Ken Park (2002)

You won't be disappointed!

Good movie but grossly overrated

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I have always been fascinated with people who do some of the lurid stuff you read about in the news. The face of a civil society, with smiling faces on billboards, chirpy television show hosts and politicians talking about morals and ethics. This of course, is not the tone of every day peoples lives behind closed doors. We all have unacceptable desires that we seldom share. Trying to marry your own daughter to keep others away from her, strangling yourself while pleasuring yourself and having an affair with a teen aged boy are just a handful of the taboo topics dealt with here very bluntly. While the film has the subtlety of a bag of sledgehammers and basically lacks a plot the performances are strong and the sequence of events is admittedly interesting. Having been a fan of Larry Clarks for years, this was his last movie that was truly daring, wassup rockers and marfa girl being complete wastes of time. Ken park works as it doesn't filter any of its subject matter and as such was doomed to only be seen by a tiny amount of people in its initial run. As time has passed its shocking content has not become easier to handle and it really is a movie you cannot recommend to anyone. I still value having watched it, because it reminds me that were all a little twisted, these people are just on the end of the spectrum.

Being acquainted with Larry Clark's work, i went to see Ken Park. I was disappointed although the movie had all the hallmarks of Larry Clark's work: troubled teenagers, irresponsible adults and a lot of naked bodies.My issue with Ken Park is the focus on the dark side of humanity. Not that it doesn't exist in real life, but there is absolutely no light in the darkness of Ken park apart from indulging in sexual intercourse and masturbation. It left me with a feeling that the scenario was written by someone who hasn't left teenage angst behind him. In a way, this was true, since at least one version of the scenario has been written by Harmony Korine in his mid-twenties.I feel sorry for anyone who had to go through anything similar to the stories told in Ken Park. Yet, it seemed to me how the authors piled everything up only to make us feel bad about being alive...

I came on 'Ken Park' through a present photo exhibition in Amsterdam, showing the pictures of one of this film's editors: Larry Clark.Larry Clark (born 1943) made a photo-career by picturing teenagers in every scene of their young lives. In showing this, Clark also includes sex, drugs & rock 'n roll, right up to showing full genitals. His most famous book is 'Teenage Lust', edited in the early 1980-s. Causing quite a stir at the time, for showing teenage life in details one usually keeps silent about.In spite of Clark's frankness on the subject, he cannot be accused of making porn. Clark pictures his teenagers in the way these teenagers see themselves. Looking through their eyes, his photos radiate eagerness to discover maturity, eagerness to try new things out, eagerness to acquire new experiences. And, above all, eagerness to catch the present without worrying about the future.Larry Clark's film 'Ken Park' just extends this theme. Maybe he narrows his limits a little: his film shows teenagers from well-to-do families, that are in some way dysfunctional. No poverty & slums in 'Ken Park', only desolation due to unhappy circumstances at home. Circumstances these teenagers are caught in, because they are not strong enough yet to influence them.

Explaining "Ken Park" in simple words: A story about several a group of Californian skateboarder's friends, their lives and relationships with and without their parents. Watching the film is not that simple, it's a awkward tour-de-force where you have three choices: walk out of the film after some of its controversial moments; watch the whole film and hate it because of its controversial content; or watch it with and like it despite everything you seen here. I don't know how many people heard things about it but I know that many people will not want to see it, or will find a boring and empty film with nothing more to say. But it has something there that compels us to watch it and like it.The story begins when a teen skater boy named Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck) happily killed himself in front of other skaters. Then the movie presents us Ken's friends, Shawn (James Bullard), Peaches (Tiffany Limos), Tate (James Ransone) and Claude (Stephen Jasso) and their complicated and obnoxious lives with their families, or in Shawn's case without them, only with his girlfriend and her mother, being a sexually active boy with both women. Many viewers and reviewers here complained about the story's point, the nudity, the sex, about everything before looking to themselves and to what they watch in the news and asking themselves: Real life is that strange as this film? Yes! That's what made of "Ken Park" one of the best films ever made and one of the most shocking too, because it seemed real, actors were not playing around, they were not only physically nude but they were portraying life as it is to some people, in this case a group of troubled people. And all that comes as a hypocrisy. Hypocrisy because people do strange things, get undressed, their intimate parts appears, they masturbate (perhaps not in that way), sometimes they show to each other, big deal, but there's always someone who'll get offended with that. But heads exploding, death executions, mass killings both in films and in real life doesn't seem to disturb the same viewers that gets easily impressed with films like this. Something must be very wrong with mankind and that's what Larry Clark and Ed Lachman present to us in this film, I don't know if that was the intention but it certainly succeed it. I guess I've seen so many strange and freaky things in movies that this film didn't bothered me that much, in fact, it let me hypnotized, I wanted to see what was going to happen next, everything was surprising, there's no moments of "I had it coming". But I know that a regular viewer who'll watch "Ken Park" will be disturbed, disgusted, shocked, paralyzed and another adjectives, and all I can say is this: if you want to see something new and you think nothing can disturb you then watch it. It's that kind of movie that you like it but you can't suggest to everyone. I must say that "Ken Park" doesn't make too much for a great director like Larry Clark considering his other controversial works such as "Kids" and "Bully" who were less disturbing but they had one thing more that this film didn't have: a social critic that urges changes in societies and in relationships without having that denounce appearance, pointing fingers to the audience; he just shows us the situation and the rest is up to the audience think for itself. His documentary style works here, you almost won't even notice that veteran actors like Amanda Plummer, Richard Riehle and Julio Oscar Mechoso are in the film along with unknown actors. A memorable film, a different and incredible experience, just when you think you know something you must see in a different perspective, and for that and more I loved "Ken Park". 10/10