Peaches (Tiffany Ramos) has been raised solely by her ultra-religious father since her mother died. Her answers don’t satisfy him, because she sounds like a parent, not a lover.
Following sex, he plies her with questions that reveal his insecurities. While Tate understands instinctively that he has a sexual advantage over Rhonda’s husband, he somehow feels inferior.
Tate, a smart, sensitive high school boy, is sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother, Rhonda (Maeve Quinlan), who uses Tate for her own sexual satisfaction. Until the end, these friends never interact, and the episodic structure presents their stories as variations on the conventional theme of adult-teen friction. Set among the suburban ranch houses of Visalia, California, the movie is actually about Park’s four surviving friends. Ken Park, whom we never get to know, represents teenage disappointment in its most extreme form, and his ghost hovers over the entire film. The titular character of Ken Park kills himself five minutes into the movie and then isn’t even mentioned until the last five minutes, when his name is invoked in a game of 20 Questions. Whatever his drawbacks as a scenarist (two-dimensional characters, for one), Korine has the ability to express believably the fluctuations of adolescent desire. Seven years later, Clark got a European producer to finally finance the film, and while Korine wasn’t actively involved in the production, it’s more his movie than it is Clark’s or, it would be if Clark and his co-director Ed Lachman hadn’t overpowered the script with sex scenes.
Clark couldn’t get funding for Ken, so he made Kids instead, and shortly thereafter he and Korine had a falling out. People who were appalled by Kids were as bothered by Korine’s evident affection for these miscreants as they were by director Larry Clark’s enthusiasm for presenting their activities so graphically.Īpparently, Korine wrote the script for Ken Park even before he wrote Kids. Since his experience with unsupervised urban skater boys was still fresh, the movie felt authentic in terms of dialogue and attitude, but many found it reprehensible, because the amoral behavior on display was presented without a filter of disapproval. Harmony Korine was 19 when he wrote the screenplay for the controversial 1995 movie Kids, which was about a group of New York City teenagers who were a few years younger than he was. I have not edited these, so all the prejudices and dumb assessments remain.
I recently realized that almost all of the music reviews I wrote for the Japan Times in the 90s and the movie reviews I wrote for the Asahi Shimbun during the same decade are not available on the Internet, so I will remedy that by slowly, methodically posting them here on my blog.
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