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The Oscars were two days ago so it makes sense that I would use this space to talk about movies. This would be a prime opportunity for me to chime in on Chris Rock’s opening monologue about how white the Oscars are, or to jump on the pro-Leonardo DiCaprio hype train (I briefly considered going year by year to see who beat Leo).

Naturally, I will use it to talk about a movie that’s about to be 21 years old and wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards.

That’s how I roll.

Sarah and I have been making our way through Netflix’s “Love” for the past week or two. In the scene where Gus goes to Mickey’s friend’s house he utters something to the effect of “everyone here looks like a grownup version of the cast of Kids”. I laughed and Sarah was like “what?” The reason she didn’t get the joke was she had never seen Larry Clark’s 1995 film “Kids”.

She loves gritty realistic dramas about teeanagers so this was something we had to rectify right away.

Two days later we were watching “Kids”; her for the first time ever and myself for the first time in probably over a decade. 21 years is way past the acceptable period of staying spoiler free so I’m just going to go right ahead and spoil plenty of this movie.

The storyline of the film is relatively straight forward, Harmony Korine basically writes a 24 hour period of every parent’s nightmare in relation to their children. The cast of Kids indulge in basically everything you would never want a child to indulge in: unprotected (and non-consensual) sex, outbursts of violence and plenty of illicit drug use. Many scenes just sort of “happen” and don’t really further the story but instead just give a glimpse of what the day-to-day life of one of these inner city kids might be like.

It’s also super engaging because the cast is actually quite young as well. Fitzpatrick and Rosario Dawson (who plays supporting character Ruby) were only 15 and 16 at filming, Sevigny and Pierce were 19. When Hollywood is routinely casting actors in their mid 20s to play teens, the presence of actual teenagers is almost as off-putting as it it is refreshing.

The crux of the story is that one of the characters, Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), loves one thing in life more than anything else: unprotected sex with virgins. Telly is about 16 years old and uses terrible, cheesy bullshit to coerce girls who seem to be 13 or 14 years old into having sex with him. He even mentions having slept with a 12 year old. Another character, Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has only ever had sex with a single partner who happened to be Telly. She finds out she is HIV positive.

That’s right. One of the main characters in this movie is a guy going around taking advantage of girls younger than he is and no doubt spreading AIDS. Let that sink in.

That’s the kind of thing that rightfully had the character of Telly nominated for AFI’s Top 100 Villains.

The film is shot in such a visceral, real way that it could easily come off as a documentary. Quick cuts of poorly framed actors just reinforce that. Apparently, since 1995 was a time before the internet could quickly validate this sort of thing, some people actually thought the movie WAS a documentary. This got to the point that, according to Fizpatrick, people actually harassed him for his portrayal of Telly.

The other male protaganist is not much better. Casper (Justin Pierce) comes off as a mostly nice guy throughout the film. Up until the very last scene Casper is seen giving fresh fruit to a little girl, being generous with his drugs and taking care of his buddy who drank too much. He also beats a guy unconscious with a skateboard, but in his defense he did tell the guy to back off and the guy struck first. He’s also a willing accomplice in Telly’s exploits, encouraging him in his quest for deflowering virgins and stealing from his mother.

Somehow (and maybe it’s just the contrast of how bad Telly is), for most of the movie Casper comes off as the “hero” to Telly’s morally bankrupt creeper. But this isn’t a movie where you can root for anyone, so he forces himself on Jennie’s passed out body after she took some kind of drug that makes Ketamine look weak.

Fuck me that was hard to watch.

We had some friends over on Saturday and the topic of “Kids” came up and my friend brought up something that I thought was really interesting.

When we (my friends and I) saw the film in the mid-90s the characters all came off as so cool. They did whatever they want, had lots of sex, did lots of drugs and stayed up all night. The sentiment was echoed by another person who said one of her friends got the nickname “Casper” in highschool in homage to the film. I don’t know if we were just too young and stupid to not properly follow the STD storyline or what, but as a teenager the cast of “Kids” was cool.

I certainly had my share of encounters that were not entirely unlike some scenes in the film and at the time I thought I was a real badass for being in that sort of situation.

Fast forward to now and you realize exactly just how much you’ve grown up. Casper and Telly aren’t cool, they’re the worst people you could meet. You feel bad for everyone in the film and whatever circumstances got them into their current state. You want to yell at everyone for being a dumb, misguided teenager.

It’s a rough movie to watch, and it’s even weirder when you know that Justin Pierce (Casper) killed himself only 5 years later.

That being said, if you haven’t watched in a while, especially if the last time you watched it you were in your late teens or early 20s yourself, it is super interesting to go back to. It’s not exactly the film you might remember it as.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.

(Polaroids of Sevigny and Dawson from Dazed Digital)