Harmony Korine was just 24 when he made Gummo (and already had seen his script for Kids filmed by Larry Clark). The movie created a stir but the critics were mostly hostile. Yet the movie has emerged as a cult favourite, and rightly so.
Filmed around Nashville but set in Xenia, Ohio, site of America’s worst ever tornado once upon a time, this is an impressionistic, poetic, absurdist, punk collage of teenage enervation — a country cousin to Kids, without the melodramatic fix which cheapened Clark’s film.
Picking out half a dozen youngsters, most of them at a dead loss, one way or another, writer-director/enfant terrible Korine takes off with the tornado idea to twist from cinéma vérité documentary footage to improvisation to pre-scripted material, often within the same scene, surfing between video, film, super-8 and still images, throwing Heavy Metal, punk rock, Bach, Buddy Holly and mumbled, confessional doggerel into the mix. The result is breathtaking, provocative, and often repellent, but somehow vivid and vital in a way few movies manage. Big props to French cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier (Les amants du pont-neuf) who took a chance on Korine and went all in.
Content Considerations: Animal cruelty; drug & alcohol abuse
Staff Pick: Epiphany
Gummo is one of the most repellent cinematic efforts in recent memory.
Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
No conceivable competition [this year] will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Korine’s debut feature.
Janet Maslin, New York Times
Media Partner
Harmony Korine
Nick Sutton, Jacob Tummler, Linda Manz, Chloe Sevigny
USA
1997
English
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Credits
Screenwriter
Harmony Korine
Cinematography
Jean-Yves Escoffier
Editor
Christopher Tellefsen
Production Design
David Doernberg
Art Director
Amy Beth Silver
90s, Baby!
Ten years. 11 weeks. 90 films from the 1990s. This summer, 90’s Baby! takes a deep dive into a defining decade of cinema.
Casino
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Ghost in the Shell
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La Haine
This angry French thriller about alienated kids (a skinhead, an Arab, and an African) in the working class outskirts of Paris plays like a cross between Do the Right Thing and Mean Streets. French cops turned their backs on the red carpet at Cannes.
Crash
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Trainspotting
Danny Boyle's blistering movie was a sensation in 1996: a kick in the teeth of old school British kitchen sink realism, it fearlessly transformed the dire circumstances of Edinburgh heroin addicts into an experience by turns exhilarating and devastating.
Fargo
Have the Coen brothers ever made a more satisfying movie than Fargo? This grisly comedy pits one of cinema's most pure-hearted cops (Frances McDormand's pregnant cop, Marge Gunderson) against the machinations of weak and mercenary men.
Lone Star
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90s Mystery Movie + Trivia Night
And now for a shot in the dark... We're not announcing the Mystery Movie in advance, so you'll have to take a leap of faith. We can say it was released between January 1990 and January 2000, and it's not already showing elsewhere in this series. As an added enticement we're going to throw in a 90s movie trivia night with your ticket — plus prizes!
Princess Mononoke
A mystical fight between humans and the Animal Gods of the forest. Ashitaka, the last prince of a dying race, struggles to find a way for both sides to co-exist. But the fighting only becomes more and more bloody and all hope seems to be lost…
Gummo
Harmony Korine was just 24 when he made Gummo. It's become a cult favourite as much for its singularity as anything else: it's a strange, misshapen beast, a slice of beat poetry translated into experimental film.
Jackie Brown
Take half a dozen characters who know they're in a fix, and give them half a million dollars to fight over. Tarantino's crime movie (his best) transcends genre in large part because in Pam Grier and Robert Forster it gives us people we truly care about.
The Big Lebowski
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