Change Your Image
dlesh
Reviews
Gummo (1997)
snuh
I'm not sure how to rate this, having grown up in a town many would consider white trash, and having had friends who might very well be living similar lives as these characters. I know I like how normal everything is, how nothing is internally shocking, which challenges us to search for a way to sympathize with the characters. I like the ugliness of the film, genuinely seedy from start to finish. I think I like the pointlessness of the film, the lack of story, plot, even character development. All of this contributes to the picture Gummo paints.
On the other hand, I think some more attention should have been devoted towards character development and plot, simply so we could understand the scene better. We know about a tornado, but we don't know about before the tornado. We know about *these* kids, but we don't really know much about the other ones. In that sense, it reminds me of a Marilyn Manson record in that it is overindulgent in its own depression, and ends up missing a lot of the depression around it. Similarly, I found some of the imagery - rabbit, cowboy kids, journalist-molester - annoying, because they reflected a sort of arty-righteousness that seemed to undermine an otherwise intelligent picture.
Pariah (1998)
easy to make nazis look bad
Lets be serious--it doesn't take a great director to make nazi skinheads look bad, and Pariah is a perfect example of this at work. It presents a very narrow view of racism, which connects only to a very narrow audience--those who are "in" the scene, etc. There were way too many overt plot details that could have been assumed or more subtly presented. I'd say see this if you want an exagerated, easy to digest film about nazi skinheads, but not if you want to get any new, smart, disturbing insight into the problems of racism and violence in youth subcultures.