BULLY

[indianasmith]

If anyone who hasn't seen it yet wants to see how awful Larry Clark can get as a filmmaker, just check out Teenage Caveman.   

That film was incredibly awful!! Even the presence of numerous very attractive young ladies could not redeem its stinkiness!!

I actually rather liked Quills . . . I found its exploration of human depravity much less disturbing than the celebration of brutal and cruel stupidity in BULLY.

Truthfully, I didn't really notice the male nudity in BULLY and wasn't so much offended by its homoeroticism  - in fact, most of the sexual expression I remember in it was male/female.  It was the absolute despicability (is that a word?) of every character in it that turned me off.

And no, I am NOT planning on seeing SHORTBUS anytime soon.

[Torgo]

That film was incredibly awful!! Even the presence of numerous very attractive young ladies could not redeem its stinkiness!!

I actually rather liked Quills . . . I found its exploration of human depravity much less disturbing than the celebration of brutal and cruel stupidity in BULLY.

Truthfully, I didn't really notice the male nudity in BULLY and wasn't so much offended by its homoeroticism  - in fact, most of the sexual expression I remember in it was male/female.  It was the absolute despicability (is that a word?) of every character in it that turned me off.

And no, I am NOT planning on seeing SHORTBUS anytime soon.

I was making an analogy to when that male co-worker of mine borrowed Quills and also complained about Bully.

It's just that you did mention like 2 or 3 times in your thoughts on why you didn't like Bully that "someone's gay" and I was just drawing an analogy to when my friend kept going on about the male nudity in Quills.  Someone could read your post and read into it the wrong way than you were possibly intending that to come across.

And BTW, if you go into it with a completely open mind, Shortbus is actually a quite good film.  It's from the same director that did director John Cameron Mitchell that did Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which is also a good film).

[RapscallionJones]

This movie IS a piece of crap and Larry Clark can burn in hell.  For all of this alleged social commentary in his movies, he seems more interested in shocking you, constantly asking, "It's 10 o'clock, parents, do you know where your kids are?"

However, something to keep in mind is that the story that Bully is telling is a true one.  The events in that movie really happened and from what I can tell, the script follows the truth quite closely.  It's a story about over-stimulated and under-supervised kids doing what they do when they have no moral compass to guide them.  Their parents have spent their time, during the life spans of their children, indulging in their own thing and by the time their kids are teens, they're so out of control that the parents are afraid of them and have no idea how to put on the brakes.  It is, essentially, too late.

That said:

Dear Larry Clark,

What's your point?

Your friend,
Rapscallion Jones

p.s.  Chloe Sevigny isn't all that good looking, man.

What fails to impress or even move me at all, is that Clark's movies show young people wild and out of control but I realize that this is happening everywhere in the world.  I worked on the adolescent ward of a locked psych hospital, I've seen kids very much like the ones in Clark's movies.  I know why they're so screwed up.  But every one of Clark's movies end on a bleak note, as if to tell you that this is happening and there is nothing you can do about it.  So who gives a s**t?  Why tell this story at all?  I don't want watch movies to bum myself out.

[Torgo]

p.s.  Chloe Sevigny isn't all that good looking, man.

What I mentioned in a prior post is that Bully managed for me to be a pretty good film in spite of Larry Clark's filmmaking tendencies if you want to call them that.

The only movie that he's done that could be considered close to mainstream was Another Day in Paradise which even in the unrated cut he managed to put in a completely out of place and graphic simulated (from what I can tell) blow job sequence in which Natasha Gregson Wagner was completely degraded as an actress IMO.

Also, in Ken Park he tries to pass this off as a "slice of  life " type movie and that "these things happen and I'm tired of shooting stuff from the waste up" and all that.  Well, that's fine if the context of the movie and story supports it.   In Ken Park, it just seemed like a really dirty old man getting his rocks off filming an (at that time) 18 year old actor actually choking himself while he graphically jerks off on camera.  There was absolutely no point to that movie. Yet Larry Clark says "I was wanting to show how messed up he was", well you already did that earlier moron when you showed that same character yelling at his grandparents/dog in a most degrading and disturbing manner.   

Oh, and I've always found Chloe Sevigny to be quite attractive in a girl-next-door type quality, but not when she's blowing Vincent Gallo on screen in The Brown Bunny though.