Gummo

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

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