Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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95 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Like nothing you've ever seen on TV, May 27, 2003
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."
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33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
There's something about Gummo..., June 14, 2006
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....
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34 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The most hateful piece of elitism I've ever laid eyes on., January 7, 2003
In a time when the film world is filled with art-house geeks(myself included) and resentment for the Hollywood conglomorate is abundant, there are films like this that seem to come out of that very hatred for the system. Harmony Korine is one of those angry geeks too, but all he knows how to express is anger and hatred towards, well, everything inside and outside of his films. After writing the screenplay for the controversial film "Kids" at only the age of 19, he goes on to make his first feature, "Gummo", a pseudo-documentary presented in a series of disconnected vingnettes that pretends to comment on how life in Ohio is once all is lost by a series of devastating tornadoes. It enraptured film artists like Werner Herzog and seemed to create a small fanbase for Korine. He would later go on to make America's first Dogma 95 film, "julien-donkey boy". Many have said "Gummo" will digust and disturb but also mesmerize and provide profound artful insight into the minds of all that see it. Sure not everything is made for everyone, but there's a place for everything and all things should be looked at. I tried to keep this in mind while watching "Gummo".After having seen it, I've come to the conclusion that what it really is is pure angry elitism, distancing itself from the characters in the film by indirectly poking fun at them, and distancing itself from the audience by stating it's superiority to those who fail to understand it. First of all, Harmony Korine admittedly didn't attend film school, but perceives himself to know everything about the art of film production. He claims to "change the way" we see movies. What he really ends up doing is spitting in everyone's face. There's this underlying pretense that says because stupid Hollywood films are glossy and sound really nice, it's artful to go in the opposite direction. Consider the scene where the sisters rip electric tape off of their nipples(what's being said here?) and they bounce about on the beds to Buddy Holly's "Everyday". Korine then cuts to one of the girls dangling her tongue about erotically with the music no longer being sung by Buddy Holly, but by a terribly recorded version of the song by the cast members that's not only barely audible, but irritating to the ears. Watching this sums up the entire idea of the movie, that in order for it to be artful, it has to look and sound really ugly. Intelligent or insightful? On what? That beneath the surface of a perfect world, the world really looks like the sinkhole in "Gummo"? Oh dear, I've learned a lot from your "life experiences" that only YOU know about. Idiotic, pretentious and self-aggrandizing? Most certainly.
The final message of "Gummo" pretty much says in no uncertain terms, that if you are poor you are a circus freak. If you lose everything to a tornado, you'll want to kill cats and sell their dead bodies to sniff glue. If you have no money, you and your children will turn into white trash and attack boys dressed in rabbit suits that [tinkle] off of highway overpasses, play an accordian on a toilet, and run to the camera to hold a dead cat in front of it. "Gummo" is the cinematic equivalent of the painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung and paper cutouts of testicles strewn about it. It gives the arthouses and independent film movements a bad name. Harmony Korine is an angry geek who ran around with a camera enough to produce something that feels like a slice-of-life collage to many, but is actually more vacuous, technically and intellectual inept and stifling than anything the Hollywood system could ever produce. It is pure hatred and filth pretending to be art. It is idiocy masquerading as intellect. It is the product of a self-absorbed wannabe who somehow managed to get his hands on a camera and a contract with Fine Line Films. Avoid.
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