I just saw Larry Clark's "Bully" a few days ago and was wondering what else anyone thinks about his movies. Apparently the guy has an obsession with half (of fully) naked teenagers.
i thought it was great, and one of the best films of that year.
im a big fan of his, i think my least favorite is "another day in paradise" though i still think its a good film. Anyone seen "teenage caveman?"
Quote from: cecil b. dementedi thought it was great, and one of the best films of that year.
im a big fan of his, i think my least favorite is "another day in paradise" though i still think its a good film. Anyone seen "teenage caveman?"
I saw teenage caveman, this is the first time I am admitting it though, because it is awful. I know its supposed to be like old corny horror movies, but Clark unsuccesfully combined teenage nudity/sex, bad acting, and monsters. I would not even waste the energy of picking the box up and looking at the back if you are at a video store.
Larry Clark is a pervert, and it really shows in his movies. When I watch them, I feel weird, like Im watching porn or doing something illegal.
i think thats whats so cool about it
Quote from: cecil b. dementedi think thats whats so cool about it
Me too, whats the deal on Ken Park, no distribution?
If Larry Clark is a pervert, we need more perverts. Clark's batting average is high -- 1.000. Kids was great. His visual style was ideally suited to Harmony Korine's script. Another Day in Paradise is a cool film. Apparently, when Gus Van Sant directed Drugstore Cowboy, he was highly influenced by Clark's photography, so with Another Day in Paradise, Clark returned the favor by using a story that was highly similar to Drugstore Cowboy. James Woods was awesome in it. Bully is good, clean fun, something that Michael Medved could sit down and watch with his grandmother and kids.
Quote from: soixanteBully is good, clean fun, something that Michael Medved could sit down and watch with his grandmother and kids.
:shock:
the chicks are good tho.
I like the quality of Kids and Bully, but I wasn't real impressed by Another Day in Paradise. It just seemed like another wannabe-QT movie like Boondock Saints (a movie which I have real problems with, but that's another thread). Everytime I see Bully, I get a laugh out of the final scene where all the kids are bitching at each other as to who told. And the Fatboy Slim tune is the icing on the cake.
Kids was alright to watch once but it's definitely not one of my favorites. I consider it one of those "important" films I guess. I admire it but I don't like it. Bully, on the other hand, is just a mess.
I don't like Larry Clark's style personally. He's not very talented..other than possibly being a good director of actors. The actors in Kids are really the only talented people involved in the movie....Bully lacks any talent whatsoever imo.
Quote from: ebeaman69Kids was alright to watch once but it's definitely not one of my favorites.
I remember a while ago where all EVERYBODY around my neck of the woods talked about was Kids "There is naked girls and they smoke hella" and that was it, kind of like rappers and Scarface, most of them never have seen the entire movie.
I've seen only Kids and Bully. Personally, I loved both of them. Bully is the better and stronger of the two. I don't mind the fact that he is using a high velocity of nudity and violence in his movies because he seems more to be documenting than advertising. These are films for adults, or older teenagers, but with the graphic nature of the film, hides behind all of that pretty straight forward stories of people doing wrong in life and realizing that through their actions, almost like morality tales. Just with Clark, you get a reality that goes to shocking which makes the message even stronger.
~rougerum
I just recently saw Kids & Bully. Both those films are very entertaining, I think Bully a little more so... I guess his movies are interesting in the way of teenage gossip. You're hearing about these kids destroying their lives and for you it's just entertainment. Some people you feel sympathy for but a lot of them just disgust you.
I've liked Larry Clark since his Teenage Lust photography days. He got as controversial as Robert Mapplethorpe for a while.
But, like PTA, I wish he would get out of his element and do something different. Teenage voyeurism can only go so far.
i love kids. some bastard stole my dvd of it :evil:. as for bully, it was good. pretty cool. however, that's the only real movie i've ever had a problem with nudity being in it. it was just totally useless to the movie. not the nudity, really - just those gratuitous sex scenes. i mean, he could have faded out or something but christ. i don't know. i thought a couple of those sex scenes were totally distracting and took away some momentum from the movie - like a bad aftertaste.
but anyways, kids rocks. i should put this in the "stupid movie comments" thread, but i think the main user comment for the film at imdb criticizes clark for "trying to shock you". that's the entire fucking idea for the movie, ain't it? in my opinion, kids is the kind of movie they should show in health or social studies classes in high school. it's a film parents should watch. it really is one hell of a wake-up call. save for attempted murders with skateboards, that film isn't much unlike my earlier teenage years.
Quote from: snaporazsave for attempted murders with skateboards, that film isn't much unlike my earlier teenage years.
YOU WHORE! :shock:
found a trailer for ken park
linky (http://www.cinemovies.fr/fiche_multimedia.php?IDfilm=2243)
I thought 'Bully' was excellent. Realistic, sharp screenplay, impressive performances from its young ensemble cast. Did anyone else think that Leo Fitzpatrick (Telly from 'Kids') stole the show as the hitman? He kicked ass in it.
The murder itself was well built, intense and horrible. The finale was hypnotic and its end slaps you in the face. I consider it one of 2001's best.
'Kids' was good, disturbing but very watchable. It didn't really feel like a movie but one giant improvisation.
'Another Day In Paradise' was worth watching for James Woods's awesome performance. Damn he was good in that.
Though 'Ken Park's premise doesn't interest me much, I'm dieing to see what he followed 'Bully' up with.
Bottomline: Do I think Clark has a major obsession with the naked teenage body? Yes. But do I think he can make a damn good film? Yes. So he's fine with me.
I liked "Kids" and "Another Day in Paradise" pretty much, haven't seen "Teenage Caveman" and "Bully" and "Ken Park" is still to be released here in good old Germany.
I thought Bully was absolutely brilliant. I think the label of "pervert" is just too easy in Clark's case. If this was true he'd just go work in porno, make a load of cash, and get to film raunchy sex all day long.
Instead he struggles to make independant films, and I don't think he's swimming in dough. If you watch the behind the scenes "making of" special on the Bully DVD, all the actors are joking about how they had sex with Larry to get the part, etc. But it's plainly evident that it's a professional film set and he goes out of his way to make the raunchier scenes comfortable for the actors.
I think his films are some of the only films brave enough to portray a certain segment of the American teenage population as they really are: sometimes cunning and smart, sometimes stupid, definitely promiscuous, occasionally violent, bored, restless, understimulated, isolated, disenfranchised, etc.
The reason you SEE kids having sex in his movies is because kids in fact DO have sex. Yes, that's right. Teenagers are fucking as we speak, even though the Bible thumpers in the White House don't want to hear about it.
This is why we have such a high teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. Sex is a completely taboo subject and when it's approached frankly by a filmmaker, he's labeled a "pervert", meanwhile a big action movie director can make a film showing hundreds of people being chewed to pieces by machine gun fire and he's on the cover of all the magazines.
I always laugh when people attack a movie like Bully, which tackles very tough subjects, claiming it's exploitation - meanwhile, Hollywood churns out films that relentlessly insult the intelligence of not only teen characters but teen audiences and nobody sees anything wrong with it. Every American Pie ripoff and sub-sub-sub C-grade slasher movie.
Look at the trailer for the pointless remake of Chainsaw Massacre - what's her name from Seventh Heavan (no less) is running around half naked. If Clark directed it at least it would have something to say about the real world.
I am looking forward to Ken Park.
Exactly! I agree with you 100%, except I'm kinda looking forward to 'Texas Chainsaw'...
Caught Bully in my Netflix last night, and wow... Another great one. I saw "Kids" first, and it stuck with me for days. I can always tell if a film is powerful if I keep thinking about it for several days after viewing.
Larry Clark probably is a pervert, and he probably does have a thing for nekkid teens, but I have to say that it's probably one thing (of many) that makes his stories so believable. Real life with a bunch of really bad kids from messed up families.
That's not a world I'd want to live in, but I sure don't mind visiting for a few hours at a time. After seeing Bully and Kids, I guess I'd call myself a Larry Clark fan. I enjoyed both of them a lot.
Bully was great... Kids was good (but more important).
I'm not sure if he's a pervert. Watch the extras on Bully... the actors tell how they landed their roles... hilarious.
who cares if hes a "pervert" or not? thats not necessarily a bad thing anyway
bully was brilliant.
Ken Park was banned here in Australia.
I read the Office of Film and Literature Classification Review Board report on why it was banned, and I came to the conclusion that the board is made up of sad, scared people.
Quote from: The Silver BulletKen Park was banned here in Australia.
I read the Office of Film and Literature Classification Review Board report on why it was banned, and I came to the conclusion that the board is made up of sad, scared people.
Here in Germany "Ken Park" wasn't distributed yet. The same for "Bully".
Perhaps they think that those films aren't for our mainstream-audience. :-D
2 things..
Silve Bullet.. totally, i did an essay back in the day when Romance was going to be banned on the incompetence of our classification board, and the conclusion i came to is it's the same everywhere. a classification board by definition is asking for idiocy.
Spike.. hah i find that hard to believe, ur the nation that made shitting in ppl's mouths famous.
kids.............was not really good IMO.....
total garbage..
what is this new avatar of urs suppose to be exactly?
Quote from: ©bradwhat is this new avatar of urs suppose to be exactly?
...if you were referring to moi.....
it is
1.)..something that i thought was really creative and cool to do ..mainly b/c i was going the ms paint route and not finding a
real picture to use like most people do...but instead it actually looks extremely stupid and like a fourth grader just messing around w/ ms paint for the first time....
2.)black, red, white, orange, yellow, brown, colors organize to mean/symbolize something
3.)background:space..hence the black galaxy w/the white stars..foreground::..circular redish, brownish, orangenish, planet..resembling the first planet in our soar system..mercury.::the final touch::..the yellow ring around the sphere to give it a "neon " glow.....conculsions::.....the av is what i think of when i hear the words neon mercury and tried to relate this in a creative manner.....
4..)..it should remain a mystery.....
..but now i think its choice number one.... :?:
I saw Ken Park this evening. It's pretty lame. The first half is good, suggesting that it might be an interesting and thoughtful look at disturbed teenagers. Then it takes the most purely predictable route and goes for simple exploitative ends, and then trying to tack a meager bit of meaningfulness on at the very end.
It is indeed very graphic. I didn't have a problem with that, and had the same amount of nudity and sex been in Kids, I thought it would have been worthwhile. There's a teen threesome at the end that's very natural and well done (and hardcore, as far as oral/handjob stuff goes -- The Brown Bunny ain't got nothing on this). I didn't think it was too exploitative. The stuff with the kid who's sleeping with his girlfriend's mom is pretty good, too. It's actually quite funny. But whenever the movie tries to be disturbing or shocking, it falls flat.
I haven't seen Bully, but the friend who saw this with me said that it is far superior.
Where did you see it? Film Festival?
No, actually I rented it from an import DVD store.
Quote from: GhostboyNo, actually I rented it from an import DVD store.
Does this store have a web site?
No. But most major cities have at least one video store that rents underground/import stuff.
I can't believe how many of you think Bully is a brilliant movie. It's a terrible, god awful film.
I remember watching it with friends and we all thought they made up the story as they went along.
and the performances (aside from Nick Stahl) were horrendous. that guy Telly from kids didn't steal the show. He just proved why he doesn't get any other work.
we're talking about the same Bully right?
i don't reckon i'll watch it ever again.
but that part where Larry Clark goes "tell her u'll write to her".. that was funny.
and when telly says "what? ah man, that guys fucking retarded" was funny too
and this:
donny
fatalize, whats that? fatalize... whats fatilize mean... um, i mean... does it mean youre dead?
derek
no dude, its worse... i mean... its way worse, bro... cause you have to live, man... you have to live and youre a... fuckin baby
hahahah, the whole movie is full of great lines
Quote from: poser.... that guy Telly from kids ...
thats on eof the main reasons why this film doesn't work for me..that guy telly was the worst character i have seen plotted out on paper and put on screen..horrible, horrible stuff i cannot see anyhting redeming in this film w/ the exception of maybe chloe S.
and what 's..also annoying is telly's
cool sidekick drinking the fourties and speaking juvenille slang all the way through this film... :roll:
scratch gigli and the watcher from all time worsts and put this up there.....
I saw ken park yesterday, I pretty much think it sucks. I agree with ghostboy's view, the beginning was a bit interesting, but after that it just ruins everything.
I didn't like kids either, but his film with james woods, last day in paradise, or something, was pretty good, the only thing I liked of clark's work
Courtesy DVD Times (http://www.dvdportal.co.uk/content.php?contentid=6298)12/17/03:
Matt Day recently had the chance to talk exclusively with Larry Clark, director of the films Kids and Bully, about his latest work Ken Park. The film has sparked a storm of controversy around the world due to its graphic content, read on to hear his defense of the film, and his thoughts on his films on DVD.
Matt Day: Ken Park has been grabbing a few headlines lately, after being banned in Australia, how's it going getting the film released elsewhere?
Larry Clark: Good. I was just in Europe I was at a film festival in Germany and we premiered it there, then I was in Paris doing press – it opened in France on October the 9th – then I went to Lyon and they premiered it there as well.
MD: So it's just the UK and America that are having trouble with the release?
LC: Well I think we're close to making a deal for the UK, we actually have three suitors believe it or not that want this film so the whole thing's coming together and hopefully it's going to play in the UK. We have a distributor in the US, so hopefully the film will be out soon. It's kind of a shaggy dog story because the film was originally going to come out in August and then November and it might even be delayed a little more but it's definitely coming out in the US. What's taken so long is we had distribution, somebody courted us, wined us and dined us, and then they pulled out at the last minute.
MD: Was that in America or the UK?
LC: That was in the US, but now we have new distribution in America. This film, it was such a struggle even making it, it took all these years to get financing for the film, and when the film was finished the producer and financiers said this film will never be distributed, you'll never get distribution unless you cut it, no-one will touch it. And I said "wait a minute you're wrong, if we can get it in front of an audience wait and see what happens". Luckily we got in Venice, where they also told me I wouldn't get in because they brought in a new director who they said was very conservative, but he loved the film and invited us to the competition. So we brought it to Venice a year ago and the audiences responded to it so well and then they sold it all over the world. Now here's this film that I was told would never be distributed unless I cut it, I said I'm never going to cut a frame from this film, this is what it is, it took all these years to get it made. If I wanted to cut it I'd have made a different film years ago. Now they've sold it all over the world, it opened in Russia, in Spain in Greece, it opened in Italy July the 4th – 32 prints of this little film in Italy – it opens in France soon, it played in Austria, and hopefully now the UK, I'd love it to be in the UK.
MD: Well the UK presents a rather difficult situation, as you've made it clear you didn't want to cut the film in any way. I recently spoke to Sir Quentin Thomas, who's the director of the BBFC, and although he hasn't seen the film yet he did confirm that ejaculation is something that hasn't been classified in the UK before.
LC: But look at the rules, I have a copy of the rules, and the rules state that you can show erect penises, you can show ejaculation, you can show oral sex, you can show intercourse, you can show anything as long as it's in context, so maybe it hasn't been done, but it can be done – there's no rules against it, and this film is all about context. I was told that if you show certain things in film, if you show certain images, it's automatically pornography. I said wait a minute what are you talking about?, and they said if you show certain things, like ejaculation, it's automatically pornography and I told them – no it's not, if it's a part of life, if it's in the context of the story, if it's not gratuitous, and if it's really well done then it's not pornography, and I'll prove it to you. That was one more thing I wanted to prove, just one more challenge, and this film – and you've seen the film – is not pornography. It's part of the story, it fits in, it seems right. Take for example the last scene in the film, the sex scene at the end [one of the most explicit in the film], people from Venice, and film festivals all over the world, tell me that's not pornography, it feels right, it's not a dirty scene – the dirty scene is where Peaches' father kisses her. This isn't me, this is audiences everywhere, they see the film and respond and they think this is OK. I think that the people that see the film at the BBFC will see that, a lot of people are speculating but I think that we're really breaking new ground here, and that's one of the roles of an artist, and when people see this film they'll see it the way it is, I'm not cutting the film for anybody, ever.
MD: The UK has an interesting situation in that there is a classification exclusively created for pornography – the R-18. Films classified with this can only be sold in licensed sex shop, but they can get away with a lot more than is allowed at a regular 18 rating. If the BBFC were only willing to pass the film uncut with that rating would you want it to be distributed in that way?
LC: No.
This is a film, it'll be shown in theatres, it a good film – I think it's my best. I'm working with a great cinematographer Ed Lachman, it's a great looking film, it is what it is, and it's not pornography, I'm very proud of this film.
MD: There were a lot of familiar faces, but not big names in the film, did that help add to the realism?
LC: The acting is just spectacular, it was really interesting to mix first time actors with really experienced ones. All the adults a really great, professional actors, and all the young people in the film are first timers which made it really interesting. Wade Williams, who play's Claude's father in a brilliant performance and he said that working with Stephen [Jasso], he doesn't know what he's going to do, he doesn't know where he's going to go, he's just so open and honest. "If he had any kind of training I might know, I might have a clue where he is, where he's going to go, so I'm out there totally lost, I have to stop acting and just be real". So that makes for fantastic scenes where the actor is forced to be real and the first timer is being real, so I was really happy with the first timers, it's interesting to see what happens.
MD: You really seem to have a talent for picking a young cast off the streets and finding great actors out of nowhere.
LC: Well I did it in my first film Kids, no-one in that film had ever acted before but they were kind of from that scene, that downtown scene, and it's weird to do that. I'm amazed by it too, I was in the skate park and I saw Stephen Jasso who plays Claude and I saw Mike Apaletegui who plays Peaches boyfriend Curtis and they were just skaters in the park that you see in the film, and I thought in my mind that's the way I want Claude to look, and that's the way I want Curtis to look, so I went up to them and, well, I made them actors. The main thing about being an actor is to not be self conscious and these kids really can do that. You can usually tell right away, sometimes you see one and you have a reading and it doesn't work, but generally you can tell it right off the bat.
But then it's a lot of work, it's not easy, I don't want to say this just happens. You pay a price emotionally to pull these performances out of them and they pay a price too, emotionally, to give that kind of an honest performance.
MD: There were certainly some fantastic performances in the film, do you think it will launch careers the way Kids did for Chloe Sevigny or Rosario Dawson?
LC: I think if they want to continue a career they can. I think Tiffany Limos is amazing, and she's out in California now, she's going to be in a couple of films but Kids really did [launch careers] Chloe's a huge star in Europe, Leo Fitzpatrick works a lot and John Abrahams who had a small part in Kids has also been in a lot of films.
MD: You wrote the stories for both Ken Park and Kids but you got Harmony Korine to write the screenplays.
LC: Yeah Harmony did a brilliant job, but after he wrote Kids for me it to a year to raise the money, that was a tough film to finance too, just trying to find the money – and keep all the kids together because they had no money. Harmony was living with his grandmother, and I'd cast a lot of the roles and I was trying to hold everybody together so I made a couple of music videos for money to pay some of the kids rent. But in that time I had all these stories for Ken Park so I gave them to Harmony and I told him I could have four films here but can you put these together in one movie, and he made a brilliantly structured screenplay. So I've had the screenplay all these years, but when we made it I changed it a bit, we read it and there were some things that worked and some that didn't and I didn't like the ending so we changed the ending a bit.
MD: What was it originally?
LC: [laughs] The ending was a joke, I mean it ended on a joke, and after we went all that way through the film I didn't want to end it that way, and it wasn't a very good joke! But Harmony wrote both those screenplays when he was 19 or 20, and I truthfully think they're so good because they were the first things that he'd done, and he was really in a space where he could work with no distractions, and he hadn't taken any drugs yet.
MD: [laughs]
LC: Seriously! He'd never taken drugs, he wasn't a drug taker, and I think he's gotten a little lost since then but I got him when he was fresh, and I think you can see the screenplays are very well done, they're very clear, and there's certainly a talent there that will hopefully be rekindled.
MD: A lot of people have criticised you for your depiction of children in Kids and Ken Park, perhaps not realising that the screenplays were written by somebody of that age.
LC: Well that was the point, I started making work for myself when I was a teenager photographing my friends. My first book Tulsa was a photo-documentary of my friends over a period of nine or ten years, so it became like visual anthropology, I started that way so when I had the idea for Kids I immediately thought of it. When I did my first work people said it was from the inside, only someone from the inside could do this. So when I had the idea for Kids I thought it would be great to have some kid from the inside write this, do what I did years before, but I said, no kid can write. But then I met this kid who was in his last week of high school, and we're in the [skate] park, he sat down beside me and we started talking, and he told me he wanted to make movies, so a year later when I got the idea for Kids I thought of Harmony, so I called him up, and you know what happened.
And even though I had the ideas and the stories for Ken Park, Harmony was 20 years old so he was understanding the relationships on a level with them as an adolescent and I certainly think that was a big plus.
MD: Speaking of your photography, I've always felt that both Kids and Ken Park feel more like photographs than films, in that they're a snapshot of these lives. Has your history as a photographer made you more likely to strip away the regular movie structure and just make a picture?
LC: Well I've been making images so long I just feel so comfortable with it, it just comes to me naturally. Working with Ed Lachman, who's a great cinematographer, he did Erin Brocovich and Far from Heaven, he tells stories - and I can say this because he says this – he was inspired by my work, by Tulsa and Teenage Lust. So working with him is great. He knows how to make an image too, and he knows my vision – and I have a very clear vision – and I think that's why the film works, I really know what I want and I'm not out there flailing away. Maybe it takes a while to figure out how to get it! But I know what I want and Ed and I together probably have 70 years experience as visual artists so between us we should be able to figure it out and make this a visually exciting film.
MD: Well the shot towards the end of Ken Park, with Tate sitting on his bed with his grandfather's teeth in is one of the most disturbing images I've seen on film recently.
LC: [laughs] Yeah.....it certainly is.
MD: Moving away from Ken Park, Another Day in Paradise was the only time you've worked with anything like a star cast [in the shape of James Woods and Melanie Griffith] is that something you want to do again?
LC: Probably I will do that again, but I certainly had a baptism by fire on that film. I wanted to challenge myself, I'd only made Kids so I hadn't worked with actors and I wanted to do that, but it was a really difficult film to make, I wasn't in the best shape myself, I was still fairly chemically involved when I made it so it was hard. But I learned a lot, I learned about working with actors, and about working with Hollywood crews – you really have to teach them a lot, they have real cookie cutter rules and ways to do things, which is why all those films look the same and they're so boring. So it was really something but now I think I could do it much better, and I actually have a couple of screenplays that I'm close to doing deals on and they'll be with actors.
MD: I heard a rumour that you were meeting with Billy Childish to do a film based on his autobiography.
LC: Yeah, it's funny, I didn't even want to come to Europe, I was just so tired, but I wanted to meet Billy Childish. So I thought if I'm going to England I'm going to meet him because I'm a big fan, but I couldn't find out where he was. My girlfriend got on the internet and tracked him down and emailed him, so I met him and I told him I really liked his book My Fault – which I think is the best title for an autobiography ever – so hopefully we'll get that off the ground, it's a film I'd love to make, an English film, I'll come and make a film in England! That'll be fun.
MD: So the other films you're working on, are they also adaptations or are they original?
LC: Well I have an original screenplay called Syrup which is a comedy that takes place in the hip-hop world and we're very close on that, we're looking into casting it now so hopefully that'll be made soon, and then I have a drama based on a 1973 Jim Harrison novel, he wrote Legends of the Fall, but this is an earlier novel about a guy that comes back from Vietnam and he and his girlfriend and another guy go on a road trip across America so that's like a road movie. So I have a number of films I hope to make back to back, I've been busy.
MD: It'll be good to see you busy.
LC: Yeah it certainly will, it keeps me out of trouble! [laughs]
MD: Your films haven't received the best treatment on DVD, with Another Day in Paradise the only one you were directly involved with, do you want to be more involved with them?
LC: Well Another Day in Paradise I had to do. I was supposed to bring in an R [rating] on that film so to get my director's cut on the DVD I had to agree to talk about it, and then they censored me! Sons of bitches said I slandered some producer so they censored me so I've never listened to it but I know there are a couple of lines that are censored. I have been asked to do a commentary for Bully and Kids, and at some point I will, I just haven't gotten around to it yet, but I could just sit and talk about them they were really interesting experiences, so hopefully that will happen, but it's just so hard to get paid for these fucking films! You make them and then you never see the money, it's very difficult to beat them because they're all thieves.
MD: [laughs]
LC: [laughs] No! some of them are good thieves, nice kind thieves, I like a lot of them, but they're all thieves, what are you gonna do? But as you make more films you figure out how to keep a little bit of money for yourself.
MD: Is it frustrating getting a relatively small audience for a film you've put so much work into?
LC: I'm making little art movies, I'm not pandering to audiences, so it's just commerce, it's the name of the game. I'm just grateful that I get to make the films that I do, it's a struggle, but I'm pretty happy.
MD: So do you ever consider making something less controversial, something easier to get funding for, or are you committed to pushing the boundaries?
LC: Well I can do a whole lot of different things, Ken Park was something I had to do, I had to, but it's out of my system for a while so hopefully the next film or two won't be quite so difficult to finance or get distributed, but I have another script that I'm going to wait a couple of films before I try to make it. It's really a dangerous film and it really breaks a lot of taboos.
MD: Well coming from you that's a serious claim.
LC: [laughs] At the moment I don't know how I'm ever going to make this film but luckily I do have another one!
Quote from: XIXAXCaught Bully in my Netflix last night, and wow... Another great one. I saw "Kids" first, and it stuck with me for days. I can always tell if a film is powerful if I keep thinking about it for several days after viewing.
Larry Clark probably is a pervert, and he probably does have a thing for nekkid teens, but I have to say that it's probably one thing (of many) that makes his stories so believable. Real life with a bunch of really bad kids from messed up families.
That's not a world I'd want to live in, but I sure don't mind visiting for a few hours at a time. After seeing Bully and Kids, I guess I'd call myself a Larry Clark fan. I enjoyed both of them a lot.
I saw only Kids.
I wouldn't say Clark is a pervert, not even near that. I'd say he realizes the gap between brain development of nowadays teenagers and the amount of freedom they have. He is like a man who saw something extraordinary disturbing, and can't forget it. Like those old homeless people in movies that speak crazy things and then in the end everybody realizes he/she was right. Peer pressure is something people should take more seriously, it's like flu in kindergarten. Children can be so cruel. That boy that was having unprotected sex knowing he is HIV+, I wanted to strangle him while I was watching the film! He was so irritating! American kids start having sex earlier than kids in Europe, but sex is only a place where that irresponsability manifests. I can totally understand Clark's obsession, when I remember some kids I knew. And you wouldn't believe, but the majority of that kind of behaviour is something their parents would advise them as a smart thing to do.
After viewing Kids and Bully, it is no doubt that Clark should be thankful to the likes of Oliver Stone in giving subjects a "brutal honesty" where other filmmakers avvoid the truth of subjects by pushing the style. I just don't think Clark is anywhere near Oliver Stone. Clark's films are so brutal in sexuality and violence that they feel exploitive and opportunistic. Clark's realism says the world of youth is an orgy of sex and violence. Artistic license he has, but how interesting is to have these things everywhere? Clark needs to be more patient and understanding of how to get to the higher themes he is trying to convey.
Quote from: The Gold TrumpetClark needs to be more patient and understanding of how to get to the higher themes he is trying to convey.
yeah but then he wouldn't be able to masturbate to it, would he?
the dude's a filthy old soomka, and that's fine cos i like the chicks he hires. i don't expect much more from him.
Kids was kind of neat the first time I saw it because it was the closest thing to porn I had ever seen.
I saw Bully at the Venice Film Festival and almost laughed out loud during that part where the kids are sitting there in that living room and he cuts between shots of the disturbed youth and an Eminem video.
i saw him at a gas station yesterday -- he was driving a pontiac grand am.
Quote from: cowboykurtisi saw him at a gas station yesterday -- he was driving a pontiac grand am.
was he rolling on dubs...?
negative
Quote from: PQuote from: The Gold TrumpetClark needs to be more patient and understanding of how to get to the higher themes he is trying to convey.
yeah but then he wouldn't be able to masturbate to it, would he?
That's true. In times of loneliness, I've found Larry Clark movies nice substitutes to Cinemax soft core porn.
i hope ken park gets distribution because it makes kids and bully look like ernest saves christmas. i can just imagine some of the messages on this thread. you would go ape shit on some of the moral and ethical debates pertaining to this film.
i heard lions gate was going to release it at some point but i don't know anymore. it's been a while. it was playing at the toronto festival two years ago and maybe it's been shelved.
Quote from: socketleveli hope ken park gets distribution because it makes kids and bully look like ernest saves christmas. i can just imagine some of the messages on this thread. you would go ape shit on some of the moral and ethical debates pertaining to this film.
I think people would talk about it for about fifteen minutes before getting bored by the conversation. I don't know, maybe it's just because I didn't like it, but I don't think its morals and ethics are all that complicated.
Well, in spite of Larry's teen sex fetishism, I think his films are pretty great. I loved Kids and Bully and can't wait to see Ken Park.
Not to mention the fact that Harmony Korine is a guilty pleasure, too.
Quote from: Slick Shoes
I saw Bully at the Venice Film Festival and almost laughed out loud during that part where the kids are sitting there in that living room and he cuts between shots of the disturbed youth and an Eminem video.
funny, because eminem mentions "kids" in one of his songs (guilty conscience). i guess rarry crark is repaying the favor.
Quote from: XIXAXHarmony Korine is a guilty pleasure
How so?
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: XIXAXHarmony Korine is a guilty pleasure
How so?
maybe because the "art" of korinne really sucks but he(xixax) ..still feels compelled to watch it.....but its really embarrasing to admit it..... :wink:
Question for those who have seen 'Ken Park':
** SPOILERS **
The 3 scene near the end-- real or 'utopia'?
Quote from: Weak2ndActQuestion for those who have seen 'Ken Park':
** SPOILERS **
The 3 scene near the end-- real or 'utopia'?
Very real. 50% disturbing, 50% slightly beautiful. 1% unbelieveable.
101% Larry Clark.
I saw bully the other day, it was only now released in portugal, which is great because after seeing the piece of shit that was ken park, I was pleasently surprised. But I would like to have seen this one before elephant, I think van Sant borrowed some of clark's ideas, like mentioning rap videos, video games, absense of parents... but never really pointing his finger on anything as the cause of violence.
It's a good film, good screenplay and good acting. I hated some shots, like the one where they are on the front yard of the hitman and the camera was going round and round for two minutes. The relations between characters are very intelligently developed up until the killing. The ending is perfect, every kid is "fatalized", turned into a state of humiliation worse than death, like in mortal kombat.
Larry Clark to Direct Wassup Rockers
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) will direct Wassup Rockers, featuring street kids in leading roles, says The Hollywood Reporter.
Clark's script is set in South Central Los Angeles and follows a group of largely Hispanic teenagers who, instead of conforming to the hip-hop culture of their neighborhood, ride skateboards, listen to punk rock and wear their clothes tight.
Constantly harassed, they take buses to Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Hollywood, where they skate and catch the attention of the local rich girls, inevitably leading to trouble with parents, police and boyfriends.
Palm Pictures will distribute and produce. Production is expected to begin in Los Angeles this summer for a release next year.
I'm affraid his films will become all the same
Quote from: ElPandaRoyalI'm affraid his films will become all the same
...they all are......all about stupid phucked up kids and sh*t and all of his films are garbage.......now this is the guy that should headline the 'overrated directors' thread..
Quote from: NEON MERCURYnow this is the guy that should headline the 'overrated directors' thread..
I wouldn't say overrated 'cause I like his films so far. However, the last one I watched, Bully, had a lot of elements from both Ken Park and Kids and those seemed like very very similar experiences. Even still, Bully has great stuff in it.
i grasp 'to say the camera creates the photograph is to say the brush creates the painting' but i don't think that he had anything to do with why KIDS is his only good film.
Trailer for Ken Park if anyone's interested... Here. (http://www.cinemovies.fr/fiche_multimedia.php?IDfilm=2243)
Still no US release date.
Random Rules: Larry Clark
In which The A.V. Club asks its favorite rockers, writers, comics, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to shuffle and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping embarrassing tracks allowed.
The shuffler: Larry Clark, the photographer and director best known for the controversial 1995 film Kids. Since then, he's helmed Another Day In Paradise, the perverse Showtime B-movie update Teenage Caveman, the masterful Bully, and the largely unseen Ken Park. Clark's latest, Wassup Rockers, is in theater now
The Langley Schools Music Project, "Desperado"
Oh man, this is great. It's the greatest version of "Desperado" ever. [Recorded in 1976 and 1977, The Langley Schools Music Project collects the recordings of a Canadian school's children's choir singing arrangements of popular songs from the period. —ed.] I love that tune. I wrote a screenplay once—it was never done—in which I die and this little girl sings this at my funeral. That would be the best thing of all time. It's just so pure and innocent and a wonderful experience to hear it.
Dinah Washington, "Darn That Dream"
There's a very, very long saxophone intro, and I forget the saxophone player's name, but it's from a live album called Dinah Jams, and it's almost a five-minute tune. It starts with an incredible solo, then she kills it. She was one of our greatest singers. In fact, that's where Nancy Wilson comes from.
Sublime, "Santeria"
Sublime was one of the greatest bands ever. [Hums.] "Santeria," yeah, this is a great one. I get goosebumps when I listen to Sublime. I saw them once, just a great band. It's terrible, but it seems like some of the best singers die. Kurt Cobain was the best, and this guy was the best, and on and on. I don't think it's the heroin that makes them good. It's a tragedy.
Bob Dylan & The Rolling Thunder Revue, "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)"
This is just Dylan at his best, really great Dylan. The Rolling Thunder Revue was when he was really at his best voice. I mean, he kills those songs, and that might be from the movie Renaldo And Clara. I'm not sure. Which I think everybody should see if just to see Dylan at his wildest and his best, and his best voice. Dylan was very, very important to me. Probably my biggest influences when I was 18 years old were Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. Dylan said you could be whoever you wanted to be. You could do what you wanted to do, just do it. And Bruce was all about telling the truth and cutting through all the bullshit.
John Coltrane, "What's New?"
If I was on a desert island and could only have one CD, it would probably be Ballads. I probably listened to that record thousands of times. When I was in my studio in New York, where I haven't been in about three years, I would listen to it every day. I could really work with that. It's just one of the greatest records of all time, and they did a digital remaster a couple of years ago, and you can hear stuff you never heard before.
Fiona Apple, "Across the Universe"
I saw Pleasantville one afternoon in New York with my daughter, whenever that came out. My daughter is 20 now, so she was a young teenager, I guess. We watched the movie, and then during the credits after the film, there was "Across The Universe" by Fiona Apple and I fell out of my chair. I mean, it just completely knocked me out, and I ran out that day and bought the soundtrack. And also put a picture of Fiona Apple on my refrigerator. I actually just met her a couple of years ago and I told her how much I liked that.
typical that he would love a children's choir. (they are great tho) as for his funeral scenario, see: In America.
Sex education
As the director of films like Kids and Bully, Larry Clark has often been accused of shocking exploitation. With his new documentary, Impaled, he's even managed to shock himself. Stephen Applebaum hears why
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Larry Clark is used to his work shocking other people. It happened back in 1971 with Tulsa, a candid photographic record of his friends' outlaw lifestyle, and then again in 1983 with Teenage Lust. In 1995, scenes of (simulated) underage sex in his debut feature, Kids, fuelled outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. His last movie, Ken Park, as yet unreleased in the UK, contained actual male masturbation.
Impaled, Clark's 38-minute contribution to portmanteau art-porn project Destricted, now goes the whole way and shows a young man - selected from various lustful, or merely curious, hopefuls - fulfilling his dream of copulating with a porn actress. It is a disturbing work. Not because of the awkward, funny and downright messy sex between spacey porn star wannabe Daniel and a flirty fortysomething; but because of what Clark reveals about the pornification of the young men he auditions. Raised in a world where hardcore pornography is available, 24/7, at the click of a mouse button it is as if they are living in their personal adult movies. This time, even Clark was shocked.
"I was shocked and amazed," exclaims the lean and bearded 63-year-old, nursing a coffee. "This was an educational film for me, because I had no idea this was going on." When he asks the male applicants to disrobe for the camera, he discovers that most of them have removed all their pubic hair, just like porn stars. "It's so weird," he says bemused. "When you're a kid, pubic hair is the greatest thing in the world. Everybody loves pubic hair. You can't wait to get it. And these kids, very young kids, are shaving it off. It's like, what?"
The way they describe having sex is just as bizarre. "There's no mystery. You fuck, you pull out, and you come on the girl - that's the way to have sex. It's shocking to me. I had no idea, I swear to God. But it makes sense," he reflects. "If kids see that they think that's the way to do it." Consequently, anal intercourse is also high-up on their sexual desiderata, especially Daniel's. However, accidents will happen, and poor Daniel's fantasy turns into something resembling a porno blooper reel.
Impaled is quintessential Clark: a short-form expression of his artistic mission to show life in the raw. While his critics frequently accuse him of exploitation, he regards himself as a truth teller. Impaled is art, not pornography, he argues, "because I'm an artist and I made it and it works".
But is it really that simple? Even Clark asks himself whether he might actually be contributing to the phenomenon he is documenting. "I wonder if teenagers will see this and be influenced by the other kids," he muses at one stage.
The point is that since Tulsa, Clark's work, at least as he sees it, has been an assault on hypocrisy. When he was growing up in Oklahoma in the 50s, America was supposed to be a place of "Ozzie and Harriet, white picket fences, and mom and apple pie; there were no drugs in America, there was no alcoholism." Yet Clark remembers kids coming to school with black eyes from beatings by their drunken parents, and a girl in junior high school who was regularly sexually assaulted by her five brothers. Not even Life magazine talked about this side of American society, he claims. "So I always thought, 'Why can't you show everything? Why do all these things have to be kept secret?' So when I started working, my thing was, 'I'm going to show everything without the bullshit.' So I'm not afraid of what people think of what I do. Fuck 'em, I'm just going to try to keep it real."
Clark has led his life that way, too. He did not just observe the outlaw lifestyle of his friends in Tulsa, he was part of it. He took drugs, drove around the country with his girlfriend doing petty crime, and eventually wound up in prison for shooting a man while high. "I didn't kill him, but it was pretty crazy, man." Most of his friends from that time are now dead. "For some reason I just won't die," he says, laughing grimly. "I don't know why. It's like genetics or something. Luck."
I wonder how well Daniel will survive Impaled. He looks dazed at the end, perhaps even a little bit shattered. Certainly sex is not what he was expecting, poor dear. Clark rejects the idea that he was disturbed by the experience. However, "the realisation that Daniel has done this to Daniel, you can see that in his brain," he says, "going around, because it's not like he thought it would be. And he was really fantasising about it." So is Impaled exploitation or exploration? Personally speaking, the jury's still out.
Kid rocker
At sixty five years old, Kids director Larry Clark is the oldest teenager on the block. David Whitehouse hears him mouth off about critics, censorship and Tracy Emin...
Source: The Guardian
Larry Clark is angry. I feel a theme developing. "Fuck the critics" he spits. "Fuck the censors" he adds. Oh, and "fuck the police". Not forgetting "fuck Tracey Emin" either, but we'll come to that later. In conversation he might sound like what he is, a 65-year-old man with a deep, slow motion Oklahoma drawl frequently punctuated by temporarily lost trails of thought, but his words, like his films, are those of rebellious adolescence. And it's authentic - these aren't the noises of a man desperately trying to get down with the kids. He's not the uncle who "does the robot" at a wedding, has a spliff and needs carrying home with sick on his shoes by his embarrassed wife. Larry Clark is legitimately the oldest teenager on the block. Pension angst, perhaps.
Though he first came to prominence in the world of photography it was Kids, the film that crashed the 1995 Cannes Film Festival to the reaction Ronald McDonald might get clowning his way through the doors of Weight Watchers, that made him both the pre-eminent documentarist of American youth and itchiest scab on the arse of the arts establishment. The tale of a bunch of teens partying their way through New York City to the pied pipe of Telly, whose mission it is to deflower a pretty young thing unaware that he is HIV+, was one of the most controversial films in history. Underage sex? Drug abuse? Aids? The Waltons it wasn't. At the crux of its criticism was the allegation that the lingering shots of teenagers fondling each other through their underwear made Clark an exploitative filmmaker. A paedophile, essentially. To which he responds: "Do I exploit teen sexuality more than the tabloid newspapers who have pictures of famous young women getting out of a car with no pants on? No fucking way. Fuck the critics."
His next films, the brief mediocre fling with Hollywood that was Another Day In Paradise starring James Woods and Melanie Griffith in 1998 and the excellent Bully in 2002 also toyed with themes of teen violence, drugs and sex and helped to piss off conservative America yet more. But the fourth, the extremely graphic Ken Park, never even got released in the States after the censorship authorities there insisted on removing entire scenes (namely the ones where people that look like young teenagers have actual sex on camera) which Clark refused. This is just as well - without them the film could have been shown in the ad break between Corrie and The Bill.
Though he may refute that it actually is pornography, it certainly feels like it. Even the cover of the DVD, which you can import from Russia or France if you wish, features a fresh-faced whippersnapper doling out oral sex to an unseen lady friend. "Don't import it from Hong Kong though", he warns. "It says uncensored on it but they blur out all the screwing, and what's the point in that?"
His censorship is the one thing that actually shocks him. "I've been working my whole life to get an R rating," he says. "It's all to do with the MPAA [The Motion Picture Association of America], those cock suckin' mother fuckers. Let me tell you about the fuckin' MPAA. They are a censorship board run by the studios to protect their films. So they shit all over the smaller independent films like mine. This means we're allowed to watch Sharon Stone fuckin' the shit out of Michael Douglas before she stabs him, but I can't show what I wanna show. It's the most corrupt system in the world."
His new film, Wassup Rockers (produced, incidentally, by Sharon Stone) on the other hand has been given an R rating. It is the story of a group of Latino punks from South Central LA who eschew the prevalent youth culture of their surroundings - gangster rap, baggy clothes and gun crime - in favour of long hair, tight jeans and punk. In the face of potentially deadly peer pressure they look and act more like The Ramones than NWA. One day, in a fit of boredom, they head across LA to upmarket Beverly Hills where they encounter racist policemen, predatory fashion designers, trigger happy movie stars and sexy rich white girls with moody boyfriends. What starts as a gritty, if patchy, urban documentary ends as a loopy caper film as the boys tear through an affluent, alien neighbourhood on skateboards trying to return to the perverse safety of the ghetto. None of the cast are actors, but real street kids found by Clark. With its lengthy silences, indecipherable grunting and juvenile sex chat, it's a pretty accurate depiction of what it's like to spend any amount of time with a group of teenagers. And where Kids was youth and sex, and Bully was youth and violence, Wassup Rockers is Clark's take on youth and racism. One scene, where the Rockers are stopped by a cop in an affluent part of town because of the colour of their skin is taken from a real life encounter they had while out scouting locations. "All the cops in Beverly Hills are racist, everyone knows that," he shouts.
That his works still obsesses over the seedier, nastier sides of youth begs the question, does he think it's better to be young now or young then, when he was photographing himself and his friends back in Tulsa getting high and getting laid?
"The world now is a fucked up place to be growing up. I mean, we always had drugs and drink and things when I was in my adolescence, but now the world seems so much more dangerous. Aids. Violence. War. It's a fucked up place..." he nods, the memories of serving a tour of duty in Vietnam and being imprisoned for 18 months after shooting someone in the arm during a card game whilst off his napper on speed obviously not at the forefront of his mind. "But y'know what? It's still better to be young now."
Last year, Clark was asked to contribute a short film (no longer than 20 minutes) on the theme of sex to a series titled Destricted. Clark made Impaled. In it, he interviews a group of inexperienced young male porn stars, whom he naturally asks to disrobe. Choosing his favourite (a wholesome chap who would be more at home advertising Golden Grahams), he then asks him to interview a selection of female porn stars and pick one with whom to make his debut. He does - a woman 19 years his senior - and then Larry films them having sex... in a bright room, on a sofa, and with all the noises porn star style sex makes as the soundtrack. Close your eyes and it could be a film about a dog fighting a squid. It is clever, compelling, embarrassing and downright filthy. Plus, it comes in at 38 minutes... somewhat poetically, Larry broke the only rule.
It's been rumoured that Clark's next move is to film the autobiography of cult musician and artist Billy Childish. Like his movies, it would be heavy on sex - Childish being sex confessional extraordinaire Tracey Emin's ex.
"I'd like to film it. Apparently, Emin called Billy and said that if the film ever gets made she'll sue him. This is a woman who is not only an artist but is famous for a tent covered in the names of people she slept with. Including Billy's! Tracey Emin. What a stupid fucking..."
Larry Clark. Unapologetic, unorthodox, and occasionally unprintable. Censorship eh?
The kids stay in the picture
Larry Clark's photographs document the secret lives of teenagers - drinking, drug-taking, having sex. Shocking? Not according to their creator. "I'm just telling it like it is.'
Source: The Observer
Larry Clark is 65 years old. He looks his age except for the clothes he is wearing: baggy pants and a hip-hop T-shirt. He must surely be the oldest skateboarder on the planet. The morning I meet him at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair, his nose is runny and his voice is low and hoarse. He looks rough and sounds like he has been up all night doing the things he used to do in the good old bad old days of his youth.
'Got to bed at four o'clock,' he growls. 'Stayed up to watch the Superbowl. I was jumping up and down on my bed like a kid when the Giants pulled it off.'
Behaving like the oldest kid on the block is just one of the things that Larry Clark's detractors hold against him. That, and his continuing fetishising of teenage rebellion in photographs and films that often wilfully skirt the fraught subject of adolescent - and sometimes pre-pubescent - sexuality.
As a filmmaker he is best known for Kids, his debut feature from 1995. It launched the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, and caused a moral panic with its depiction of a gang of young urban teenagers drinking, drug-taking and having unprotected casual sex.
'Some people seem to think I'm some kind of pervert because I film and photograph kids,' he says, 'but just look at the work. It's real situations. It's about real life. Teenagers have sex, they smoke weed. I don't think I'm putting anything in there just to shock. I really don't.'
In Ken Park, though, his even more controversial film from 2002, he included a scene in which a young boy indulges in autoerotic asphyxiation. The shock factor, though, lies not just in the subject matter but in the style in which he portrays it. His camera has a tendency to linger on its subjects, their lithe, young, often barely clothed bodies lit with lush tones. One critic described Clark's photographic technique as 'drawing you into the moral void of gorgeously sensuous squalor'.
Clark, of course, sees it differently. 'A lot of adults see my work and go, "Oh this is Larry Clark's fantasy. Teenagers don't live like this,"' he says. 'But, hey, read the papers. All teenagers have a secret life and it's always darker than what their parents think. The thing is, the kids themselves always get it. They can always tell if it's real or not.'
Clark is in London for the opening of an exhibition of his most recent photographs, entitled Los Angeles 2003-2006. It's familiar turf, a record of the four years he spent trailing a bunch of young Hispanic teenagers who live in Compton, in South Central Los Angeles, which Larry refers to simply as 'the hood'. Mostly, they are the same kids who featured in his last film, Wassup Rockers, which came and went without much fanfare. The narrative, what there is of it, concerns the coming of age of Jonathan Velasquez, a baby-faced Latino who caught Clark's attention back in the summer of 2003, when he was just 14.
What did the Hispanic kids think of him, this old guy on a skateboard who walks it and talks it like a teenager? Were they initially suspicious of his motives? 'Never,' Clark says, shooting me a dark look. 'They accepted me. They get what I'm doing, too. The thing is,' he says without irony, 'if I wasn't cool I couldn't get within two miles of these kids.'
Clark is entertaining company, but it's hard to know what to make of a grandfather who still puts such stock in his street cred. Likewise his new photographs, which are saturated in colour but oddly drained of meaning. They are not reportage or photojournalism, but sit somewhere between a street fashion shoot and a series of well-taken snapshots. As seen through Clark's lens, Hispanic teen life in South Central looks neither as dangerous nor as transgressive as he insists it is.
'They're kind of like punks,' Clark says of the scrawny kids from Compton, 'with the tight jeans and painted shoes. They have a style that they call "dressing young". Basically, they wear the same clothes they wore when they were 12, but now they're 15 or 16.'
I'm tempted to say that Clark himself invented the 'dressing young' concept, but I let it pass.
There is something about Clarke that defies cynicism. He seems both street tough and oddly vulnerable, and seems obsessed for reasons he has no interest in exploring - except through photography - with the ever-shifting iconography of adolescence: the slang, the dress codes, the haircuts. It's anthropology of a kind, but it's all surface.
What is palpable throughout is the homoerotic undertow that is a constant in all his work. He speaks of Jonathan Velasquez's 'utter lack of self-consciousness', which is certainly on display in a series of images of the boy in bulging underpants. This is where the complexity lies in Clark's photographs, in the distance between their subjects' lack of self-consciousness and the camera's all-too-aware rendering of the same.
It was ever thus with Larry Clark, but the innocent faces and saturated colours of Los Angeles 2003-2006 are a long way from the blank stares and monochrome starkness of Tulsa, his first and most powerful book, published in 1971. It remains one of the most influential photography books of recent times, its raw imagery diluted for countless fashion shoots, its groundbreaking confessional style a catalyst for the work of younger photographers such as Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. I tell him how taken aback I was when I first came across Tulsa in the late Eighties. 'Well, that work was kind of scary and shocking to me when I first spread it out to look at it,' he says. 'I remember thinking, "I have either got to burn all the negatives and shoot myself, or go down to LA and try and get it published." It took a while to do that.'
Many of the images in Tulsa were taken in the mid-Sixties, when Clark was living what he calls 'the outlaw life' with his equally self-destructive friends, shooting methamphetamine, toting guns and having sex with various whacked-out girlfriends. The foreword reads, 'When I was 16, I started shooting amphetamine. I shot with my friends every day for three years and then left town, but I've gone back through the years, once the needle goes in, it never comes out.'
Was he aware at the time that he was creating a document that was both transgressive and shocking in its rawness? 'Well, I knew I was making groundbreaking photographs because I had never seen images like that before,' he says without hesitation. 'I knew in some way that I was photographing things that were not supposed to be photographed. Forbidden things. It just happened to be things I was doing myself as an 18-year-old. In a way, it's a record of my secret teenage life.'
By the sound of it, Clark had quite an unsettled and chaotic childhood, too. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in January 1943, he claims he was 'forced into the family business at 14'. His mother was a photographer who specialised in mother-and-baby portraits. 'I was this skinny kid who stuttered really badly,' he says, smiling ruefully. 'Basically, I had to go and make these babies laugh by acting silly. I'd put stuff on my head, make it fall off, mess around some and then snap a picture soon as the kid started laughing at me. That was my apprenticeship, man.'
When I ask Clark about his father, he falls uncharacteristically silent. 'Well, I didn't have a happy childhood. At all.' Was it violent? Abusive? 'Nah. I just had a lot of issues with my father, which isn't unusual, but it just seemed to fuck me up. I think I felt ignored. Unloved.'
He stares at the table for a moment, obviously uncomfortable. I am just about to move on to another subject when he says, 'I guess what I really felt was that I was hated by my father for no reason.' Did they ever work it out? 'No. Never worked it out.' Another silence. 'He's gone now. Lived until he was 83, but we never worked it out.'
It is hard not to see Clark's continuing obsession with teen culture as a reaction to his own upbringing. Likewise, the turbulent and occasionally self-destructive lifestyle he embraced as a young man. He was, he says, 'always a loner, running fast'. He served in Vietnam from 1964 to 1966 in a unit that supplied ammunition to the troops up-country. Even that experience, though, did not impinge on his outlaw lifestyle.
'Strongest grass I ever smoked was in Vietnam. Never took any damn photographs. I used to go into the villages and smoke opium with old guys who looked like Gunga Din. It was not a good time for me creatively.'
After the speed-shooting early-Sixties years recorded in Tulsa, he embraced the outlaw life even more wholeheartedly - or perhaps desperately. I ask him to define 'the outlaw life'. He sighs, though whether this is out of weariness and regret, or impatience at my line of questioning, is difficult to tell.
'It was just far-out stuff, crazy stuff. I had a girlfriend who was a prostitute. We had a racket together. We'd go around Oklahoma to doctors. Crooked doctors. She'd go in and give them a blow job and they'd write us some prescriptions.'
He laughs a hard, hollow laugh, and shakes his head. 'I ain't saying it was good or bad, it was just crazy. I didn't earn a dime from commercial photography because I couldn't get it together. I was out there on the battlefield a long time. A drug addict and an alcoholic.' How bad did it get? 'Real bad. Put it this way, when someone I knew would die, which happened a lot, I'd think they were one of the lucky ones. I honestly used to think I was cursed to stay on earth and make photographs.'
He returned to Tulsa a few years back to see if he could make another body of work on the same subject. The sheer scale of the methamphetamine epidemic defeated him. 'It's massive now, not just in Oklahoma but all over the country. And, it's grimmer. I wanted to do a film, too, but it was all just so dark and depressing. I couldn't find any hope.'
To Larry Clark's credit, there is always a glimmer of hope in his work, the fleeting chance of redemption. Even in Kids, supposedly his most amoral film, it's there, flickering.
For better or worse, Clark has created at least two signatures: the raw, unflinching imagery of the Tulsa photographs, and the meandering, observational, but seldom illuminating style of his films. And, I have to say, he is great company, one colourful anecdote rolling into another, his enthusiasm and unflagging self-belief a breach against all the critical flak he endures, and, indeed, wilfully incites. Is he utterly amoral? No. Is he often misguided? Yes. Then again, true obsessives often are.
Not a very flattering portrayal of the man, but it was a good read nonetheless.
Larry Clark is Remaking Neil Jordan's 'Mona Lisa'
by Monika Bartyzel; Cinematical
There's this little film made back in 1986 called Mona Lisa. Bob Hoskins starred as George, a man just out of prison who takes a job chauffeuring a high-price call girl named Simone (Cathy Tyson). As first, they're opposites who argue, but then they foster a friendship which leads him to help her out and get embroiled in a mess with the underworld. Michael Caine co-starred as an underworld boss, and Hoskins earned himself his only Oscar nomination.
23 years later, Production Weekly's Twitter feed reports that the film is getting a remake. Mickey Rourke will add another film to his ever-increasing roster and star alongside the radiant Eva Green. That should throw the whole relationship into another dynamic. Hoskins might be able to show the toughness, but he's no ex-wrestler and tough guy of Sin City. The big kicker, however, is the director. Larry Clark, helmer of Kids and Bully, will grab the directorial chair.
This could actually be awesome if Larry Clark doesn't go off the deep end with it.
Quote from: Stefen on May 11, 2009, 04:28:50 PM
This could actually be awesome if Larry Clark doesn't go off the deep end with it.
Yea, Larry Clark lives with the vision that only he understands the underbelly of society, but he's made a career out of obvious statements about society. He's a peephole filmmaker of our smut, but because that is all he has, he's becoming a lethargic Marquis de Sade. The problem is that he continues to try to out gratify his last film.
Still, I'm interested. I root for him because he lives on his own edge. Also, because Eva Green is in it. I have no such thing as a queen beauty in film to admire, but she's the closest thing for me. Thumbs up to Eva Green pushing the nudity envelope.
Quote from: Gold Trumpet on May 11, 2009, 05:52:44 PM
I root for him because he lives on his own edge age.
At glance, I read like that and thought, wait whaaa...
Quote from: Gold Trumpet on May 11, 2009, 05:52:44 PM
Also, because Eva Green is in it. I have no such thing as a queen beauty in film to admire, but she's the closest thing for me. Thumbs up to Eva Green pushing the nudity envelope.
YES! she's stunning.
Mickey Rourke smiles on 'Mona Lisa'
Actor to star in remake of '80s gangster pic
Source: Variety
Mickey Rourke has signed on to star in a remake of classic 1980s Brit gangster pic "Mona Lisa."
Rourke will play an ex-con who takes a job as a chauffeur for a high-class escort. Eva Green is in advanced negotiations to star opposite him.
Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson starred in the original 1986 pic directed by Neil Jordan.
Helmer Larry Clark ("Kids," "Wassup Rockers") is writing and directing the remake, which is being produced by Handmade Films with Handmade Films Intl. handling worldwide sales.
Lensing is set to begin in New York in July.
Rourke's deal was brokered by agent David Unger, Bill Sobel of Edelstein, Laird and Sobel and HandMade's Patrick Meehan.
'Kids' Director Larry Clark Gets Paris Photography Exhibit & 'Tulsa' Screening
Source: Cinematical
Photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark has contributed his imagery to some of the finest art institutions in the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Now the 'Kids' director can add the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris to his list with his first French retrospective, 'Kiss the past hello.' This special exhibit encapsulates fifty-years of Clark's artistic career, with over two hundred original prints (many being shown for the first time), as well as a first-time screening of his 1968 16mm film on teenage addicts, 'Tulsa' -- the precursor to his 1971 photography book of the same name.
LARRY CLARK IS STILL DANGEROUS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
By Erica Euse
via Vice
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Sex, drugs, and skating are notorious themes in the work of photographer and director Larry Clark. Since 1961, Clark has used his camera to capture the debauched realities of the teenage experience. He earned his reputation for documenting the lives of youth in the early 70s with the release of Tulsa, his controversial and iconic book of photographs taken during his drug-riddled adolescence in Oklahoma. In subsequent works such as his 1983 book Teenage Lust and his 1992 book The Perfect Childhood, Clark continued to document the beautifully bleak world of youth in American. Amid criticisms of his work being obscene and pornographic, his success only continued when he directed his first feature film Kids in 1995. The influential movie, written in collaboration with a young Harmony Korine, followed a group of teenagers as they fought and fucked their way through a summer day in New York City. Clark went on to make more incendiary films centered around adolescents, including Bully, Ken Park, Wassup Rockers, and Marfa Girl.
Now, the photographer and filmmaker is taking to the internet to share his work. The 71-year-old artist has just launched a new webstore offering eight original T-shirts that feature photographs of the boys from his 2003 film Wassup Rockers, the semi-documentary on a group of Latino skaters in South Central, Los Angeles.
I called up Larry to talk about this new foray into fashion, the internet, and his new movie, The Smell of Us.
VICE: How did your relationship develop with the guys from Wassup Rockers?
Larry Clark: They would tell me their life stories and I kept a diary. This continued for a year and a half. Every Saturday I would pick them up and take them skating. I wanted to make a film about these kids. When you see young Latino kids, you don't see them the way they really are. The first half of the film was their stories. After I made the film, I just knew the kids so well, I kept photographing them.
You seem to have become especially close to Jonathan over the years?
I knew Jonathan was such a good model that he kind of became my muse. I have been photographing him and filming him for over ten years now. I have an incredible body of work with him. When he was 16, he was having issues with his parents, the kind of normal teenage battles. His mother called me and said, "Can Jonathan live with you?" Jonathan came and lived with me and concentrated on music and I photographed him. He has a band in LA called reVolt. He just turned 25-years-old. He is a very serious young musician.
How did you pick photos to use for the shirts?
I have so many photos, I could make 100 shirts. I used five that I took and Jonathan, who is a quite a good photographer, took two of the photographs. I was trying to stay away from the well-known photographs that I have made. I am not quite sure what I will do the next batch of shirts. I never did this before, but I did let Supreme make two skateboards and two shirts. I made a deal with them where I would get half of the skateboards, which I gave out to kids in South Central. Collectors bought up the ones that Supreme sold, and you can find them on eBay for hundreds of dollars. It is kind of ridiculous. My board is all beat up and broken with stickers all over it.
Are you enjoying building your online presence?
Yeah. I am trying to keep up just like VICE is. I knew VICE when it was just a little giveaway magazine. It is interesting and fun. I started the website (http://www.larryclark.com) to put a film up that I made of Jonathan. I made another film two years ago, Marfa Girl, and the only way you could view the film was on my website.
What do you think about fashion designers appropriating the "dressing young"—tight-fitting, distressed menswear—that was seen in Wassup Rockers?
Ralph Lauren has a line now and it is all of, these clothes that are sewn and ripped, with words on them and stuff. Fashion rips off everybody; they rip off fine art. It's all about selling clothes, but they will rip off the artists in a hot jumping minute. It is just the way it is. What am I going to do?
You referred to your new movie, The Smell of Us, as the new Kids. Why?
It is about kids in Paris 18 to 20 years old. It is a very interesting film. I had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris in 2010. I would be in the museum hanging my show, and the museum would close. I would come in the back door, and I would have to walk through the back where all of these skaters were. It kind of reminded me of Washington Square Park in 1993. That is how it started referencing Kids.
Was the process of filming it similar?
As I make films, I always change things, make up things, and I am open to any idea that I get. I am 71 years old, so it was very difficult for me. When I was 50, I could have shot it standing on my head. It was difficult physically for me to keep up. Something always goes wrong with every film you make, everything crashes and burns, but that's when I am at my best. Then it is like a blank canvas, because if everything didn't go wrong, I wouldn't be in that place. I threw the script away and made up half of it. This film is the most personal I have ever made because I had to finish the film on my own. I am in the film as Larry Clark, and then I played two other characters when the actors didn't show up.
What other characters did you play?
There was one character, a homeless bum ex-rockstar. I played him with a beard. Then there is a scene with foot fetishes. I had a very good actor to play the role, but he called and said his doctor wouldn't let him travel. He had a foot infection, of all things. So I shaved off my beard. I haven't seene my face in 20 to 30 years. I cut my hair and dyed it. Just before the scene, I covered all of the mirrors and shaved my mustache. I didn't know what I looked like at all. I didn't know what to do, so I just did everything and anything with this kid's feet.
Was it shown at Cannes?
All of the producers thought this French film was a shoo-in at Cannes, because it is very well known, but it was rejected. Every one of my films has been rejected by Cannes. Somebody on the committee called the movie trash. Now this is the festival that wouldn't show Ken Park, a film that was an enormous hit in Paris. It made all of its money back in France alone. Now they didn't take The Smell of Us. They only took Kids because Harvey Weinstein had power that year. Pulp Fiction had won Cannes the year before, so he entered Kids. What an experience to see your first film on that huge screen... That was a highlight of my life. Calling The Smell of Us and Ken Park "trash" was kind of an honor too.
Why do you think they have that response to your films?
I don't censor myself. I am just showing it like it is. Life is rough, and it is not all happy endings. We all go through a lot and I am just showing it as I see it. I think a lot of people get upset with that. I think that is film at it's best when it may not have anything to do with the audience but they recognize it as true life. Cassavetes was able to do that. I remember in Faces when the star is having sex with Seymour Cassel and you just know her husband is coming home early from the office and he wants to make love to her. Seymour jumps out the window, and the husband looks at the wife and just says, "Why?" and she says "I don't love you anymore." We all know what that is like.
How do you feel about people calling your work controversial?
I think it's pretty amazing that even the Tulsa book that was shot in '62 and came out in '71 is still available and people buy it. People still find it dangerous and controversial. I think it's good to still feel dangerous after all of these years. I don't embrace the controversy; it just happens. I am just trying to show real life. All of my work throughout the years is about a small group of people who you wouldn't know about otherwise. You wouldn't know about my friends and I from Tulsa. You wouldn't know about these kids in the ghetto of South Central. You wouldn't know about the secret life of adolescents that adults aren't allowed in. When Kids came out, people said it was just some old man's fantasy. "That is not the way our kids are." Then all you had to do was read the newspaper for a few years and you saw that everything in Kids was happening in America. I am always a little early. Then the country catches up.
What else are you working on?
I just did a book for a clothing company in Japan called Wacko Maria. I agreed to photograph their clothes if they allowed the kids from Wassup Rockers to wear them. I am going down to Marfa, Texas, to shoot Marfa Girl 2 on August 1. We will put that out in the traditional way. I have a big show at Luhring Augustine running from June to August. It is photographs and collages that have never been seen before. I just started painting in Paris last year. When I was filming, I couldn't sleep and I can't meditate, it is too boring for me, so I started painting. So I am going to show two or three paintings. The show takes off from my first photograph, which was a portrait of my best friend, Johnny Bridges in Oklahoma in '61. I photographed him with my mother's Rolleiflex. I put it on the wall with a photograph that I took in Marfa of the star Adam Mediano, two years ago. It's kind of the same photograph. It is kind of funny. It has this beautiful light coming through trees. The show takes off from my first portrait until today. I am working on that as we speak. I have been busy. I haven't retired, even though some days I am so tired, I want to.
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A summer with the French kids of Larry Clark
via arte
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From 18th July, you can follow the story of the actors and script writer of Larry Clark's new film (which is taking place in Paris over the summer) in real time, thanks to ARTE Creative new web series "A summer with the French kids of Larry Clark".
"Whether they want to go on the roofs, or take a stroll underground, I'll follow them!" For seven weeks, Thomas Kimmerlin's filming plans will be based around the work schedule of Théo, Hugo, Diane and Lukas, the four main actors in Larry Clark's new film project, as well as that of S.C.R.I.B.E., the young poet from Nantes who's written the script. Over the summer, the filmmaker is working in Paris on "The Smell of Us", which focuses on the life of skate-loving teenagers.
Thomas Kimmerlin films "A summer with the French kids of Larry Clark", produced by Darjeeling/Morgane Production, which looks at the adventure of making the film from behind the scenes, thanks to weekly access to the five main lively protagonists and their daily lives. Filmed, edited and broadcast almost in real time, this new web documentary, broken down into 8 episodes of 6 minutes each, will be available on ARTE Creative every Thursday, to follow the progress of "The Smell of Us". The other challenge: Thomas Kimmerlin is filming it all on his own, with a "relatively light-weight" Canon camera, to ensure the authenticity of his exchanges with the five teenagers. "A summer with the French kids of Larry Clark", like "The Smell of Us", gives us an insight into a "small section of the Parisian youth, which refuses to grow up. They're also more naughty than I was at their age" observes Kimmerlin. "I'm having lots of fun around them".
^ Old news, not sure when this was posted. The whole web series is already online here (http://creative.arte.tv/fr/magazine/summer-french-kids-larry-clark)
Larry Clark's 'Marfa Girl' Heads To Theaters
via Deadline
Kids helmer Larry Clark circumvented traditional distribution when he put his latest film, Marfa Girl, online for fans to stream on his own website for $5.99 a pop. Thanks to Breaking Glass Pictures, he'll see the sexually charged West Texas-set drama hit theaters in limited release next year. Marfa Girl revolves around Adam (Adam Mediano), a directionless 16-year-old living in Marfa, and his relationships with his girlfriend, his neighbor, his teacher, a newly arrived local artist, and a local Border Patrol officer. The film won top honors at the 2012 Rome Film Festival and will open in a 10- to 15-theater run in the spring. "I think Marfa Girl is my best film or at least as good as any film I've made," said Clark in a statement. Breaking Glass CEO Rich Wolff negotiated the deal with Ryan McCombs of Spotlight Pictures.
you know how it's already been available, through that devil whispering from your shoulder. that's my radio code for this having been a torrent
thought about watching it many nights, and never got quite to it, for various reasons, but the beginning was strong. i watched the beginning and found it strong
i'm more likely to see this theatrically, which is odd, and i guess i like when people know they're in a place looking for certain troubs
I have enjoyed and/or been forgiving of Clark's work in the past, and I tried to really find a way to give this one a pass, but ultimately I just sort of hated it.
it's a challenging moment for my time and interests when a worry is confirmed
Kids was just released on blu-ray (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01MCTXCQ4?ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B01MCTXCQ4&ascsubtag=6385d02434a602b2ee14e8618d67d101&tag=bluraycom04-21) in Germany. Screenshot comparisons (http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/202221/picture:0)
A family living in Marfa, Texas attempts to pull themselves back together after a horrific tragedy. This provocative sequel to Larry Clark's film Marfa Girl, shows us a group of people ready to escape their current realities - no matter the cost. Gritty, unrelenting and powerful, auteur Clark once again delivers a bleak landscape of sex, drugs and boredom amongst the residents of a dead-end Texas Border town.Written and Directed by Larry Clark
Starring Adam Mediano, Drake Burnette, Mercedes Maxwell, Drake Burnette, Jonathan Velasquez, Indigo Rael, Jeremy St. James
Release Date - opens in New York at the Cinema Village and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Glendale November 2, 2018
Larry Clark & Jonathan Velasquez's short film A Day in a Life (2021) is coming to Mubi June 14th
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Paris. Gabrielle and Enzo, two teenagers from the same gang, meet in front of the school. Cigarettes, the affirmation of sexual desire and the discovery of new drugs punctuate their day. Each one, in his own way, celebrates or laments childhood that is slipping away.