Mister Lonely

[Ghostboy]

I totally fell madly in love with this movie.

[for petes sake]

This looks great! 

[w/o horse]

I totally fell madly in love with this movie.

Agreed.

[squints]

so did you go see it or what?

[w/o horse]

Yeah I saw it with the Q&A.  I feel like if you see the movie and you know me, or like have maybe read some of my posts here, you'll know I absolutely loved it.

Three things about the movie I really liked:

1a.  Korine retains his visual intensity.
1b.  Demonstrates emotional maturity.
1c.  And is, actually, more imaginative.
2.  The narrative is strong and vibrant, brave, mesmerizing, a little mysterious, and completely honest.  There is a close connection between the narrative and the protagonist and it comes off as very authentic.  I know there have been strong accusations of Korine being a filmmaker dilettante but if he once was he clearly isn't now.  I don't think he ever was.
3.  The scope of the characters.  He's always been really good at this too.  In a more traditional form this means an intimate look into a broad range of feeling.

[cinemanarchist]

We are opening this at the Magnolia here in Dallas and we have a trailer for it playing before Baby Mama. I'm not sure how Harmony would feel about so much laughter occurring every time "Michael" spoke. I guess this won't be his crossover hit with sorority chicks and soccer moms...maybe next time. 

[MacGuffin]

The Return (and Reform?) of Harmony Korine
By DENNIS LIM; New York Times

HARMONY KORINE catapulted to fame as an enfant terrible, and for a few years he played the part to perfection. He was the young skateboarder turned wunderkind screenwriter behind Larry Clark's 1995 sensation, "Kids." At 24 he directed "Gummo" (1997), about glue-sniffing, cat-killing teenagers in a Rust Belt backwater. Most critics hated its junkyard, freak-show aesthetic, but it spawned an instant cult, with devotees including Werner Herzog, who became a mentor and collaborator, and Gus Van Sant. Mr. Korine's next film, "Julien Donkey-Boy" (1999), inspired by his schizophrenic uncle, continued the gutter-punk provocations.

But after that he largely receded from public view. Now 35, having dug himself out of what he called "a black hole," he has finally made another film, "Mister Lonely," a sweetly cockeyed fantasia about a colony of celebrity doppelgängers and a troupe of sky-diving nuns. Over coffee during a recent trip to New York — he now lives in Nashville with his wife, Rachel, not far from his childhood home — this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.

"I could never live here again," he said. "Too many ghosts."

Those ghosts, and the process of exorcising them, account for the long silence between "Julien Donkey-Boy" and "Mister Lonely," which had its premiere at Cannes last year and screens at the Tribeca Film Festival this week before opening Friday. As he tells it now, the Harmony Korine of the '90s was not just a precocious upstart but also a thin-skinned kid.

"In my own distorted view of things I thought people would be championing me," he said. "Or I thought they'd say, 'At least he's not making the same films as everyone else.' "

He vividly remembers Janet Maslin's review of "Gummo" in The New York Times, which proclaimed it "the worst film of the year" in the first sentence: "I got a call from Herzog, who was like, 'This movie is now destined to live forever.' "

Even then, he said, he realized that it was partly his youthful hubris and pranksterish humor that made him such a tempting target. "It's one thing to understand it intellectually," he said, "but another to live through it."

Mr. Korine's stunts grew stranger and more brazen. His awkward appearances on "Late Show With David Letterman" bordered on performance art. (He was eventually banned from the program, reportedly for pushing Meryl Streep backstage.) He started work on a video project called "Fight Harm," which involved goading strangers into beating him senseless. That endeavor landed him in jail and in the hospital.

"I thought I was making the greatest comedy," he said. "At the time I really felt like that's what I was on earth to do — get beaten up."

The magician David Blaine, one of Mr. Korine's closest friends, said: "Harmony's a guy who seeks truth. For someone like that, when the world becomes artificial, you start to hide from it."

At some point, Mr. Korine said, "I lost interest, not just in films but in life. It was never the intention to become the center of attention. The people around me, the social stuff, the narcotics — it was just like, what the hell happened?" He seemed to be cheating death, and not just with drugs: he survived two house fires, first in Connecticut and then in Queens. "The first one I don't know what happened," he said. "The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking."

He moved to Paris, where his friend, the fashion designer and cinephile Agnès B., put him up in a studio apartment. But he didn't speak French, and the isolation was not conducive to recovery. "It was weird to be in a place like Paris that's so beautiful and be falling apart," he said. (His memory of that time made its way into "Mister Lonely," in which the character played by Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson impersonator adrift in Paris.)

He realized he had hit bottom, he said, when he was eating a gyro and bit into what he thought was a bone. Annoyed, he took it back to the vendor — who, he said, "was like, 'That's not a bone, it's your teeth.' I was rotting from the inside out."

Mr. Korine then spent some time with his nomadic parents, who now live in the jungles of Panama. During an interview in Cannes last May he recounted a turning point in his slow climb from the abyss:

In Panama, he befriended a cult of fishermen called the Malingerers, who were trying to find a fish with gold scales. After a few months he got into an argument with the cult leader — he thought they were living a lie — and as he was leaving, a fisherman's wife handed him a dog leash. "She said she was walking the dog. It was an invisible dog."

In New York recently he offered further details. After he moved to Nashville, "I mounted this leash on the wall and I heard it bark," he said. "I swear to you. Something at that moment just felt right. I know it sounds weird."

It may be useful at this point to note that Mr. Korine's mythomania has always been central to his art. "I don't know if that story's true," Mr. Blaine said. But, he added cryptically, "The real story about Harmony and his life is more mind blowing than any story he could ever make up."

In Nashville, finally clean, Mr. Korine mowed lawns and did odd jobs. "I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life," he said. But eventually the images in his head returned. "The story always comes from pictures I want to see," he said, and this time they included nuns falling from planes and a Michael Jackson impersonator on a child's bike.

"Mister Lonely," which Mr. Korine wrote with his younger brother, Avi, shares with his other films a nonjudgmental fascination with outcasts. The impersonators, unwilling to face the world or themselves, exist in an illusory Neverland. "There's an inherent drama in people who create their own utopia," Mr. Korine said.

Mr. Luna prepared for his role by studying with a Michael Jackson impersonator in Mexico City. To test himself he performed outside the Notre-Dame museum in Paris. "I danced for two hours and made seven euros," he said. (He was convincing enough, he said, to fool Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams, who was staying at the same Paris hotel. "He came up to me and said, 'Hey Mikey, how ya doin'?' and was really annoyed that I wasn't Michael.")

"Mister Lonely," apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine, comes with a ready-made back story — the rehabilitated addict, the maturing artist — which should not be mistaken for a master narrative. "I definitely didn't want the film to have a bleak worldview," he said. But he isn't prepared to lose the bad-boy mantle.

"I think the next one will be more provocative," he said. "Otherwise life just gets too boring."

[bonanzataz]

one of those movies that while watching it i wasn't sure if i liked it (unlike gummo, which i loved from the first frame). but i'm dying to see it again, so that means it's probably really good. it's actually a pretty heartbreaking film.

saw it at the international film festival of boston and the q&a was the most awkward q&a i've ever been to. even korine seemed to be a little weirded out.

[Ghostboy]

Go see my movie at IFFB! Shorts block three!

[bonanzataz]

i can't. finals. i'm shooting my new movie now and tomorrow i'm writing a paper on female sexuality in the fucking wicker man. remake.

...what time is it?

EDIT: yeah, it's playing at the theater a block away from me today and tomorrow. i'll try to make it.

[MacGuffin]

Harmony Korine's back with 'Mister Lonely'
Korine won't go into detail about his eight-year hiatus or about his new film, a far cry from his earlier work.
By Mark Olsen, Special to The Times

Harmony Korine burst onto the independent film scene in the late '90s as the twentysomething enfant terrible who wrote the screenplay to the controversial "Kids" and went on to direct the purposefully modulated provocations "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy." Then he seemed to vanish into a cloud of drug rumors, transient living and alleged projects.

It was as if he had come to destroy cinema, and in the process nearly killed himself.

After an eight-year absence, he's reemerged with a new film, "Mister Lonely," which last year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is set to open in New York on Friday and Los Angeles on May 9. Full of quiet grace and spiritual transcendence, "Mister Lonely" seems far removed from the carefully calibrated grotesqueries of Korine's earlier work.

He is, in many respects, a changed man, if not a more conventional filmmaker. Korine, 35, lives in Nashville, where he grew up, with his wife. In the last decade, he says that he's worked as a lifeguard and bricklayer, lived through two house fires and spent time in Paris and with a Haitian voodoo tap-dancer in Baton Rouge, La., and also with a cult of fishermen in Peru.

It sounds like some scruffy art-rock rendering of Mark Twain, but are his journeys fact or some allegorical reimagining of years of drug addiction and emotional malaise? "What's the difference?" he said. "Whether you believe me or whether it's the truth, what does it matter? Everything's just a story. It's all a story."

New direction

Onetime poster boy for New York's art-fashion-music-film nighttime demimonde, Korine couldn't help but have a chuckle at finding himself on a recent Sunday at a sun-dappled table poolside at a hotel in Beverly Hills, munching on French fries and gulping coffee.

The setting does seem a far cry from the underworld phantasmagoria he explored in his earlier films -- out-of- control teenagers in "Kids," Rust Belt glue-sniffers in "Gummo" and the boundaries of mental illness in "Julien Donkey-Boy."

Taking a different tack, the Paris-set "Mister Lonely" follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who is befriended by a woman who dresses as Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton). She invites him to live among a commune of celebrity impersonators in the Scottish Highlands.

In an unconnected parallel story, nuns in Panama discover they can skydive without parachutes and land unharmed.

Korine has referred to the relationship between the two narratives as "poetic punctuation," and he has no interest in explaining his films. Rather, he prefers the disjunctions and dissonance that come from not knowing, like a punch line with no joke attached, what he has called "a perfect non-sense."

"Everyone always takes so much time trying to explain things and set things up," Korine said. "But I like the idea of just feeling things, letting it go through you. I don't understand why everything has to be explained or why everything has to make sense, or everything has to say something, because it doesn't."

Slowing down

It is easy, though, to read "Mister Lonely" as a symbolic autobiography of Korine's lost years and his struggle to rebuild himself with a healthier identity and self-image.

"I try not to get into so much detail," he said of his time away from filmmaking. "A lot of it's kind of blurry anyway. Obviously there's things I'm not really going to talk about, but for the most part in those years it wasn't much more than I had a desire to just leave, to turn my back on everything and lead a different kind of life.

"I enjoyed narcotics, but that was nothing more than the fact I just liked slowing down time," he continued. "At that point in my life, with so much going on around me, it was nice to be able to slow down the voices and the noise. But there were a lot of other things around it."

Korine's father, Sol Korine, is a documentary filmmaker who once chronicled the Deep South, following moonshiners and folk musicians in projects made for PBS. (Sol Korine also worked on "Mister Lonely," as did Harmony Korine's mother, brother and wife.)

Harmony Korine recalled with delight how, following his father on trips as a boy, he met goldfish-swallowers and fire-breathers and spent summers traveling with carnivals and circuses. The impressions went deep, informing the very root of his own storytelling.

"There was an energy," Korine recalled, "a chaos and a strangeness that I understood innately; it felt like I was home. And in some ways everything I do now is to try to get back to that sort of feeling. I always liked that part of America the most, that crazy America where things are seething, everything is incongruous, it seems anything can happen.

"There's magic under that tent."

[Reinhold]

thanks, mac. i hadn't really been considering seeing this until i read this.

[w/o horse]

There's a certain moment with Herzog that I won't describe in detail, but Korine says that when the moment was happening he was away doing something else and he turned around to see Herzog doing this thing and he wondered what was going on.  Herzog said to him "Something magical is happening.  Get the camera on me quick."

In case anyone else needed further incentive to see the film.  There's also unexpectedly exciting and intense aerial cinematography.

[JG]

yeah it really is a special movie. here is one that i had anticipated for a really long time, so, like bon, i wasn't sure what to make of it at first. in some ways it was exactly what i expected and in other ways not at all. but it hasn't left me alone since i saw it a few weeks ago, the kind of thing that stops meaning something the minute you try and explain it. i won't. i'll also refrain from saying that this is a huge leap forward for korine in fear of doing a disservice to gummo and julien donkey boy, both of which i saw again in theaters recently and realized how much i loved. he definitely does things here that he wouldn't have done then, but maturity seems like too easy a word. i'm just really grateful to have him around. one of the best of the year for sure.

[pete]

I saw it.  some moments in the middle dragged for me.  some of the images didn't seem particularly odd or truthful, aside from the fact that people were doing things in weird costumes.  It felt like Korine milked too much of the premise without developing much emotion to go with it.  the scene with the eggs was great though. very very moving.