of art and cinema than Larry Clark does. Larry Clark's directorial style (if you can call it that) is way too straightforward and really lacks in imagination. The only scene that I found haunting was the final one, when an aria is heard (or an operatic song), and we see some beautiful camera work. It's the only moment of poetry in the film, and it wouldn't have surprised me if Korine directed it himself, as there are similar scenes in Korine's underrated julien donkey-boy. Clark and Korine would revisit this subject with the infamous, rarely screened Ken Park, and that film is supposed to be worse than this one. If you check Kids out once, that's enough. You don't really need to see it again.