Gummo

Rating:
Summary: I love Gummo!
Review: Gummo has to be my favorite movie of all time. It is a documentary/drama about how [bad] rednecks live. It is funny for some people and creepy for others. This movie gets boring in some parts just because it is so abstract and strange. It boils down to a movie about how rednecks live their everyday messed up lives. Everyone MUST see Gummo at least once!

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Summary: The most brilliant and profound film since Saving Silverman.
Review: Relationship Rule #57: When your girlfriend asks you to go to the video store to rent Casablanca, and said film is not available, do not assume that Gummo is an acceptable alternative. Trust me.

Rating:
Summary: Not your friendly neighborhood
Review: Harmony Korine is clearly working on a different plane. More like planet. Gummo is a film that makes you wonder how such a film was made to begin with. It's so far from anything out there today in America that it tests the viewer to watch it again just to try and qualify it.

There was something about the film I loved, yet I wasn't immune from the pretensions of the young director, who makes a bizarre (what else) cameo as a very drunk, very sexually confused and very sad teenager who tries coming onto a black, dwarf man. And that's probably one of the more normal scenes.

Gummo has no plot, and Korine wants it that way. It's less a story than the setting for one. It's a situation so to speak. Korine has taken his camera to a place that may look like a demented art film but is in fact, somewhere in America. Xenia, Ohio was hit by a tornado a number of years ago, and it struggles in every single way to crawl back from the primordial soup. Actually, Xenia, Ohio is a real place and it was in fact hit by a massive tornado in the mid-1970s (still a famous disaster). It's been hit by others since. However, Korine actually films in his home Nashville, when his type of hyper realism makes you wonder why the real city wasn't chosen. (Maybe the mayor ran them out of town?)

To put it mildly, Gummo drops the viewer into the deepest depths of scary America, a white trash haven that has not found any emotional or physical leg to stand on following the natural disaster. We follow the adventures of Solomon and Tummler, two kids with a lot of nothing to do one summer. They ride their bikes and kill stray cats to sell to a local restaurant supplier. They take their pittance and buy glue, huff it, then sit around. Then the next day, they do it again, mixing it up by visiting a man who pimps his retarded sister out to the town.

This film stuck with me when I first saw it and I found myself wanting to own it. It's not something you can explain. While it's surely a pretensious mess in many regards--what film by a 23 year old kid with Korine's attitude wouldn't be?--but it has a deliberate hand on the back of the viewers head, forcing one to watch and question what they're seeing.

Score at least half a point for the art film, period, be it American or foreign. The fact that you're even seeing a film like this for sale here on DVD says something about something. Maybe about the people backing Korine who did a good job of getting his work out there.

The DVD is very nice, though short on the features that this film desperately needs. There's a photo montage sequence with a Korine interview played over it that's somewhat interesting as he talks about casting and shooting the film. No surprise when he admits how much of the film is taken from a last day of shooting.

I don't how to recommend this film. If you liked Kids, Korine's only other reference point before this film, then get ready for something similar but very, very different. Very bizarre, ugly, beautiful, all of those terms that come to mind as you watched broken characters dominate the screen for an hour and a half. If you like something daring and dare I say notorious, you might want to pick this up.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Amazing!!
Review: My buddies and i just got done watching this movie. I have now seen the movie twice and i must agree with all my buddies that it is appaling. But at the same time i find it to be a unique masterpiece. It really causes you to open up your mind and look at things from a completely different perspective. I think it is an amazing film and i would suggest everyone watch it sometime. IT is an underground must see movie!!

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Summary: Sick, sick, SIIIICK!!!! A portait of subhuman garbage!
Review: This movie is so disgusting that it makes me want to vomit every time I even hear about it. The question is, is it really terrible? No, in fact the directing and shooting is excellent. The fact of the matter is that this movie provides little more than shock value, and quite ridiculous shock value at that. Cruelty to animals, huffing glue, promiscuous sex and incest...yeah, that's definatly the scum of the earth! If you feel that you really need a reason to hate human garbage, watch this movie!
On another downside, the story sort of meanders, never really telling a story. Instead, you go from a few moments in the life of some scumball to another. Stupid! It just shows the worst elements of the world. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the point was to feel like you've been huffing glue with the teenagers in this movie.
I have great respect for the director of this movie, but I cannot reccomend this video to anyone. "Kids" had a plot. Its story developed. Watching this movie is like getting stuck in a septic tank, and wallowing in its filth while you wait for help to arrive for 2 hours, so that they may liberate you from your torments. Or you could do the humane thing by hitting "stop," then "eject," then finally throwing your tape of Gummo into the trash can where it belongs.

Rating:
Summary: Guilty pleasure
Review: I first saw Gummo in 98, about a year after it's release. After seeing Kids, I eagerly awaited Korine's directorial debut. Gummo is just what I would have expected.
Gummo to me is a small piece of Americana, definetly not Norman Rockwell's Americana..but more of a John Waters, or Todd Solondze Americana.
At times Korine tries way too hard to come across artsy, or even Godardian. Apparently a mentally impaired women shaving off her eyebrows, and a boy with pink bunny ears playing the accordion on the toilet is somehow avant-garde?
The reason I am giving Gummo 3 stars is because it is thoroughly engrossing. The imagery is just as vivid and clear in my mind today as it was almost five years ago when I first saw it.
If you like structure in your movies, do not see Gummo. If you like your storytelling linear, precise, and to the point, do not see Gummo. If you're eagerly awaiting the next Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration, do not see Gummo.
Even if you hated this film, you still felt motivated to write a review about it. Lengthy reviews at that.

Rating:
Summary: Don¿t believe the bad reviews!!!
Review: I was compelled to write a review after reading the two one star reviews. I must start by saying that this movie is not for every one. You must enter into this movie with an open mind. Harmony Korine the writer of Kids which was directed by Larry Clark embarks on his directorial debut with Gummo. Where Kids showed us life of teens living in New York City Gummo takes us to the small town America via Xenia, Ohio. Using a cut and paste method to paint a picture of Xenia a town living in the aftermath of a devastating tornado. Through out the movie we are bombarded with strange characters thrown into even weirder situations. Some of the character where introduced to include a gay black midget, an albino girl who's a big fan of Patrick Swazy, and two cat killing, glue sniffing, grandmother killing, teens. Now not only is this movie disturbing its also very funny some of the lines will have you laughing out load but it's not all laughs. Harmony puts some of the most disturbing scenes ever committed to film up for your viewing (one thing that makes them even more disturbing is your not sure what your seeing is acting or for real). By doing this Harmony puts us face to face with things and people most people rather pretend don't exist. He's doing the same thing he did with Kids trying to wake us up to a reality most people would rather ignore. Most of the people that dislike the film dislike it because they refuse to wake up. Well people this type of stuff does happen. So do your self a favor and rent one of the most un-relenting and unflinching films on the small town redneck life you will ever see. And if you like it come on Amazon and place your order. Also if you like Gummo please check out Julian-Donkey Boy, Harmony's latest film.

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Summary: The most hateful piece of elitism I've ever laid eyes on.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Almost the Worst Movie I've Ever Seen
Review: Listen up, all ye trying to drag your skateboards to Art Film 101: I too read the back of the box when I rented this, THAT IS AN ADVERTISEMENT. Just because you've been told that there isn't supposed to be a plot and this is supposed to be emulating a documentary doesn't make it true. Watch any documentary, you'll see some unification, some direction...Gummo feels like Harmony Korine dropped a camcorder in a trailer park and ran away.

I gave it two stars because I sense that he saw something here; some of the images are powerful, and he did try to cross boundaries/push envelopes. I just think he fell short. However this is only his second film and he is under 30.

Rating:
Summary: homophobes,albinos and cat killers oh my!!
Review: wow this made me think i could make a movie! if you enjoy movies like happiness, kids,bully you will like to be disturbed by this as well. if your parents were absent in your early teens and you took what drugs and booze were at hand you will be nostalgic. the movie moves right along and before you know it its over though not in a disjointed way. some line delivery is a bit wooden but all the actors are beleivable. im sending a copy to my dad to further reveal to him what it was like growing up me!