Harmony Korine

Why did you hate it? Huge fan of Sevigny so that got me watching in the first place. A fair amount of it (Leo, for example) was hard to watch.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

It's a good film, but I enjoyed the making-of more than the actual movie. I loved Larry Clark's approach and how he used mostly untrained performers. That said, I hated most of the characters and the film made my girlfriend at the time and me pretty angry as we watched it. A sign of good cinema, but it distilled a pretty deep dislike of the proceedings in me at the time which subsequent viewings haven't overridden.

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I despised it for years. For some legit reasons and for some pretty stupid reasons as well. And I didn't even think it was good. I thought it was total bullshit.


It was only after watching it for the first time in twenty years a few months ago, i could put my prejudices away and realize it really actually was one of the best, and certainly most important, movies of the 90s.

as annoying as he can be at times, in my eyes he’s maybe the most exciting filmmaker working today. spring breakers is the best film of the last twenty years. love julien donkey-boy and the beach bum. need to rewatch trash humpers and gummo but like both quite a bit. mister lonely has some good stuff in it but isn’t on quite the same level as the others.

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letterboxd
criticker

I watched Gummo today and liked it as much as the others. It had been on my radar for some years because I listen to a lot of the music included in the soundtrack (including the brief interlude of 80s stuff...), so it was good to finally get around to it.

Not sure if anyone is familiar with him, but Gummo's aesthetic has been significantly taken up by the Australian artist/director Michael Salerno (at least in his zines).

Oh, and here is the always great Dennis Cooper's presentation of "Harmony Korine Day" on his blog: https://denniscooperblog.com/harmony-korine-day/

I have not seen Gummo, and honestly don't really plan to.

You're probably thinking it's the cat. It's not the cat.

It's the spaghetti.

Bath spaghetti!


Yum!

I will definitely keep this guy in mind.



I've also heard there is a Italian version of Harmony Korrine, but for the life of me I can't figure out what his name is anymore.


Not that I necessarily want rehashes of the OG, but I'm down to watch anyone push envelopes and be a little wooly and wild.

I've watched Kids. I've watched Gummo. And after reading the synopsis for Julien Donkey-Boy on Wikipedia I realized I watched that too. I didn't set out to do it. It just happened.

Salerno is cool. I haven't seen any of his films yet, but I have been thinking about his art for a while. https://www.michaelsalerno.net/index.html I only own Teenage Satanists in Oklahoma, but I think it's great.

I would be very interested to hear whoever this Italian guy is. I love what I have seen of Italian film as it is, so this combination sounds intriguing.

While we are mentioning similar filmmakers, I see that Criterion Channel lists Ruben Östlund's The Guitar Mongoloid as something in a similar vein. I had totally forgotten his name after watching Triangle of Sadness last year.

I've seen that one, and I remember it being interesting enough, but didn't quite hit that mark of poetic strangeness that Korrine is so good at

I'll check it out after I finish all of the Korine movies I have access to. Triangle of Sadness was a little to polished, I guess, so I'm not certain that even an early work of his could capture the atmosphere that Korine did---content aside.

Those collages are great

I watched Kids today, and I can definitely see the roots of where he would subsequently go in his own directorial efforts (specifically groups of people encouraging/pressuring one or more members to engage in some form of unsafe or anti-social activity). After watching it, though, I felt like something was missing in comparison to works like Gummo or Trash Humpers. I think those films had an almost whimsical quality to them that came out of the combination of their general weirdness and shared embrace of tap dancing/vaudeville, whereas Kids seemed more consistently realistic and almost documentary (apart from the score).

(This lack, though, should not be construed as a negative, necessarily---just an observation at this point.)

I grew up on Julien donkey-boy, some powerful scenes there, not for the faint of heart. Gummo is classic, there's a strange tenderness to Korine ... recently saw Spring Breakers, it was good, i might check Trash Humpers out soon.

His films all manage to perfectly reflect the sentiment of this scene from The Simpsons:


While not overtly wrong in any straightforward way, there is always something that is so out of left field that it feels like I should avert my eyes without really knowing why.

Such as this:

Totally realistic & very New York City. Loved it!