Episode 18: Kids (1995) and Bottom 5 Kids in Movies

What happens when Mike reaches deep down into the bag of the most controversial films in cinema history and withdraws a weapon so oddly jagged and dangerous that it might kill both Jay AND Mike himself? You get a full review of Larry Clark’s 1995 slice of New York City life, cinema verité, “Kids” with some very surprising conclusions drawn. And because the guys are nothing if not predictable, they follow-up with a discussion of their bottom five kids in movies before playing a lethal game of Kick-two, Pick-two involving way more than just the usual four movies. This episode flouts the rules in every respect and earns it’s “explicit content” badge with honors, so those with sensitive ears need not press play.

Kids (1995)

Thoughts:

  • Be careful – you may have gotten the director’s name confused with a comedian originally from Boston named Lenny Clarke! Apologies if I said the name wrong as we were closing our last episode.
  • The movie is an endurance test by design – the idea is to shock you with these freakishly frank, yet immature portrayals of teenagers obsessed with sex and getting drunk/high.
  • Truth is, though, there’s not a lot that’s all that shocking here. I talked like these kids and while I wasn’t as morally bankrupt as Telly and Casper, I certainly was no angel – especially when it came to sex. I was obsessed with it, even though I wasn’t having it.
  • What “Kids” seems to be doing is giving everyone that’s pearl-clutching about “kids these days” something genuinely worth clutching their pearls about. We all know teenagers are curious and borderline obsessed with sex, so the idea is to take everything THAT. MUCH. FURTHER by being sexually crude and frank while also mixing in other bugaboos like defiling virgins, huffing, excessive drinking, pill-popping and gang violence.
  • It seems like a custom-made conservative night-mare, the kind of thing that would be on Fox News every night and inciting rage and fear in an audience.
  • I don’t know what Larry Clark’s rationale was for making the film, but it seems he has a career-long obsession with youth culture that began in the late 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. In teaming up with a young skateboarder named Harmony Korine, he was able to find a reasonably authentic voice to tell this story.
  • Plot synopsis – this is a crass, allegedly “authentic” slice of life study following a group of teenagers in 1990’s New York City. Mostly it focuses on four central characters: Telly, a fifteen year-old douche-cannon that’s sex obsessed and, in particular, focuses on a goal of deflowering two very young virgins in one day. Casper, Telly’s best friend who is not nearly as skilled with the ladies, so he just gets wasted all the time. Jennie, a girl Telly deflowered earlier in the year and has forgotten about, but who has just tested HIV+ and Ruby, Jennie’s very good friend who has been having a lot of unprotected sex and who was terrified of a positive HIV result, but whose test came back negative. The kids go from situation to situation, stealing money from parents, stealing booze from the local convenience store, getting in fights, getting high, going to parties and fucking, but it is only at the end of the movie when Casper rapes a nearly-unconscious Jennie after a party that the character stories coalesce.
  • The film is told in a very cinema-verite style and often feels almost like a documentary. Lots of hand-held shots. Tons of tracking action as the characters move through the streets of NYC which appear in no way cleared for filming.
  • It was rated NC-17 for its subject matter and not necessarily for any specific violence or nudity captured, and this is the kind of thing that always drives me crazy about the Motion Picture Association of America and its Ratings Board: if you’re doing something low budget and edgy, you are soooooo much more likely to get an R, or X or NC-17 rating than the big boys do. Kevin Smith’s Clerks was originally rated NC-17 for language alone (it was later appealed and reduced to a R-rating without editing) and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, while violent, was definitely silly enough to get an R. But things by Spielberg like “Temple of Doom” where people get their hearts torn out have a whole new rating created for them because MONEY.
  • Firs screen appearances by Chloe Sevegny (Jennie) and Rosario Dawson (Ruby). Leo Fitzpatrick (Telly) – Went on to have a career.
  • Music by Lou Barlow and Folk Implosion – Natural One.
  • Gus Van Sant was influenced by Clark’s photograpy and became an executive producer on the film. His interests in a similar vibe of sorts would come out in one of the most angering films I’ve ever seen: “Elephant.”

Bottom Five Kids in Movies

Criteria – Had to avoid as many of the overtly icon-level choices as possible, so someone like Damien from “The Omen” or Regan from “The Exorcist” won’t make my list. And sadly that meant leaving out some really excellent well-known ones like The Children in ‘Village of the Damned” and Rhoda from “The Bad Seed.” What’s iconic? I think it would be kids that are immediately recognizable as horrible little shits or scary as fuck rugrats. That means no “Children of the Corn” either. Also, I didn’t want to have kids that were somehow manipulated into evil ways – so basically nothing with possession. I didn’t want the Devil to be the reason they’re horrible, like the children in “Kids” I wanted their awfulness to be organic and natural – a part of them. With all that out of the way, my main qualifier here is that I find these characters a poster children for birth control; that the world would be a better place without them in it.

Haley – Hard Candy (2005) Dir. David Slade

This is a super-tough one to have on the list, but I include it as my number 5 because it’s worthy of debate. While Patrick Wilson’s character, Jeff, is clearly a horrible human being – a photographer who lures young girls to his place who might be mixed up in a missing-teenager case – it is Haley who I find the most disturbing. Sure, she’s avenging her missing friend, but the level of her own duplicity and her rather sophisticated and dangerous schemes put her on the level of a super-villain. Drugging and then threatening to castrate Jeff while getting it all on film? There’s vigilantism and then there’s pure psychopathy; an absence of balance in response. Sure, trick the pederast into taking you home, collect evidence and expose him for the sicko he is. But when you go so far as to convince the dude to kill himself or be exposed… there’s something way more broken and out of wack here. Regardless of reasons, that level of insanity shouldn’t be advocated or applauded, so despite what an incredible job Page does in the role as Haley, and despite the level of catharsis one might feel at the end of “Hard Candy” when Jeff gets his, when you really think about it, this is one really, really bad kid.

Chris – Carrie (1976) dir. Brian De Palma

A lot of people might have Carrie herself on a list like this – after all, she uses telekinesis to kill almost everyone in her high school and then does in her own mother with a set of flying kitchen knives. But anyone who’s paying attention knows Carrie is the victim in this one, albeit a disturbed and rather off-kilter victim that’s sent over the edge by some severe bullying. And the worst of those bullies? None other than Chris, played will excessive cruelness by Nancy Allen in a “love-to-hate-her” role that I’m honestly surprised she was able to avoid being typecast as. Chris is one of the mean girls at the beginning of the film that taunts Carrie in the girls’ shower by throwing tampons at her. Later, though, she reaches a truly evil level by forcing her friends, and her boyfriend played by a goofy John Travolta, into one of the most horrific cinematic pranks ever: loading the Prom Queen ballot box with votes for Carrie so that she can take the stage and be doused with a buck full of pig blood. Pranks are pranks and kids will be kids, but Nancy Allen’s portrayal of Chris is so gleefully mean-spirited that you’re thrilled when she and Travolta catch the evil eye from Carrie when they attempt to run her down and instead they’re engulfed in a ball of fire as their car flips over. Serves her right!

Hob – Robocop 2 (1990) Dir. Irvin Kershner

Robocop 2 is a bizarre flick, a weirdo bit of mayhem that was penned by comic book writer and illustrator Frank Miller, best known for his work on Sin City. Here, with the help of Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, Miller and co-scripter Walon Green birth a silly-ass flick about the mega-corporation OCP taking over and gentrifying Detroit once it falls victim to a drug epidemic caused by “Nuke,” a designer drug pushed by a homicidal nut named Cain played by the always fantastic Tom Noonan. Cain is a total madman, arbitrarily killing cops, allies and random people, so naturally he has a young apprentice drug-dealer of no more than 13 years-old named Hob.  And this kid’s a foul-mouthed turd-burglar of the highest order, probably best remembered for mocking Robocop’s impotence when confronted by an armed child by saying “You can’t shoot a kid, huh, fucker?” before blasting Robocop in the head with a hand-cannon that, in real life,  should have recoiled him into Robocop 3. Amazingly, that was Hob’s second run-in with Robocop: the first time he chopped off the hero’s hand with a machine gun and then gleefully oversaw his dismemberment exclaiming excitedly “They say he’s got a brain – I wanna see it!” After Cain is apprehended and, pretty inexplicably used as the brain for a new, improved Robocop that looks like Ed 209 from the first movie, Hob becomes kingpin briefly before being gunned down by the returning Cain-bot. His final line, “Dying… it really sucks” while holding Robocop’s hand is played like a scene out of a demented Hallmark movie, and that late-inning attempt at eliciting sympathy for this delinquent tells you all you need to know about this mess.

Aidan and Mia – The Lodge (2008) dir. Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

Directed by the duo that brought us “Goodnight Mommy,” it’s no surprise really that the brother/sister duo in “The Lodge” aren’t what they appear to be and that everything ends in an almost laughably bleak manner. The set-up is simple: a young woman named Grace, who has a troubled past, has found a lovely new life by getting engaged to an older man with two children. The catch? The kids’ mom killed herself when she found out about this new girl. The other catch? The girl’s troubled past is that her father led a religious cult that she barely escaped alive.  When the dad has to attend to business around Christmastime, he concocts this idiotic plan for the kids to stay with his new, young fiancee at a secluded lodge. This isn’t a very good movie, so I’m going to blow some of the plot twists right now and just tell you that I’ve done y’all the favor of watching this so you won’t have to. But if you don’t want to know, just fast forward this episode about a minute so you don’t here why I think these kiddos belong on this list. Ok… warning shot fired, here’s the deal: these kids are straight up sickos. Like Haley from “Hard Candy,” the level of their duplicity – the sheer ingenuity of it, is astounding and profoundly upsetting. Using the Grace’s past trauma, they perpetrate an insane hoax that a malfunctioning heater in the lodge has asphyxiated all of them in their sleep and now they’re trapped in purgatory. They go as far as removing all of Grace’s belongings, including her much-needed anxiety meds, taking down all Christmas decorations, letting her little dog freeze outside, moving all the calendars and clocks forward several weeks ahead, creating a fake newspaper with a newstory about their deaths and, in a rather insane masterstroke, the boy – Aidan – stages a suicide by hanging himself, which doesn’t kill him. If that’s not enough, they pump excerpts of sermons by Grace’s insane cult-leader dad through hidden speakers so she thinks she’s being haunted.  When combined with her withdrawls from her meds, the dead dog and her amped-up anxiety , Grace snaps and becomes dangerous herself, thus dropping the conniving siblings into a huge-ass dumpster fire of their own making. The whole thing is a mess, and it’s all thanks to these meddling kids.

Kevin – We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) dir. Lynne Ramsey

I’ve never encountered a movie child that made me quite as raging and unexpectedly speechless as the title character in 2011’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” A good, riveting, strange and upsetting film, it features Tilda Swinton as a mom saddled with what can honestly be described as a total douchebag for a kid. All the way from toddler-age – and perhaps even earlier – Kevin is manipulative, deceitful, mean and tormenting. This kid refuses to eat properly, refuses to use the toilet – at one point purposely shitting himself right after having his diaper changed – and is intentionally combative with his suffering mother who is never believed by her oafish husband, played by John C. Reilly in a bit of casting that I REALLY do not understand. All this aside, the non-linear structure of writer/director Lynne Ramsey’s adaptation of the book of the same name by Lionel Shriver lets you know that all of this awfulness Swinton’s character is being subjected to is leading to something really, really bad, and when it’s revealed, it’s awful. And behind it all is… no real explanation. The kid isn’t possessed by a devil, or a tool of an alien species: he’s just a horrible human being Hellbent on punishing his mother for reasons we’ll never understand. And that’s why he’s so high on my list, because his hatred and, later, the level of his murderous rage toward his mother is so punishing that really there was never going to be a way to successfully explain it. Sometimes people are just fucking terrible. This movie suggests that and then shows the devastating effect it would have on a parent.

Mike’s pick for the next episode: Glen or Glenda

I’m Mike, so I never need notes or make mistakes! :::raspberry sounds:::