Kids_filmThe 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. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…