Customer Reviews

Gummo

5 star:		(163)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(40)
2 star:		(31)
1 star:		(73)

 

 

Director Harmony Korine may or may not be the latest "enfant terrible," but he's certainly given us something to think about with "Gummo." He's given us about 90 minutes of in-your-face immersion into a culture that most of us only glimpse in "Cops" and other "reality" programs that deal with the hopeless, hapless people who make up the bottom strata of White America.
We suddenly find ourselves immersed in a culture where single moms huff glue with their teenage sons and their buddies and where boys hunt neighborhood cats with BB guns and sell the carcasses to a guy who supplies meat to Chinese restaurants. As the story develops, we learn the boys spend their cat money on glue and the services of a young prostitute who looks like Anna Nicole Smith with a lobotomy.
This movie is like a train wreck - at once horrifying and mesmerizing.
I disagree with an earlier reviewer who saw "Gummo" as an outrageous piece of elitism.
I think that charge misses the point. This is not some arrogant exposé of the quaint ways of the poor, it's a 90-minute tour of the self-perpetuating Culture of Stupidity that can be found on the fringes of every city and town in America. These are people who turn bad choices into a way of life because that's what their parents did and their parents before them. Yes, Korine packs the screen with enough geeks and freaks to populate a dozen circus sideshows, but his point is well taken. This is a strata of society that Hollywood ignores, except for the occasional cameo role in films like "Deliverance." It's a vision of a reality that we recognize instantly from our day-to-day experience, but which is carefully filtered out of the mass media.
Whether Korine has talent or promise in any convential sense of the words remains to be seen, but he's created a unique film that is destined to become a cult classic.
But, as an earlier reviewer noted, this is not a suitable date night substitute for "Casablanca" or "The Sound of Music."

If you describe this film to people, and tell them you like it, they'll think you're insane and disturbed. It's a documentary/collage like film about white trash. Some advertisements for the film have tried to portray it as a comedy, but it isn't. It's mostly vignettes from the town of Xenia, Ohio, where white trash and their values reign supreme. Cat killers (no cats were actually harmed), paying for sex with mentally handicapped people, white trash beating up chairs, and paint huffing are some of the attractions you'll see here. But Korine edits and films it in, dare I say, an artistic and interesting way. There is something going on here. This was an independent movie, but most indie movies are just quirky films that aren't that different than what mainstream Hollywood gives us. This is a real independent film. Korine films in 8mm, video, 16mm, and 35mm. He doesn't seem interested in crossover appeal with his work. He captures the despair and nihilism of these white trash denziens. And some of the images stick in your mind, like the kid taking a bath at the end eating spaghetti in a filthy tub. Korine has made only 2 features, but they are both certainly worth watching, and quite beautiful, in their own, strange way. This is a very good film....

Honestly, I don't know how to feel about this film. The formal structure of the film is brilliant. Korine uses a collage style that mixes film, digital video, home movies, and photos. He employs not a conventional linear narrational structure, but a more associational, non-linear logic that resembles poetry rather film. This idea of form has great potential, but I don't know that Korine fulfills that potential. Gummo is so reference-heavy (much like the poetry of T.S. Eliot) that it's almost impossible to understand all of the connections Korine makes and to understand the metaphors. Many of the images he uses (like Bunny Boy) have the potential to be symbolic, but in an interview on the special features of the DVD, Korine explains that like Bunny Boy and the title, Gummo, a lot of the images and references were things that he chose just because he liked them and wanted to see them in a movie. To attribute symbolic meaning to these things may be beneficial for the viewer as a personal exercise, and if an audience is affected by the associations they make on their own, that's great. However, I think that giving the credit to Korine just because he chose images he simply likes may be unwarranted.

I also think that Korine also uses a lot of shocking material for the sake of shock. Gummo is set in Xenia, Ohio (though actually shot near Nashville) and focuses on the poverty-stricken society that strives to exist in the aftermath of a tornado (although attributing the state of the town on the tornado seems like a red herring). So much of what the film depicts is pretty disturbing. We see kids who kill cats and huff glue, a man who prostitutes his sister with downs syndrome, and a girl who describes the sexual abuse she receives regularly at home, just to cite a few scenes. Most of the characters are violent, racist, and ignorant, and many of the actors are actually members of the surrounding community who are playing themselves. As a result, I sometimes feel like Korine is exploiting them as freaks. This especially concerns me in the scenes involving Ellen, the mentally disabled woman who is shown shaving her eyebrows off. I'm worried that Korine is somehow trying to benefit from the spectacle of this image, and the shock value it has, which I find cheap. I think Korine does a lot to shock his viewers and not much in the way of making us sympathize with his characters, especially those who are violent and racist.

Fans of the movie often defend Korine's intentions by arguing that he is attempting to show that although these people seem like lowlifes and freaks, they are still beautiful and interesting in their own right. I do agree that they are beautiful and interesting, but I don't think that Korine is responsible for giving us that. He is so busy showing us the gutter of humanity that when he does attempt to show us the beauty, it's buried under the hatred, violence, and abuse the characters subject each other to. Korine doesn't show us beauty overpowering the grotesque, though perhaps he attempts to. What we end up with is beauty buried under the grotesque. For that reason, I don't think the actual thematic content of the film lives up to the potential given by the form Korine has created. Each time I see Gummo, I walk away feeling pretty indifferent about the characters, like I haven't learned anything I didn't know before. I don't think anyone can presume to know what Korine "meant" by the film or if there was any greater intention at all. If there was, I think Korine's attempts to express it were ineffective.

I have just seen this movie, and I must say it is ambivalent. Very sick passages and ideas (wacko-kids from rural areas living out bizarre passions and experiencing strange situations), but the film has indeed very funny moments as well (e.g. the chair-squashing). There is no plot, nor is a plot intended. The surreal camera work, the "main" story being interrupted by rural persons talking about themselves (which is largely silly), the soundtrack containing grotesque songs at times (Death Metal, sick children choirs etc.) - all this reminds me a bit of Jim Jarmusch's "Permanent Vacation" (1982), an equally surreal film (if you liked Gummo, you should watch this!). The point I want to make here is: this is actually a MOVIE. Other reviewers have complained about a wrong picture concerning beautiful Ohio and about the film having no impact on them (funny then, why do they write reviews?). A cynical and surreal movie as Gummo is not a report - it is a point of view (or have you ever seen Terminators walking around in New York City?). This point of view may not be pleasing, nor elevating, nor relaxing - it forces one to think (even by being disgusting at times). And everything that makes one think, every such thorn in the flesh - is true art.

Another reviewer said Gummo was "unlike anything else of TV." My Holy Goodness, how right they were. If a lunatic was voted mayor of a town, Gummo would be the film depicting the townsfolk who call such a place "home-sweet-home."

We are introduced to the following: two awkward, gangly teens who kill cats and sell the rotting corpses to a local grocery store for a dollar per pound; three sisters who are about as backwards as anything this side of Appalachian poverty; a seedy brother who pimps his retarded sister out to teenaged boys; a sinister-looking young lady who, obviously being on the slow side, enjoys walking around the town singing "Jesus loves me this I know" as well as the always depraved "A-B-C-D-EFG-" song. Along the way, we also meet a young man wearing nothing but some swim trunks and a pink bunny hat who has the habit of urinating on cars driving beneath a local underpass. Oh, and for fits and giggles, we meet a group of rowdy mullet-styled rednecks who get their kicks from wrestling kitchen chairs to the point of exhaustion.

Sound like fun? This is a messed-up movie about twisted people living in the aftermath of a tornado that has swepth through their little slice of heaven. Nothing runs together smoothly as scenes and storylines come and go without rhyme or reason. Even the David Lynch and Terrence Malick crowds out there will feel disoriented in about 90% of this film.

A word of caution: if you begin to watch Gummo, you will have trouble turning away. I would liken it to a drug addiction that you know will harm you in some if you keep using it, but you end up alleviating such a warning by telling yourself, "Hey, just a little more. Just a little bit mo...."

Some movies are "so bad they're good." This movie is so disturbing, it's art. Anything that could leave that much of a lasting impression on just about anyone who's watched it clearly has some merrit.

Part of me wants to give it 5 Stars. From the twisted combination of bunny boy imagery and eerily-quirky folk singing in the intro, to the more memorable scenes of depravity, to the random low-fi (perhaps real) interludes depicting all sorts of nastiness, the film certainly does an excellent job capturing the emotion that is the disturbing side of low-class white America. As a youth, I spent a lot of time hanging out with the kids on the wrong side of the tracks, and a lot of its depictions ring true, and it truly leaves you nauseated, somewhat like a good roller coaster ride.

Another part of me wants to give it one star. The recurring theme of animal cruelty is in poor taste, and renders the film entirely unwatchable to anyone who's sensitive to that sort of thing. I could never share this film with my girlfriend, for instance, without owing her weeks of apologies and dozens of roses. Animal cruelty and cat overpopulation are realities of the White Trash world, but one scene would have sufficed... they really made it such a recurring theme that it was overly-sickening, and it detracted from the film immensely for me. Also, it really felt like everything that could have been taking place in this town was passed through a filter that only allows sewage to pass through. There was really no room made for the light side of humanity. In reality, the law of the Yin Yang pervades... there's only so much darkness that can exist before a spot of light manages to pop out. If Bunny Boy was the light, it was a rather dim one. Way too unabashedly nihilistic for my taste- to miss the seed of good that exists in people is to fail to capture the whole picture. If I were pressed to write a term paper for the positive elements of humanity showcased in the movie, I'm sure I could dig something out, but it was very deeply buried by a bevy of completely inexcusable characters.

Also, I didn't feel like the movie really delivered any point aside from "poor white people are really, really, really, really screwed up." Some kind of revalation or resolution might have been nice, or at least some sort of finality that placed a philosophical capstone on the whole exploration. As it were, it seemed more of an exPLOITation. The movie felt like it was always trying to one-up itself in terms of how shocking and depraved these characters' lives and actions could be. The more subtle scenes were far better than those that tried to shock you with brute force.

So ultimately I split the difference and decided on three stars. If you're adventurous and enjoy movies that give you a real kick to the gut and give you sociological nightmares (i.e. any fans of the IFC channel), this is a must-see. If you require movies to have some semblance of a storyline or if you find depictions of animal cruelty intolerable, then avoid this film at all costs.

I had heard a few things about the movie "Gummo" in the past: "really gross", "disturbing", "f#*$ed up", etc., and I guess I feel the same way, but the film holds a certain allure that can only be compared to looking at an accident scene: you don't want to look, but you do anyway. Aside from the killing of cats, retarded prostitutes, and wrestling of chairs (yes, that's in it), perhaps the most disturbing part of the film is that it's hard to tell who's acting, and who's not. The film plays like a documentary, and it gives the film a realistic feel that's really creepy. For instance, the scene in which the two ex-Jehovah's Witness brothers beat the living crap out of each other looks absolutely real. These guys are really hitting each other as hard as they can--no camera tricks can simulate this. The scene in which the kid with the weird head, Solomon, is sitting in his filthy black-water bathtub eating spaghetti and then drops his chocolate bar in the water, fishes it out and eats it, made me want to puke. This film will definitely make an interesting addition to your collection, but it's not something to watch for fun.

While I am no stranger to supposedly "art house" films, my experience with Harmony Korine's 1997 film "Gummo" made me question whether movies that fall under that rubric are worth the effort. Pretentious, inane, disgusting, and ultimately confusing in the extreme--"Gummo" embodies all of these traits and more. I don't think you can even call this a film, really, since there is no plot structure to speak of, little in the way of coherent dialogue, and no attempt to establish well developed characters. On second thought, these three problems describe most of the low budget junk I spend my days and nights watching, so perhaps Korine's effort is a film in some sense of the word. It was shot on film, for example. According to the blurbs on the DVD case, Harmony Korine was the chap responsible for writing the epochal "Kids," another gloom and doom filled film that taxes viewers' patience. I suspect this is the sort of movie you will either hate or dislike immensely; some people claim to love it, amazingly, although I am suspicious of their assertions because they never seem to say anything substantive to back up their supposed infatuation.

What you have in "Gummo" is a place (Xenia, Ohio), several white trash personalities, an African-American "little person," Harmony Korine himself, dead cats, glue sniffing, illicit use of duct tape, and a bunch of other nonsensical themes and people stuffed together in a series of disjointed scenes. Korine tries to draw some sort of comparison between what he shows us and a killer tornado that wiped out the town back in the 1970s, but it doesn't make any sense. The film opens with some kid wearing pink bunny ears (Jacob Sewell) ambling around on a highway overpass. Then we eventually meet two brain dead yucks, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and the wispy haired, repulsive looking Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who spend their days biking around town to the dulcet strains of heavy metal music. These two kids take their BB guns and shoot cats, sell them to the local butcher (!), and then use the proceeds to huff glue. Oh yeah--they also engage in some of the most uninspiring, insipid dialogue ever captured on film. Just in case you get bored with these two, we occasionally shift focus to Dot (indie movie queen Chloe Sevigny) and a couple of her bleach blonde compatriots. These girls jump around on a bed, experiment with duct tape, and stumble around town.

For some inexplicable reason, I continued to watch the film. More inanities unfolded, including a house full of drunken parolees smashing metal chairs, the whole issue with the old lady on a respirator, a girl with Down's Syndrome running back and forth, and Solomon's filthy experience in the bathtub replete with spaghetti dinner and chocolate bar for dessert. You even get to see Solomon working out in front of a mirror while he converses with his wacky mother. The movie begins as it ends, i.e. not making a whit of sense. Throughout the entire film I searched for meaning in the random jumble of images, confident that at some point Korine would reveal what he's really trying to say with "Gummo." Perhaps something about the plight of the rural poor in America? The mindless existence of lives spent in endless cycles of poverty? How environment coupled with a life shattering natural disaster can permanently damage the human spirit? Hey, I got it! This is a stream of consciousness film where we the viewer project our own interpretations onto the images! Yeah, right. Any of the above messages would have worked in a pinch if only Harmony Korine actually had an interest in saying anything of interest. He doesn't, "Gummo" doesn't, and we the viewer suffer as a result. There is nothing here beyond what you see, no depth beyond surface impressions.

I'm not going to waste anymore time talking about this atrocity. Watch it if you must, if you feel you have to explore the furthest reaches of banal cinema, but don't expect an epiphany. Trite dialogue, trite characters, and a plodding pace make "Gummo" the feel bad hit of the last ten years. If you care, the extras on the disc include a short commentary/interview with a rambling, incoherent Korine that sheds absolutely no light on the film. I would have been interested in discovering the origins of the film, why Korine thought this was a good idea. My guess? He ingested to many paint chips as a child. Don't say you weren't warned.

If you're adventurous in your movie watching you'll at least respect Gummo and you might even come out truly inspired. I've never seen a more original film. Godard, Bunuel, Peter Greenaway and a few others have probably done some things that were just as original but not more so. But that's not to say it's some dull art film that you have to research to understand. Far from it. Gummo is a punch in the face. It's about real people and real life. Kids do sniff glue and kill cats and rednecks do tear stuff up when they get wasted. They always have. I'm almost 30 and they certainly did in the 70s when I was a kid.

Gummo takes realism to whole new level but it's not just a nihilistic rant. It's a sort of collage of rural, white lower-class survival. Of course it's not all pretty, and a lot of it maybe just a little too ugly for some, but there is beauty too. And I think the real beauty is that nobody's dreaming of a better life. People go around dreaming of a better life all day in Hollywood movies. In real life, most people try to make money so they can eat and have a little fun. They dream on the side.

Gummo is the film American Beauty wished it could have been.

I bet if most of the people who found Gummo disgusting watched it a few more times they'd change their minds about it. It's really not that bad: certainly not the Faces of Death meets Pink Flamingos that some people make it out to be. In fact, much of it is downright sweet! I challenge anyone to hold up those scenes in Gummo they consider disturbing alongside any handful from, oh, Raging Bull (to pick one of any hundred "acclaimed" films). If anyone really thinks a few fake dead cats are harder to stomach than the deluge of violence in that film, something's very wrong. Maybe we've gotten too used to seeing horrifically ugly images rendered innocuous by style.

I wasn't familiar with all the brouhaha surrounding Gummo when I caught it late one night on IFC. I had no idea that people like Werner Herzog and Gus Van Zant were calling it the harbinger of a cinematic revolution or that most critics thought it was the movie equivalent of anthrax. I was able to be completely objective and, in all honesty, I was deeply moved.

Here's how I see it. Gummo is about a segment of the population that (I would imagine) most film critics haven't (unlike Korine) spent much time around, and he never throws those folks an ironic, self-referential bone. You think any minute the film will drop the sincerity and settle into John Waters territory but it doesn't. Instead it grabs you by the scruff of the neck and says, "Watch this mentally retarded girl run back and forth, back and forth. Watch her gleefully shave off her eyebrows. You expect her to be wrenchingly pathetic or sublimely noble, right? Well she's neither. She's a human being, and she's having fun." Those are just two beautiful, tender moments out of many.

Is it high art? No. But what movie is? Maybe The Battleship Potemkin and a handful of others approach high art but let's face it: most movies, from The Godfather to Tommy Boy, are really just entertainment. Gummo might provide a few more jolts than your average entertainment does, and, yes, it's probably a little indulgent at times, but overall it's just a sincere, brave little movie.