If you're interested - what do you think of my 'Ken Park' review?

(Contains spoilers)
Plot Summary:
In the opening sequence, we follow a distraught, freckled skateboarder (who’s the title character) into a skate park, where he records himself blowing his brains out. From there, the film chronicles the lives of his friends with and without their parents and grandparents in California. We meet Shawn, who doesn’t get his needs fulfilled from his parents, but gets different kinds of needs fulfilled from his girlfriend’s mother, named Rhonda, whom he shares a casual sexual relationship with. We meet Claude, who can’t stand living with his unemployed, drunken and brutish father, and contemplates leaving him. We meet Peaches, whose life with her father isn’t any better, either, as he is a tyrannically religious one who harbors feelings for his daughter that no father should. And, finally, we meet Tate, a mentally disturbed bizarro whose parents’ mistreatment of him subconsciously drives him to stab his well-intentioned grandparents to death with a kitchen knife.

Ken Park brings these four different but interlocked stories to life with brutally honest detail in a film about teen sexuality and disillusionment.

The Lowdown:
Ken Park, which is directed by filmmaker/photographer Larry Clark and famed cinematographer Edward Lachman, is a starkly realistic and compelling character-driven piece that knows a lot about its subject. All of its characters are treated very honestly, and the performances are so plausible, some of them are scary.

Ken Park is without the slightest doubt one of the boldest, most disturbing and bizarre films that I’ve seen thus far. It deals with characters with questionable mental stability, doesn’t shy away from sexually explicit material, and has scenes with such shockingly casual violence, that it’s likely to get under your skin and stay there long after you’ve seen it. But Larry Clark, who’s infamous for his youth-oriented films, isn’t an exploiter; he’s genuinely interested in telling stories, exploring characters, and allowing voices to be heard.

In the eyes of many film critics and moviegoers, Larry Clark is a dirty old pig because of his no-holds-barred style of filmmaking, but not in mine. Clark is a visual artist: he uses the human body as a metaphor for adolescents’ vim and vulnerabilities, and he uses sexually explicit imagery to uphold the veraciousness of his films. True, Clark’s films are provocative, and he likes them to be that way (“I like my work to look sexy,” he has said), but that doesn’t make him a dirty old pig. Of course, many people would disagree, and would likely bring up the film’s final sequence in order to uphold their opinion.

But before I get to it, let’s just say that Larry Clark is sexually attracted to adolescents—I don’t know, but let’s just say—would his sexual attraction to them be that wrong and harmful a thing? I mean, after all, that would make him an ephebophile, not a pedophile, and there’s nothing wrong with being an ephebophile. It would be an innocent attraction.

The final sequence of the film features a threesome between three of its principal characters—Sawn, Claude and Peaches—and it is depicted in an unblinking manner. Many have looked at it and questioned its existence, but I haven’t—and I haven’t because I neither believe that it’s pornographic, nor do I believe that it’s there for shock value. The intention behind that sequence was to show us how teens use sex as a way of temporarily forgetting about their disenchantment with their home-lives, and to show us how they emotionally need one another, how friendship—sexual or otherwise—is the key to sanity in an insane world. It’s meant to uplift our spirits, to make this inexorably grim film have redemptive value, and I feel that it succeeded in what it attempted to do. That sequence is intended to be a beautiful one about human bonding, and beautiful it is.

Clark is a true genius, a great American rebel who audaciously explores issues many filmmakers don’t even dare come near. Do his films have to be as visually revealing as they are? Absolutely not. But he doesn’t like to turn his camera away from anything and, as an artist, I feel that he has every right not to. And why should he have to censor himself to a bunch of hypocrites, anyway? After all, we do derive pleasure from watching movies that are brimming with dismembered limbs, disembowelments, decapitations and torture, yet frown upon sexually charged films; and movies like Hellraiser and Saving Private Ryan do get away with an R rating, while erotic human dramas get slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating for their explicit sexual nature. It’s things like these that show you just how hypocritical and backwards we really are.

Ken Park is a very good film. If I have a complaint with it, it’s the approach in which it took with its opening sequence. In it, we can see that Ken Park is visibly upset, but it would’ve been more realistic and effective had he not been, since he was on his way to ending his misery in the skate park via a gun. But that’s all. Other than that, I was pleased with Ken Park, which is another impressive slice-of-life film by Clark.



Human beings ain't only just human, you know—they got animals living inside of ‘em, too. —U-Turn