A beautiful young Filipina with a devout Catholic father successfully plays the dutiful virgin when Dad is around-until he catches her in flagrante delicto with her Bible-study boyfriend. Another sensitive skater is verbally and physically abused-and then drunkenly molested-by his macho butthead father. There is an unassuming kid enjoying a Graduate set-up, having sex with a daughter and her mother in parallel. The ensemble narrative unfolds as we meet several of Park’s teen friends, neighbors, and their families, whose bleak-to-bittersweet lives are introduced in segments focusing on each. Our suicidal lad is the titular Ken Park, or “Crap Neck” as his friends called him in a literal reversal of his name. Indeed, Korine wrote the screenplay from real-life stories Clark had collected from young people he had known, met, or heard about. Watching as the freckly, redheaded skater arrives at a crowded skate park, sits on one of its plateaus, removes a digital video camera and pistol from his backpack, and unceremoniously blows his brains out, I braced myself for the partly empathetic, partly exploitative vérité treatment of teenage wasteland that is Clark’s stock-in-trade. The boy-on-skateboard-with-punk-rock-sound-track intro sealed the connection-even if this was sunny, suburban Visalia, not the gray, gritty environs of New York City. The Kids parallels were immediately signaled in the credits, which noted that in addition to being codirected by Clark, the screenplay was written by Harmony Korine (who cowrote Kids). Lachman, a slim, compact man with a black fedora and wooden cane, said he was pleased to be back in Brooklyn, as one of his earliest features was The Lords of Flatbush (1974), and that he’d let Ken Park speak for itself. I found a seat in the packed theater as Lachman was introduced, and we were informed that Clark would be late. Kicking off a festival of Lachman’s lenswork, which includes I’m Not There (2007), Far From Heaven (2002), The Virgin Suicides (1999), Less than Zero (1987), True Stories (1986), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), and many other award-winning films, Ken Park turned out to be very much a Clark project- Kids II, say, even though, as the audience learned, it was supposed to be Kids I. I was at BAM Rose Cinemas last Friday night to catch Ken Park (2002), the as-yet-undistributed-in-the-US feature by chameleonlike cinematographer Ed Lachman, and to hear Lachman and codirector Larry Clark talk about the film.
#Review of ken park movie movie#
It seemed a tad contradictory to walk through Brooklyn in a howling nor’easter to see a movie about nihilistic Southern California skate kids, but so it goes. From left: Peaches's father (Julio Oscar Mechosa) and Peaches (Tiffany Limos). Left: Still from Ken Park, 2003, directed by Larry Clark and Ed Lachman.
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