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
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
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.
Lessons of Darkness
Werner Herzog's unforgettable documentary reveals the unfolding disaster of the Kuwaitian oil fields in flames in 1991 as a sweeping inferno of mesmerizing power.
Beau Travail
Inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claire Denis' transfixing Beau Travail is set in East Africa. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin).
Three Kings
George Clooney headlines David O Russell's bold, brazen attempt to get to grips with the immediate aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, as 4 US soldiers try to liberate a missing shipment of gold amidst the chaos and carnage.
But I'm a Cheerleader
Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is the perfect All-American Girl, or so she thinks. That is until she’s shipped off to conversion therapy. This pitch black comedy is wrapped in a saccharine bow, featuring the icon herself, RuPaul, as a conversion counsellor.
Magnolia
This deeply personal 1999 California opus is ripe for rediscovery. Mapping the emotional traumas of half-a-dozen major characters as they crisscross the San Fernando Valley in search of either recognition or reconciliation, it's PTA's riskiest gamble.
Election
Tracy Flick (Reece Witherspoon) is running for Student President, but Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) has other ideas... This remarkably sour millennial comedy from Alexander Payne (The Holdovers; Sideways; The Descendents) hits twice as hard today.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai
Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is an assassin, but he's also an existential loner who adheres to his personal code. Despite the thriller trappings, this is really a lampoon of that genre, and a melancholy reverie for the cultural melting pot we call home.
The Straight Story
David Lynch goes a different direction in this linear Midwestern about a septuagenarian (Richard Farnsworth) who drives nearly 400km on a lawnmower to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton).
90s Surprise Film
The 90s movie we have all been missing... Join us for a celebratory wake for this year's 90s, Baby series! What you will be seeing is top secret (no, not Top Secret!, that was 1984) but it will be at least 26 years old and it will be new to this series.
The Wind Will Carry Us
Kiarostami's dry comic masterpiece follows a Tehrani film team's thwarted attempts to document a traditional Kurdish funeral... Trouble being, there's no one to bury, and, worse, virtually no cell service...
Fight Club
1999 was a very good year for movies, but nothing captured millennial angst quite so vividly as David Fincher's bruising black comedy about what it means to be a man today. This modern classic does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction.