Ken Park

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Will this film depress me beyond all reason?

I'm thinking of seeing it tonight.

I didn't like any of Clark's other films.

― amateurist (amateurist), Wednesday, 8 October 2003 16:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Don't bother. Take yourself out for a cheap meal instead, Am.

― adaml (adaml), Wednesday, 8 October 2003 16:37 (twenty-one years ago)

Does this film have U.S. distribution yet?

Bully had a profound effect on me, but I always tend to qualify my feelings about it and am still not sure whether or not it is a "good" film or not.

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 8 October 2003 17:34 (twenty-one years ago)

"bully"s effect on me was making me feel like shit, if i recall. which is some kind of accomplishment.

it's opening night and the lines were too long anyhow. also, i feel sick as a dog.

larry clark is in seemingly every french magazine and newspaper this week.

anyone who sees it, please post their thoughts here.

― amateurist (amateurist), Wednesday, 8 October 2003 17:39 (twenty-one years ago)

I would just like to say for the record that I worked for two years with the real Ken Park, the ex-skater (Clark et al. actually bought the rights to use his name)...

― Douglas (Douglas), Wednesday, 8 October 2003 21:59 (twenty-one years ago)

russian dvds are available. i'm glad a saw it, but it didn't really knock my socks off. i did not find it depressing but maybe somethings wrong w/ me

― ron (ron), Thursday, 9 October 2003 03:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Kids didnt' bother me. just seemed like the shit i went through growing up. granted it's a little exaggerated, but it didn't seem that crazy to me.

Bully bothered me bad. maybe i couldn't really relate to the small town characters as much. maybe killing is a little weirder to me than drugs and sex. i left with a big knot in my stomach. almost as bad as the knot i got from watching Requiem for a Dream the first time.

i haven't heard much about Ken Park yet. what's it about?

my best friend was Clark's personal assitant during the shooting of Another Day in Paradise. he said he smoked $1000 of heroin a week.

― JasonD (JasonD), Thursday, 9 October 2003 06:16 (twenty-one years ago)

My boyfriend refused to go see it with me. "It's all nekkid bodies!" heheh He's right.

― nathalie (nathalie), Thursday, 9 October 2003 06:22 (twenty-one years ago)

for me the best thing about it was amanda plummer - i love her

― ron (ron), Thursday, 9 October 2003 13:41 (twenty-one years ago)

Bully didn't really bother me - it seemed a somewhat muted version of my own young life. But LC is in the doghouse in England cos he amde some racist comments plus got into a fight with his distributor at the London Film Fest. So it might never make it. He's a rotten old perv anyway.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 9 October 2003 13:47 (twenty-one years ago)

this month's "cahiers du cinema" focus on three american movies that all center around teenage misbehavior (of differing degrees of awfulness)--"ken park," "elephant," and clint eastwood's "mystic river" which i'm excited to see. every single critic polled agreed that gus van sant's "elephant" (which opens here in two weeks) was a masterpiece, which now encourages me to see it despite my foreboding that it will be a kind of art-house version of the aesthetization of violence that is common in hollywood films (i fear this partly because van sant's films seem so callow to me sometimes). "ken park" i now think, in the cold light of day, i'll avoid. as noted above i didn't like clark's earlier pictures and the critics i trust most--charles tesson and j-m frodon--didn't much like it.

(x-post)

haha suzy to thread!!

― amateurist (amateurist), Thursday, 9 October 2003 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)

i don't know what clark is really like but he either wears the world's most dour and would-be intimidating countenance all the time or he takes pains to appear in this manner in every publicity photo. he looks like he's about to assault the cameraman. in one photo it can be effectively impressive, across dozens of them it begins to seem self-parodic.

― amateurist (amateurist), Thursday, 9 October 2003 13:49 (twenty-one years ago)

I haven't seen 'Elephant' so I shouldn't asusme anything. But I do ask that anyone praising it be made to watch Alan Clarke's 'Elephant', made for British TV in 1989, which is the major inspiration. Van Sant may have made a masterpiece for all I know, but it's still unjust that Clarke is rarely mentioned alongside Loach, Leigh, Frears; and not often in conjunction with Van Sant's film.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 9 October 2003 14:13 (twenty-one years ago)

my brother-in-law edited ken park so i wanna see it! he edited bully too. i liked bully. it won't play here where i am though. i will wait for video. i also liked that teenage caveman movie. that was a hoot. sometimes i feel like people have totally forgotten that larry clarke was a world famous/renowned photographer.now he's just a boogyman for the medveds of the world. i used to love that stuff back in the day. nan goldin too.

― scott seward, Thursday, 9 October 2003 14:15 (twenty-one years ago)

"cahiers" had a big sidebar about clarke's "elephant," which is an avowed source for van sant's film. check it out.

his photography was also the object of considerable controversy. i find in it the same troubling things i found in "bully."

there was an interview in "liberation" which i found embarrassing, the interviewer nodding along to clark's repeated insistence that he loves his actors, he loves teenagers/skater punks/etc., he is one with them, etc. etc. which may be true as far as it goes but all this insistence on "love" as some sort of transcendent state of being that will put his films beyond criticism bugs me....

― amateurist (amateurist), Thursday, 9 October 2003 14:19 (twenty-one years ago)

i've always looked at him like he's bruce weber's evil twin. young & lovely-vs-young & not so very lovely, is it?

― scott seward, Thursday, 9 October 2003 15:07 (twenty-one years ago)

Ach if only I cd read French!
Alan Clarke does occasionally get shown love in France - Gaspar Noe dugged him.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 9 October 2003 15:12 (twenty-one years ago)

as a disclaimer, i should mention that my favorite movie is Over The Edge and that i find movies like Parenthood, Father Of The Bride(the re-make) and Hook much more vile and evil than anything that Larry Clarke has ever done.

i'm remembering now that i have already talked about this subject on ILE! some thread about most disturbing movies. i probably said really brilliant things on there so i will shut up. i hate repeating myself.

― scott seward, Thursday, 9 October 2003 15:13 (twenty-one years ago)

Enrique, I was at the dinner where Larry got into the fistfight with what was a very obnoxious, very drunk/high distributor who was baiting Larry with anti-Zionist/Semitic gems like 'all victims of suicide bombers deserve to die.' When Larry asked 'even the little kids?' and got a yes from the guy, that's when the guy got punched (end result: one rich-kid distributor with busted nose). Larry was sober (he's actually been clean for almost five years).

Trust an eyewitness. Guy deserved to get hit; you don't hold a dinner in someone's honour and then spend it drunkenly baiting that person.
The consensus among those who know the distributor in question is how surprised they were that nobody had clocked him before.

Ken Park is great because unlike Clark's other films, you see where the adults fit in.

― suzy (suzy), Thursday, 9 October 2003 15:54 (twenty-one years ago)

Haha I bought the original Tulsa in high school; before it was reissued I probably could have gotten $1000 for it on eBay. Anyway I agree with the Bruce Weber comment; especially in light of his later career it seems like his love or identification with his subjects is a bit suspect. It's just explotation, albeit with very pretty actors.

― Sean (Sean), Thursday, 9 October 2003 18:01 (twenty-one years ago)

hey wait a minute, what does doing heroin and punching people have to do with whether or not Amateurist goes and sees a movie? are some of you Baptists? i'm glad i'm not. it would be a sad Abel Ferrara-less universe if i was.

― scott seward, Thursday, 9 October 2003 18:36 (twenty-one years ago)

Bully had major problems, from what I remember (though I couldn't pinpoint them now), but the atmosphere was incredible. You could feel the humidity of small-town Florida.

I think that the graphic sexual content didn't fit in well with Bully. Some was reasonable, but some felt pointless and show-offy ("Here's some young, sweaty, nubile bodies!")

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Thursday, 9 October 2003 18:42 (twenty-one years ago)

i keep spelling larry clark's name wrong. there, i got it right. i think there is an actor named larry clarke. when all is said and done i probably prefer bob clark's Black Christmas to any of larry's movies. (people hated bob too for his exploitative treatment of young people in Porkys)

― scott seward, Thursday, 9 October 2003 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)

i think one problem is that many critics and audiences take clark's "i'm showing the *real* side of america, this is what kids are *really* like" stuff at face value, when in all of his movies that i've seen there are moments that are purely showtime movie, including the poorly-lit soft porn aspects. i mean it should hardly be a revelation that clark, even with his verite pretensions, should rely on existing tropes and so on, but i'm not convinced of his talent in using them.

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 10 October 2003 12:20 (twenty-one years ago)

Suzy, I can well believe it, the distrib guy does seem megalomaniacal, tho it's odd most newz reports took his side (well not that odd, no-one wants to upset the screenings applecart, I suppose). Still reckon Clark's a rotten old perv though.

― Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 10 October 2003 12:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Enrique, I was there because I was interviewing Tiffany Limos (L's girlfriend and studio manager, who is in KP) for Edgy Style Magazine and we'd been chatting for an hour and we'd hit it off, so she invited me to the dinner. After the dinner broke up, we all dashed up to the hotel room and I had to let the cops in the room to take him away for questioning. I think, over the weekend these events took place, that I got to know him pretty well. Not pervy, not at all. In fact, really tons more sound than I would have expected or estimated.

Amateurist: see the film, it's pretty interesting but pretty graphic.

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 10 October 2003 12:44 (twenty-one years ago)

I'll bow to yr superior knowledge, obv: still not quite sure about the crotch-shot in 'Bully', fleshcentricity, etc but...

Hang on - is Tiffany Limos not the greatest name in the history of the world?

― Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 10 October 2003 13:54 (twenty-one years ago)

well clark the man and his films are two different matters, i wouldn't judge one on the basis of the other.

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 10 October 2003 17:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Well, I don't. I'm not crazy about KIDS, as it goes. Although he does put a great deal of himself into the films.

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 10 October 2003 18:15 (twenty-one years ago)

i wasn't directing that comment at you, suzy...

― amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 10 October 2003 18:20 (twenty-one years ago)

Tiffany Limos (L's girlfriend

Wait. L=Larry? Isn't Tiffany Limos like 20 years old?

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 10 October 2003 18:57 (twenty-one years ago)

23.

and she is no longer with larry.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0510814/
http://www.tiffanylimos.com/pages/910049/

― spanky brown, Saturday, 11 October 2003 04:38 (twenty-one years ago)

http://lyra.colorado.edu/sbo/keith/ghs/reunion2000/morris.mitchell.reunion.jpg

― Dada, Saturday, 11 October 2003 04:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Casper, the dopest ghost...

― Helltime Producto (Pavlik), Saturday, 11 October 2003 05:15 (twenty-one years ago)

Corine's taste for damaged characters and surreal smalltown promiscuous
laisons plus Clark's verbose voyeurism have produced on those movies that are worth seeing just for the after theatre chat. On the other hand Elephant was just a revelation. By the way what is ex-trendy guy Harmony Corine doing lately?

― francesco, Saturday, 11 October 2003 15:59 (twenty-one years ago)

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