Ten minutes in and i knew i wouldn’t be enjoying or even liking this film.
No narrative arc (as the film critics like to say) to it. Incomprehensible mostly. Unintelligible manic distracting discomforting energy to it.
That’s the delusional reality schizophrenics live in is saying Harmony Korine. I’m getting you right into this donkey boys mad head. Give you the crazy cut up world from his whacked out perspective. Feel his discomfort as yours, inhabit your repulsion as his, gouge out this film worlds eyes with your antagonism (see, i’m getting into Korine’s head too!)
Apparently Korine has a mad schizo uncle this film is supposed to be doing homage to. Ewen Bremner is totally convincing; he doesn’t even seem to be impersonating or mimicking – ala Dustin Hoffman – mad man mannerisms; he is that man, he is that mad.
The film adheres to Dogme aesthetics: handheld video camera, no artificial light, no superfluous props, no manipulated musical emotionality, no narrative arc (Lol), no pleasure-seeking cheap thrills. And yet mega post-production editing has gone into it. It’s like they had thousands of hours of digi vid to cut and shape - and then gone mad to make it’s production seem unglossed up, wilfully unsmooth, provocatively unbeautiful: cus in crazy psycho-land, ugliness equals truth, grotesquerie authenticity.
At first i was, if not enjoying, at least admiring the aspiration to make the film formally challenging – to appropriately stylistically match how difficult the subjective material is. But before long it got tiresome. Very tiresome. Stop melanging it through opaque filters. Stop slow-moing! Stop jagging the edges! Stop jarring my senses. Stop jiggling my eyeballs. Stop fracturing the narrative! Stop all this self-conscious technique! Start making sense! Keep the camera still for christ-sake. Lets just watch something simple without all this manic fiddling and farting about contriving to make it all look so maddeningly mad, strangely estranging, complicatedly complex.
Korine grosses out on whacked out weirdnesses. Ewen donkey-boy Bremner is saying “He (Hitler) ate my mothers titties“; he’s stamping on the head of a turtle; he’s reading out a repetitious poem “Midnight chaos, noon chaos, eternity chaos etc” which papa Werner Herzog hates, and tells him is “too artsy-fartsy. I like the real stuff” (intended in-joke irony here i think) Herzog is hopelessly miscast; just because he’s reputedly a maverick bonkers film-director doesn’t mean he can act batty or bonkers; he’s made to do and say bonkers things: drink cough syrup out of a shoe; humiliate his grown-ups kids; lie on the bed with a stupid fucking gas mask on his head distractedly smoking a fag listening to bluegrass.
God this film got tiresome!
And there was more whacked out weirdo weirdness: a masturbating nun; a black rapping albino and an armless drummer; Herzog wanting his wrestler wannabe son to put on his dead wife’s summer dress; bowling with retards; a hapless-looking magician regurgitating lit ciggies. Why? Don’t ask why. Wanting to know why is too normal. There is no why can explain this crazy fucked up ugly mad world. That’s why.
“I just can’t take it any longer” says Herzog about an hour in.
Neither could i
Dir: Harmony Korine, USA
3/10
With a name like “Harmony Korine” i suppose you’re doomed to be an unusual somebody special sort of guy. In the DVD interview he says: “We’re at the end of 100 years of cinema where film should be getting more complex – instead it’s going the other way; films are so simple now” I can kind of agree with that. But there’s complex which aspires to something eventually clarifying, essentially lucid. And there’s the chaotic confusing self-conscious complex that this mad mess of a film is.
And anyway Harmony, you look too young (and too sweet) to be making perplexing, complexing, films. You need to grow up a bit son.
