Kids

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and a 12-year-old girl making out on a bed. With no adults around, Telly, who is slightly older, persuades the girl, who is a virgin, to have sex with him. Afterwards, he meets his friend, Casper (Justin Pierce), and they talk about his sexual experience very crudely. Telly has taken to only having sex with virgins. They go inside a local store, where Casper shoplifts a bottle of malt liquor as Telly distracts the cashier. Looking for drugs, food and a place to hang out, they head to their friend Paul's (Sajan Bhagat) apartment, though they express dislike of him on the way there. They arrive at Paul's house, talk about sex and smoke marijuana while watching a skate video (Video Days). Casper inhales nitrous oxide out of balloons, which Telly considers dangerous. The scene intercuts with a group of girls, among them Ruby (Rosario Dawson) and Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), talking about sex—each gender contradicting what the other gender says, especially about oral sex.
Ruby and Jennie mention that they were recently tested for STDs at Ruby's request, though Jennie only got tested to keep Ruby company. Ruby's test is negative, though she has had multiple sexual encounters, many of them unprotected. Jennie tests positive for HIV. She says she has had sex only once, with Telly. Jennie spends the rest of the film trying to find Telly, to prevent him from unknowingly passing it on. Telly and Casper walk to Telly's house and steal money from Telly's mother, who is preoccupied with taking care of her new baby. They go to Washington Square Park and buy a dime bag of marijuana from a Rastafari. They then meet up with a few friends to talk and smoke, one of whom gives a blunt-rolling tutorial. As they do, Casper and many others taunt a gay couple passing through the park. On the side, Telly briefly talks to Misha, a girl who strongly dislikes Casper, calling him a jerk. As Casper rides on a skateboard, he carelessly bumps into a man, who furiously threatens him. He pushes Casper, but is struck in the back of the head with a skateboard by Harold (Harold Hunter), a friend of Telly and Casper's, causing him to collapse. A number of other skaters join in, beating, stomping, and hitting the man with their skateboards until he is rendered unconscious by a final blow to the head by Casper; Telly then spits on the man.
While discussing whether or not they killed the man at the park, Telly and some of the group from the park pick up a 13-year-old girl named Darcy (Yakira Peguero), the virginal younger sister of an acquaintance, whom Telly wants to have sex with next. He convinces her to go with them to a pool. The other girls engage in pseudo-lesbian kissing and flirtation, but Darcy is restrained, though not shocked by the others' behavior. Telly and the group go to an unsupervised party at the house of another friend, Steven (Jon Abrahams). Meanwhile, Jennie makes her way to Washington Square Park. Here, she talks to Misha, who tells her about Telly's possible whereabouts. Jennie goes to a rave club called NASA trying to find Telly. She runs into a raver boy, Fidget (Harmony Korine credit as Avi, his brother), who shoves a pill in her mouth, which he refers to as "a euphoric blockbuster drug that's supposed to make special K look weak". It turns out to be a depressant (similar to Valium or Xanax). The pill kicks in and Jennie eventually finds out that Telly is at the party at Steven's house.
Jennie arrives at the party only to learn she is too late, as she discovers Telly having sex with Darcy, thus exposing Darcy to HIV. Emotionally drained and the drug still affecting her, Jennie cries and passes out on a couch among the other sleeping partygoers. A drunken Casper proceeds to rape Jennie unprotected as she sleeps, unknowingly exposing himself to HIV as well. The film ends with a poignant look at several early-morning junkies on the streets of New York City, as well as a soliloquy by Telly about how without sex he would have nothing to live for. The final shot features Casper drinking liquor first thing in the morning and looking at the camera and saying "Jesus Christ, what happened?"

Tags: tragedy, cult, violence

Review:
I do believe that Larry Clark has a strage obsession with teenage nudity, in every film I've seen of his there has been tons of teenagers having sex, sometimes it spoils the film.Overall the film is powerful and moving, watch it..
This is not a super super film, but it stays with you, which was sort of the point - especially if you saw it at the time it was released, before the onslaught of "dark" teen movies over the decade following.
There are two highly, and deservedly, controversial movies dealing with the issues of drug and alcohol abuse, underage sex, lack of control, and the preteen and teenage minority of urban America.
And I can fairly say now that as a reviewer and film-goer, I can forgive Mr. Clark."Kids" is set in the drug-riddled streets of New York.
He balances the explicit and implicit with professional craftsmanship."Kids" is a very tough movie to watch and tough to enjoy, but I must confess that it is, to my mind, a truly great film.
He's also got some very strong performances from his cast which include Leo Fitzpatrick, a very young Rosario Dawson, Chloe Sevingy, and the late Justin Pierce whose brilliant performance reminds me so much of the scumbags that I had the displeasure to know in my adolescent years.
The film doesn't have much of a direct screenplay (mostly dialogue you would hear while around friends) which is good for the type of movie being made here.
The movie makes me want to lock any future kids I end up having in a box, and not let them out until they are 30.
When I saw this movie I was 13 years old, and back then I manage to understand the message that the movie was trying to send.Sometimes it doesn't have to be a "why" or a "how" for people get in this kinda life, you just have to grow up in the middle of it...This movie is all about life, the feeling of emptiness you get near the end credits, and you start to think how did the world become so messed up.
Yes  some (many?) young people like sex and drugs but how many live like this?But the film wants to over-blow things simply because the shock value adds value to the subject.
So we have rape, beatings, AIDS being spread, children barely 10 smoking weed etc and the film has a mix of shock but also a sort of sensationalisation about it  like Clarke is rubbing his hands behind the camera ad directing, saying `worse, worse, more, more etc'.
The rest are just all there to `shock' us  `oh, look' says Larry Clark `they're doing drugs, there's girls kissing girls, there's fights and shocking sex  isn't it all lovely and terrible!!!?'.Overall it's worth a watch maybe once simply because this is a lost world that I'll hopefully never see.
The sex scenes are rather drawn out and some of the situations are very disturbing and very graphic, but there really is kids like this in real life.
The crux of the story, an HIV infected teenager intending to deflower two thirteen-year-old virgins in the space of one day, is rendered difficult to believe by the casting of Leo Fitzpatrick.
Consider that his subsequent films are very hard to defend artistically, and you will struggle to derive real depth from KIDS.Other less charitable critics have called him "pedophilic" in his sustained exploitation of good looking youth.
I'm really surprised that people find this shocking.Content aside, the film is badly directed with lousy sound and has virtually no plot--just a bunch of teens wandering around getting high, drinking etc etc.
Yet other than the shock value of having a character, infected with AIDS, who lives to deflower virgins, much of "Kids" comes across as shallow and tedious..
Just when you think it can't get worse, it does.The only reason Kids was thought of as Disturbing was because adults do not like admitting that their children have sex.
I didn't get that wrong?If you are a real-life version of one of these kids, I understand how you might like the movie, but I doubt it's going to change your lifestyle.
This movie was unreal.And even the breast feeding scene was silly -- like most welfare mothers sit around for hours waiting for a people to be there to watch before she whips out her milk jug...
Director: Larry Clark, Script:Harmony Korine, Cast: Chole Sevigny and others I almost bought this movie because I have Bully so I was curious about this because I have heard a lot about it.
Just when I think I've seen the worst movie ever made, along comes a new contender called KidsKids makes Reefer Madness look like a Ken Burns documentary, except that Reefer Madness was watchable.
I can only imagine the magnitude of buyer's regret worldwide that has been caused by this one film alone.The formula for creating a movie like Kids is embarrassingly simple (and simple-minded): Don't bother to hire a screenwriter, gather a huge cast of the most foul, unattractive young people you can find, tell them to do and say the most shocking, degenerate things their warped imaginations can come up with, film their actions while drunk with no steadycam anywhere to be found, and insert some credits at the beginning and end.
Oh, and throw in a bunch of children smoking pot and having sex to appeal to the niche market that really, really enjoys watching five year old girls prance around in beauty contests.Then create a doosie of a PR campaign that would make any performance artist proud--one that convinces even the critics that the film is so profound, if you don't like it, that's only because you're just not clever enough to "get" it.The sad thing is, I'm not trying to be funny.
After all, Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up, and Siskel and Ebert are honorable men.As for me, I'm going to keep looking for a real filmmaker, one who bothers to film real kids who are experiencing real troubled lives, so that we might really learn something, even if it means no one makes a great deal of money or manufactures a career out of stale, rancid, thin air..
I feel if the parents would take their kids to see this film, then maybe thing would be better in the world, but we'll never know, cause parents are to scared to reveal that kind of information to their children.
Director Larry Clark created the most cruel and sad film about kids being pushed into things they shouldn't do.
He just doing films that are probably based on his experiences and what he's heard and seen.THE PLOTPowerful and passionate, colorful and compelling, Larry Clark's "Kids" is 24 frenetic hours in the life of a group of teenagers, and like most teenagers, they think their invincible.This is a great film, I give it ****(out of 4 stars)..
I think "KIDS" should be shown and be a requirement in every school across the nation since it's simply the best, most realistic film ever made about teenagers' attitudes and behavior about sex.
Larry Clark might think he's made a movie that will get people all over the world talking .
But to be fair to Clark there's no such thing as bad publicity so any movie that sickens an audience with AIDS , rape , drug taking and violence all involving characters in their early teens can only be a good thing .
Clark might also think he's making a naturalistic movie by using a cast of total unknowns many of whom have no acting experience but the performances aren't natural - They're simply awful .
Fitzpatrick does deserve some faint praise since he's the most outstanding non actor in a movie overwhelmed by outstanding non actors I have tried to appreciate Clark's later works like TEENAGE CAVEMAN but this director always goes out of his way to shock his audience usually with 15 years old saying " I want to f*ck you so much baby " and then getting down to the dirty deed while taking drugs .
I thought the little kids doing drugs and all of the sex were just there because it was a movie.
Now that I have grown up and i see all of this stuff happening, the movie truly shows how scary life is for stupid-ass kids like us.
I'm working on my PhD in clinical psychology and the professor had some crazy notion that watching this stupid movie would be an insightful way to learn about kids.
*If you haven't seen it and don't want it spoiled, stop reading here.*At the end, I don't know about you, but I was almost relieved that all the one-dimensional characters (everyone in the movie) weren't gonna make it.
Yes, I know everything that goes on in this movie happens in real life, but the plot didn't seem believable in any way.Bottom Line: Stay away from this movie..
And so it is a culture, in your face, of adolescent ignorance and need, with music and camaraderie and drugs filtering through the movie start to finish.On the one hand, it's disturbing to see these young people so callous and so ignorant, and yet so willing to go down or be consumed, through best friend pressure and peer pressure.
I don't need to like the characters in a movie to enjoy it, but give them some personality- most of the characters in "Kids" were completely forgettable.
Without a real plot it gets boring fast, and is it just me or do movies like this get made only for the shock value?
Instead of trying to tell a good story it shows the lives of a group of kids living in New York City who find nothing better to do but have sex, get stoned and beat people up.
Kinda scary when you think about.This movie is clearly an attempt to accurately portray teen life in the big city.
That simply didn't worked for me.Would this movie stop teenagers from having unprotected-sex, drinking alcohol and taking drugs?
He hasn't got the right look and talent for his role, so his character doesn't quite work and is not believable enough.In short, it works well as a view on the life of teenagers but when it comes to being powerful, controversial, making a statement and leaving a message it isn't good enough.
I realize that violence is a part of life, especially in downtown New York City, but the violence as well as the excessive partying scenes and the gruesome sex was drawn out much more than necessary, and this took a lot away from the film.
While not a completely worthless film, Kids just has so few redeeming values that it is hardly worth the time to watch it.
I've always thought that the closer films are to reality, the better they are, but the thing that really ruined Kids was that it focused so hard on the drugs and the sex and the violent elements of reality, while virtually ignoring every other part of these kids' lives.
It is so real that it will probably be offensive to some people but the point the movie tries to make is that the real lives of a lot of teenagers are full of some shocking experiences.
This movie hits you immediately with the very first scene being the 16 year old guy who is the main character making out, then having sex with a 12 year old girl.
The movie tries to depict a typical day in the life of some screwed up teens but there is no real point other than to maybe make you angry or concerned.
Older viewers would probably not like this movie but some teenagers would probably watch it and say, "Yeah, whats the big deal?".
The movie tended to glorify these "kids", and paint a picture that all teens are like this.
I'm just glad I saw "Bully" before "Kids",because if it had been the other way around,I would have ended up missing one of the most intense movie-going experiences of 2000.Larry Clark's first feature is a foul mess,populated by a group of foul-mouthed little punks,who could all probably benefit from a good long stretch in the Reformatory.Don't waste your time.Life's too short..
The Movie is Entertaining Beginning to End. At the start it looks like a little bit of underage kids doing adult things.
The film's script, written by (at the time) eighteen year old Harmony Kormine, is a real treat, however there's not much else great about the movie other than that.Kids follows three teenagers in New York City during one average day over the summer.
Rosario Dawson also can be seen in her first acting role as one of Jennie's friends.Kormine's script is the one thing that saves Kids from being totally bad.
The acting is mediocre from the male performances, however it is not really all that hard to see why Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson became famous for this movie.Recent realist films have definitely borrowed a lot from Kids.
The plot of "Kids" is such that you need to care about the characters if this movie is to be successful on any level.
Secondly, we follow Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) on her quest to find Telly and inform him that he has given her AIDS before he can spread the disease even farther.These events are for the most part seen without judgment and without comment, and this gives them a greater power than so many films which feel the need to moralize.
I just feel that the film don't give good reason for kids to behave this way.
Kids is one of those films whose every scene, every line of dialogue, every moment on screen is entirely there to shock the viewer.It doesn't serve any sort of worthwhile purpose, not even as entertainment which is what movies should be.
This is one of those movies that sets out to paint a "real" picture of what it's like for kids today.
We spent most of the movie sarcastically yelping, "This is SO like our lives!" You want to know what real teenagers do?
Of course Fitzpatrick and best friend Justin Pierce (about as rotten a kid as his pal) move all around the city and are near impossible to track down as we see teenagers on an endless ride of sex, drugs, parties and general mischief.
Those people that are talkin bad about this movie must really have not have a  real teenage life.
I have to say that if you think that this movie is bad because 1)kids don't act like this, 2) the language is foul, or 3) the characters are shallow, you really are uninformed or missed the point.
The characters in this film feel two-dimensional, never acting believably like teenagers.
"Do you know what your kids do when you're not around?" No you don't because you aren't ever around, you are being a bad parent, maybe if you raised your child normally and taught him/her whats right and wrong, acted as a guide and a loving parent, that wouldn't happen.I bought this movie for seven bucks thinking it would be more along the lines of requiem for a dream.
This film is depressing to watch,seeing these kids drink,smoking weed,and having unsafe sex.
Hopefully,parents can watch this film,then have one hell of a serious talk with their children about the dangers of unprotected sex and drug use.
At the same time, Fitzpatrick is on a mission to deflower nubile young Yakira Peguero (as Darcy) "Kids" is an incredibly rich drama from virgin (i.e. first time) director Larry Clark.Handling this kind of material well isn't easy, and usually results in a stupid, offensive movie - though, probably, many still found it offensive.
'K.********* Kids (5/22/95) Larry Clark ~ Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce, Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson.
Kids is not a movie for everyone it is dark and at times uncomfortable to watch especially the opening scene and the last scene.
Kids today are curious, and this film exploits the innocence of adolescence to a the underground world of drugs and unprotected sex.
It might seem dated when watched almost 20 years after it came out, but it was showing a side of Kids that many movies were ignoring.
You can look at the film Kids in a lot of different ways.
A difficult film with an uncomfortable subject but that is why it works.Directed by controversial director Larry Clark, Kids from 1995 was originally given an NC-17 rating but was then released unrated.
The plot tells the controversial story of a group of poor teens who's life consists of mostly drugs, alcohol, sex and AIDS.The movie has a thin plot and even thinner character development.
The setting is very effective and helps makes the story.Kids is an interesting movie that depicts the dangers of our world and is a wake-up call to parents.
I saw this movie many years ago, I was probably 18 at the time and I never forgot Talie's face, the disgusting kid, nor the last scene.
I guess director Larry Clark wanted to show what kids do, but I think that this depiction of young people is particularly helpful.
I didn't know what to expect from this movie - all I'd heard about it was it was controversial and dealt with teens, sex, and drugs.I was quite pleasantly surprised, as Kids is poignant, realistic, and to the point in its portrayal of the extreme culture that some people are born into.
It feels like you are watching actual footage from a documentary on troubled youth thats what make this movie so great.
Kids, one of the most controversial and unsettling movies of the 1990s, introduces two new names to the world of underground and independent cinema: director Larry Clark and writer Harmony Korine.