The Screengrab : gummo

Reviews By Request: Mister Lonely (2007, Harmony Korine)

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

I find myself sort of at a loss at how to review Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Here is a film with plenty of ideas without enough ways to satisfactorily tie them together, yet it’s also so rich and strange that it’s impossible to ignore. That it doesn’t really work in any of the usual ways is to its credit. Just because I have such a hard time pinning the movie down doesn’t diminish my admiration for it.

Like all of Korine’s films, Mister Lonely deals with characters who live on the fringes of society. In this case, his protagonist is a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who ekes out an existence in Paris. Most of time, he performs on the street, although occasionally his agent (fellow filmmaking enfant terrible Léos Carax, who’s really overdue to direct another movie) will find him a job. It’s at one of these jobs- a “personal appearance” at a nursing home where he cheerfully tells the residents, “don’t die! Live forever!”- that he meets another impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe played by Samantha Morton, who invites him to live with her in a commune just for impersonators.

The commune, an old castle in the Scottish Highlands, is inhabited by Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Morton’s real-life daughter Esme Creed-Miles). There’s also the Pope (James Fox), Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna, James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Buckwheat, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Stooges. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here, Marilyn promises, they can all live the lives they’ve chosen in an environment where they will be understood and welcomed.

The early Paris scenes are good, but the movie gets really fascinating once Michael makes the journey to Scotland. It’s also here that the idea of impersonation becomes complicated- for some celebrity impersonators, it’s primarily about making money or indulging their fantasies in a relatively healthy context. Yet the residents of the commune are another breed entirely, having substituted the lives they’ve assumed for their own. Korine shows us the Pope getting drunk at dinner, Buckwheat tending to his chickens, and so on. But try as they may to escape who they are, their real natures end up coming out- Lincoln reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed petty tyrant, Chaplin alternately abuses and neglects his wife, and Marilyn begins to unravel. Even the sheep end up getting sick and having to be put down.

Complicating matters even more is the show they put on for the locals- a few of the impersonators do their own chosen celebrity’s shtick, but some do other people’s famous routines, with such strange sights as James Dean doing stand-up comedy. Indeed, all Three Stooges are never onstage at the same time. Could it be that these people are so uneasy in their own skin that they’re forever searching for another identity to assume? Regardless of the intent, the show is hardly the success that it was intended to be, no doubt because if people are paying to see celebrity impersonators, then by gum want to see them impersonating those celebrities.

All the while, Michael mostly keeps to himself, practicing his routine, never quite giving himself over to the commune’s vibe. If most of the other impersonators have turned the celebrities’ identities into their own, it becomes clear that Michael is more of a seeker, using the Michael Jackson persona as a way to find fulfillment in his own life. Once it’s clear to him that he won’t find it at the commune, he makes his way back to Paris and gives up his Michael Jackson persona, seeking fulfillment from something different altogether.

Perhaps it’s this search that best explains a strange subplot involving a group of nuns led by a priest who’s played by longtime Korine friend Werner Herzog. One day, when air-dropping bags of rice in Central America, one of the nuns falls out of the airplane only to discover that if she prays hard enough, she will survive the fall unharmed. In contrast to Michael, who has searched all his life for some kind of inner peace, the nuns happen upon it by accident, and seize upon the opportunity to experience transcendence through their literal leaps of faith.

After rising to prominence as the writer of Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has made three features to date, all of which have attempted to push the boundaries of cinema. But while julien donkey-boy and particularly Gummo were dragged down by Korine’s need to turn them into freak shows, with Mister Lonely he has matured as a filmmaker by showing a real curiosity for his characters and a willingness to approach his ideas with real sincerity. In an interview earlier this year, Korine described his directing style by saying, “I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible.” With Mister Lonely, I believe he has successfully accomplished this, and in doing so he’s made his best film to date.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? Once again, I’m playing catch-up on my 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include two of this year’s most acclaimed documentaries, a comic corrective to the rather humorless Quantum of Solace, a celebrated Danish drama, and a David Gordon Green-produced family tragedy. So, what’ll it be?

What should I watch for my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Feel free to stump for your favorites or to recommend future candidates in the comments box. See you in two weeks!

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

Click Here For More Guilt From Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Harmony Korine Settles Down

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then. (After Janet Maslin declared his 1997 white-trashterpiece Gummo the worst movie of the year, Korine recalls, “I got a call from Herzog, who was like, ‘This movie is now destined to live forever.’ ”) He managed to burn down not one house, but two. (“The first one I don’t know what happened,” he said. “The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking.”) He made a series of Crispin Glover-esque appearances on the David Letterman show, and embarked on a video project called Fight Harm, perhaps the single stupidest movie ever attempted by a name director. This is how Korine explained it at the time: “I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see.”

After trips to the hospital and jail, the project was abandoned. “I thought I was making the greatest comedy,” he said. “At the time I really felt like that’s what I was on earth to do — get beaten up.” Some of his critics agree, but Lim cites Mister Lonely as “apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine.” We trust this means Korine won’t be going the Uwe Boll route and challenging his critics to meet him in the ring.

Trailer Review: Mister Lonely

Paul Clark — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I wasn't a big fan of Kids, Harmony Korine's screenwriting debut, or Gummo, his first feature as director. I was more positive on his subsequent film julien donkey-boy, although that film demonstrated that he still had some maturing to do. In spite of this, and the lukewarm notices from last year's Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, this trailer has me intrigued about his latest film, Mister Lonely. A lot of it is the film's cast — where else are you going to find Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, and Denis Lavant in the same film, much less playing second-rate impersonators of Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin respectively? Part of me fears that this moody trailer is hiding some of the thornier aspects of the film, and I don't have the foggiest idea of how Werner Herzog fits into the whole thing, but I'm certainly curious to find out how it all fits together.

British Actor Reports: "I Was a Fake Abe Lincoln for Harmony Korine — and Lived!!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"I had been a fan of [Harmony] Korine since his 1997 directorial debut, the disturbingly quirky Gummo. However, I had no idea that the fidgety, punky livewire I recently spent two hours chatting with at a London party was Korine. I never thought to ask him what work he did — we were laughing too much, exchanging ever-more outrageous stories, and comparing near-death experiences. Only when I was leaving the party did we exchange phone numbers. A week later, as I was about to fly to Los Angeles for a three-month run of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William Burroughs theatrical collaboration The Black Rider, Korine called me and announced: 'Hey, I want you to play Abe Lincoln in my new movie. We film in the Highlands of Scotland, June through August. Do the dates work?'" Thus begins actor Richard Strange's account of how he can to appear in Harmony Korine's latest freak-out: Mister Lonely, set in "an isolated commune for retired impersonators. A place where everyone is famous and no one gets old." (The cast also includes directors Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson stand-in, and "a man who looked worryingly like Larry, the shock-headed klutz from The Three Stooges.") The piece includes descriptions of Korine at work that will just sound bizarre if you're unfamiliar with his films but are oddly reassuring if you've seen them: "Although Mister Lonely is scripted, Harmony used the script as a working sketch rather than the finished painting. One day, having rehearsed a scene in which we are planning a barbecue for the newly arrived Michael Jackson, Harmony leaned towards me to whisper, 'You are not going to do any of that. I want you to tell them about your experience of acid and napalm in the Vietnam war,' and left chuckling. His directorial style is akin to that of the solicitous hostess of a cocktail party who makes sure that all her guests have their glasses charged, then leaves the room, lobs in a mace grenade, and locks the door." If nothing else, it does sound about like what you'd expect.

Korine, who recently turned thirty-five, is now a married man — his wife, Rachel, appears in Mister Lonely as Little Red Riding Hood — and Strange describes him as now being "cleaner and happier than he has been for many years." (Oddly enough, it's the second part of that combo that seems to me the bigger shocker: he's always seemed unaccountably jolly to me. Trying to imagine him even happier just makes me picture Ed Wynn floating around his study in Mary Poppins.) If nothing else, Mister Lonely will qualify as some kind of event for marking the reunion of two of the stars of the 1970 Performance: Anita Pallenberg, who plays an impersonator of the Queen of England, and James Fox, as Pope John Paul II. Legend has it making Performance weirded Fox out to such a degree that it caused him to retire from acting for almost fifteen years. Now that he's had the experience of being directed by Harmony ("Do a card trick with your ass sticking out, then dance like you're in a swamp"), we may never see him again. Certainly none of Fox's or even Anita's old associates can tell their director anything new about self-destructive behavior. He told Strange that his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor "didn't go out for four years. He stayed in a room, and shat in pizza boxes. He felt bugs under the skin, and used a 100-watt light-bulb to burn them out. Then poured disinfectant on the burns. If you want to know what pain is, try that." Or, if you really want to know what pain is, see Julien Donkey-Boy...

Happiness: The Video Game

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:55:00 GMT

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

Her online MMORPG based on Todd Solondz's Happiness seems like a real winner, especially (given that similar games like World of Warcraft are massive time- and money-pits) since she proposes that "because true, lasting happiness can never be achieved, no one can ever win and the game goes on forever." We're likewise fond of the idea of a Gummo first-person shooter with an all-black-metal soundtrack. But the best idea by far is a racing game based on Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny where "you're the only one on the road, and when you finish the race, instead of a trophy you get an absurdly long blow job from your dead girlfriend." Someone get Prince Vince on the line — I have a feeling he'll pay for this himself.

Vanishing Act: Harmony Korine

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Attention Diablo Cody: you are not the first oddly monikered young screenwriter whose first script became an indie sensation. Way back in the 20th century, there was a fella name o’ Harmony Korine, no more than a teenager when his screenplay Kids became photographer Larry Clark’s 1995 directorial debut. An instant controversy, the documentary-style look at the sexually-charged, drug-fueled life of a group of New York teens was slapped with an NC-17 rating that prevented its distribution by Miramax (then as now owned by Disney). The Weinstein brothers released Kids on their own to a mixed reception; some critics swooned, others proclaimed it exploitative sleaze.

Still, Korine made enough of a name for himself to secure his own directorial debut two years later with Gummo. A fragmented, impressionistic ode to white trash, the film was if anything even more divisive than Kids. Janet Maslin of the New York Times opened her review with the line “October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year.” But while sophisticated metropolitan tastemakers were busy pointing out how condescending and hateful Korine was toward his “nonprofessional actors, often freakish individuals” (jeez, no condescension there, Janet!), Gummo was well on its way to becoming the cult favorite of the trailer park. And why not? Among other things, it featured the greatest battle of man versus chair ever captured on film:

Korine followed Gummo with his Dogme 95 entry, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), an uneven tale of a schizophrenic that garnered the now-predictable mixed reception ( I offered qualified praise: “Shot on digital video, with blown-out colors and punishing graininess, Julien Donkey-Boy has the look and feel of something unearthed in an archeological dig - a primitive piece of folk art.” Admittedly, I haven’t revisited it since.) That was nearly a decade ago, so where has Korine been?

For a while, there was talk of a disturbing movie in the Jackass vein, wherein Korine would antagonize random people on the street into fighting him and document the resulting damage done to him. In 2002, Clark directed Korine’s script for Ken Park, but that had been written years earlier. There were whispers of heroin addiction and, perhaps even more disturbing, a friendship with doofus magician David Blaine that resulted in the British television special Above the Below. But there were no new Harmony Korine movies...until now.

Mister Lonely, which will have its U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, is exactly what you’d expect: a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who brings him to a commune full of faux celebrities and historical figures. Having shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film breaks no new ground as far as its critical reception: it’s as divisive as ever, sometimes within the same review. The UK Telegraph describes it as “by turns idiotic, over-extended, childish and half-baked.” Then, in the very next sentence: “But when it’s not those things, and sometimes even when it is, the results are brilliantly bold, moving and tenderly, rhapsodically beautiful.” Sounds like a Harmony Korine movie alright.