Harmony Korine’s last theatrically released flick was the psuedo-classic / slapstick comedy Julien Donkey Boy, way back in 1999. That was back when Harmony was some kind of indie golden boy. No one could make up their minds whether it was cool or cliche to like Harmony. Too pretentious for the midnight cult crowd, to raunchy for the art houses. He was less the red headed step child of cinema and more like royalty in exile, but inbred retarded royalty.
Eight years later he’s pretty much fallen off the map save for the occasional blurb in the last paragraph of the gossip page, buried underneath notices about which up and coming WB star Lindsay Lohan is throwing up on these days.
He’s less vitale film making talent and more the punchline to some extremly pretentious joke. Unfortunatley we’re going to have wait a little bit longer for that particular episode of Hollywood Squares because apparently Harmony’s got a new movie due this year. It’s called Mr. Lonely. IMDB’s got the following synopsys:
Paris, a young American (Luna) who works as a Michael Jackson lookalike meets Marilyn Monroe (Morton), who invites him to her commune in Scotland, where she lives with Charlie Chaplin (Lavant) and her daughter, Shirley Temple.
Check out some early footage at jaycheel.com, one of my favorite movie related blogs. He’s also got the footage from Korine’s two classic appearances on Letterman.
I was a huge fan back in the 90’s, Kids underwhelmed me but Gummo was instantly my favorite film of 1997. The art crowd’s dismissal of Gummo struck me as emblematic of some larger failure on its part. Certaintly his films were memorable, certaintly they were the work of a unique vision. But Korine’s films appealed to a definitely salacious pervisity that the artsy crowd couldn’t sanction. It’s always seemed to me that the high-art / semiotics crowd can sanction any kind of prurient deviancy as long as it apologizes for itself by being boring. The second a guy tries to entertain anyone he loses the artistic currency that buys him his indulgence. Call me a reverse snob but that’s what I see.
Mr. Lonely sounds a lot like The Idiots, Lars Von Trier’s sole entry into the Dogma 95 movement fad. But the 15 year old contrarian in me can’t resist looking forword to the latest from this less relevent but still interesting film maker.
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