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Larry Clark is known for making some of the most controversial films over the last thirty years and it all started in 1995 with the film Kids.
Set around a twenty four hour period in New York Kids follows two teenagers Casper and Telly as they walk around looking for drugs, alcohol and girls to whom they can have sex with. We see them go from location to location doing different things including stealing from one the kids mothers, buying weed and learning how to roll a blunt to taking the virginity of a under age teenage girl (and that is in the first minute of the film). The main point of controversy was just how old that girl was in real life and it has to my knowledge be proven she was legal to be in the scene that she was but to see it first hand does make you wonder.
This is not a nice film; but then again it is not meant to be, Larry Clark commissioned Harmony Korine (who himself was only 18 at the time) to write the screenplay "so the story could come from the inside, from the point of view of the kids."
As I say this is not meant to be a nice film, it is not written that way, although there is no official tag line I am quite sure it was "do you know where your kids?" and given the subject matter this is a far comment. Do parents really know what their children are doing? One reviewer stated "a wake-up call to the world" and again I think never a truer statement has been made.
This is a horrible film but I think it is also an important film, the story is one that should be told if only to make parents realise that as much as they love their offspring and as much as they want to believe they are good some turn out bad and if it is not kept in check? Things can go wrong.
To this day it does not fail to shock me so I guess this is kind of the point and it has done it's job. It is not a film you will find on the shelves of HMV, I remember seeing it by buying it in a discount bin at my local Spar supermarket and I am quite sure had the known what it was it would have been pulled.
See it, consider the message and decide if it is important, self indulgent, dangerous or just plain glorification of sex, drugs and alcohol. Whatever the case it will stick in the back of your mind for a long time afterwards.
Set around a twenty four hour period in New York Kids follows two teenagers Casper and Telly as they walk around looking for drugs, alcohol and girls to whom they can have sex with. We see them go from location to location doing different things including stealing from one the kids mothers, buying weed and learning how to roll a blunt to taking the virginity of a under age teenage girl (and that is in the first minute of the film). The main point of controversy was just how old that girl was in real life and it has to my knowledge be proven she was legal to be in the scene that she was but to see it first hand does make you wonder.
This is not a nice film; but then again it is not meant to be, Larry Clark commissioned Harmony Korine (who himself was only 18 at the time) to write the screenplay "so the story could come from the inside, from the point of view of the kids."
As I say this is not meant to be a nice film, it is not written that way, although there is no official tag line I am quite sure it was "do you know where your kids?" and given the subject matter this is a far comment. Do parents really know what their children are doing? One reviewer stated "a wake-up call to the world" and again I think never a truer statement has been made.
This is a horrible film but I think it is also an important film, the story is one that should be told if only to make parents realise that as much as they love their offspring and as much as they want to believe they are good some turn out bad and if it is not kept in check? Things can go wrong.
To this day it does not fail to shock me so I guess this is kind of the point and it has done it's job. It is not a film you will find on the shelves of HMV, I remember seeing it by buying it in a discount bin at my local Spar supermarket and I am quite sure had the known what it was it would have been pulled.
See it, consider the message and decide if it is important, self indulgent, dangerous or just plain glorification of sex, drugs and alcohol. Whatever the case it will stick in the back of your mind for a long time afterwards.
