Kids

Larry Clark's 1995 whirlwind of controversy Kids is one of the more popular examples of the American independent movies created by indie-film figureheads Clark and his buddy Harmony Korine in the 90s and 00s - other examples being Gummo, Ken Park and Bully. These are films which surround American no-hope teenagers, are stripped of any sort of sheen or fantasy, and are presented frankly, uncomfortably and without any sort of single, guiding morality. To many, this made Kids a depressing and irresponsible film with zero artistic merit. To me, its subjective nature was its greatest artistic merit.


To say that Kids concerns 'issues' such as teenage delinquency, gang mentality, HIV, date rape, drugs, drinking and underage sex is to give the wrong impression. It makes the film sound like some kind of 'very special episode' that the USA is so very fond of. While all these 'issues' are the abstract enemies of the family-oriented American media, and to a lesser extent the herd mentality of my own country, this is a film where no lessons are learned and no opinions are laid down by the filmmakers. Superbad this is not. Instead, the film is very much what you see is what you get. Most of these characters are not radical visions of a young, hip generation, but are actually just a collection of dicks, douchebags and idiots. The main character, if one exists, is Telly, an arrogant self-styled stud who enjoys taking the virginities of underage girls - the embodiment of every teenage girl's parents' worst fears. His exploits, some including borderline rape, go completely unpunished by the end of the film. Karma does not exist within Kids.

The storyline to Kids is essentially just a mishmash of the dealings and doings of a collection of seemingly parent-less New York teenagers over the course of a single day. Getting high, skating, going to parties, you know how the typical modern-day adolescent archetype works. One of the few redeeming and essentially guiltless characters is Jennie, a naive but seemingly intelligent girl who like so many others lost her virginity to Telly, and after discovering their single encounter led to her becoming infected with HIV, spends the plot on a journey to find him. Things don't go so well, she ends up taking a pill or two and getting completely fucked off her face before she finds any success, but her determined presence is a reminder that Telly isn't just breaking a few morals and values in his sexual endeavours, but that HIV is spreading - visibly - across pretty much the entire main cast as the film goes on.


As I said before, Kids was lambasted for its explicitness, particularly in the whole sexual side of things. I mean, there's some frequent depictions of underage sex and nudity throughout, and Clark was called out for his arguably exploitative shots of young males hanging around with their shirts off, but as I talked about when discussing Elfen Lied, nudity and sex in film doesn't always mean that the movie should be watched with a box of kleenex. Thankfully I'm desensitised to the point of complete apathy, but I can see how people weren't so keen on watching what is essentially a teenage sex fest that didn't have American Pie's lightheartedness. Thankfully, none of the sex is particularly graphic - it's all a little uncomfortable and awkward, but nothing to call a lawyer about. The movie's tagline should be "It's not that these things don't happen all the fucking time". It's not all about sex, though. The whole thing has a weird darkness to it. At one point, for instance, the kids meet up at the skate park, get high and beat the ever-loving shit out of some guy who dared to chat shit to a group of angsty youths. And there's also the kids who've barely made it to a double-digit age who sit in a row puffing on ganja like they're some kind of rap group. I mean, this isn't the Daily Mail, but you don't see these sorts of things in Eastenders.

You might ask that for a film with no real message or meaning, what's so special about it? Well, the thing is that I'm one of the disgruntled teenage youth that's so poorly represented in the media that whenever I turn on an episode of Skins, I feel like I'm a Japanese person watching Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. So it's good to see something that treats teenagers like they're actual human beings, even if those human beings are virtueless shitheads that only bare a slight resemblance to even the most depraved adolescents of rural Suffolk. In fact, speaking of Skins, I'd rather see teenagers portrayed at their most disturbingly real than to see a soulless attempt at teenage fantasy. Teenagers are the most emotionally intense, existentially challenged and genuinely complex people of humanity. Well, at least for the most part. We deserve accurate representation, and I don't believe that such a thing is impossible. Even if it's a bit extreme, Kids is still a shining revelation of the darker corners of adolescence, warts and all, and while it's undoubtedly intended to be different things to different people, for me, it's one of my favourites.

Indie films shouldn't really have trailers, but here's this one's.

Elfen Lied

Ever since I finished re-watching Death Note, I became famished for a little more in the way of anime. I've always had ambiguous feelings when it came to Japanimation, as my experience of it seems to dip and dive between some of the best things I've ever seen and some of the stupidest, cheeriest and un-nervingly perverted things I never really wanted to see. While I could talk for hours about the pros and cons of anime itself, the most recent weird Japanese cartoon I've laid into for the past few days, Elfen Lied, lies somewhere inbetween anime's polarity of brilliance and stupidity.


I was drawn in at first mainly because I was looking for dark anime, you know, something a bit bolder and bloodier than just your average Bleach or Naruto or any of that shite. My meticulous research brought me to Elfen Lied, already startling for possessing a German name that bears very little actual relevance to the plot or anything at all, really. I was also helplessly tantalised by the weird, kawaii imagery (particularly on the manga covers) being juxtaposed with descriptions of 'frequent nudity', 'dark subject matter' and 'sadistic, bloody violence'. In all honesty, it's those three things that finally sold it to me and got me firing the motherfucker up on YouTube. The brief synopsis on Wikipedia all sounded very generic anime-style -mutants, sci-fi, girls with animalistic features, etc - but there was no way I expected the thirteen episodes of pure emotional onslaught that was to follow.

Elfen Lied is one seriously harrowing experience, to say the least. On the surface it's all very generic Japanese weirdness - stupid amounts of blood, characters that barely behave like real people, high-pitched girls being both childlike and adorable yet intended as sexually promising, etc, etc, etc - but when you actually knuckle down and watch the whole of the very short thirteen-episode series, you'll find that the experience is so emotionally draining that you'd wished you spent the last six and a half hours watching something a whole lot happier. By the end of the series, when the flashbacks started popping up, nearly every episode was a different experiment in gut-wrenching character-driven misery. Don't let that wide-eyed cute girl on the cover fool you - the entire series is one long wallow in pure nihilistic gloom. And when there isn't gloom, there's shock.

I guess I should run over the story a little bit. Basically, the series revolves around the existence of the Diclonius, a race of all-female mutant people whose characteristics include two nubby horns on their head and the ability to manipulate and cut things with a number of invisible appendages sprouting from their body, which they use almost exclusively to murder human beings, and occasionally each other. These mutants are either killed at birth or, like most superpowered mutant people, imprisoned by the establishment in a top-secret military hideout in order to be cruelly experimented on. Needless to say, one of them escapes, and escapes in style, as the bloody massacre of the series' opening ten minutes shows. This mutant is the series' anti-hero, Lucy, who leaves the research facility injured in such a way that she spends the entire series switching between two personalities - one her usual human-despising, all-powerful and generally stern-looking self, and the other a character that is nothing but the embodiment of fan service, a bit like the girl from Chobits without the ability to take the piss out of itself.


Despite the synopsis' focus on the existence of these mutants, in reality the real soul-charging power of the series comes from much of the actions of humankind. Characters are abused, neglected, raped, abandoned, tortured, and of course brutally murdered. The violence is gratuitous, yes, and at first you feel it exists solely for spectacle, but in actuality the series' shock value comes less from a teenage girl using magic to pull a man's head off, but from the various integrated characters traversing through some sort of painful arc where they end up worse off than they were in the first place. The flashbacks are the show's main points of heartstring tugging - episodes 8 and 9 especially, which concern Lucy's past as a childhood outcast, are particular heartbreakers in the vein of Gobbolino the Witch's Cat meets Carrie. In fact, it's the unnerving combination of dark, dark subject matter with the Japanese's insistence on making everything cute and adorable that makes the more horrific parts of the anime really succeed.

Some of the shallower complaints against the series surround its gratuitous violence and nudity, and boy is there a lot of nudity. However, in all honesty, I was expecting a lot worse. The nudity here isn't all that perverted and tasteless, give or take. There's no graphic sex or anything (the closest it comes is disturbing flashbacks to child rape, but at least that's meant to be disturbing). The West is still finding it hard to get its head around the fact that nudity isn't always sexual and the portrayal of nudity on TV isn't always meant to give its audiences a hardon. Although, when it comes to the various fourteen year old girls bathing together and giggling, there's an inability to deny that this anime like so many others suffers from 'creepy Japanese pedo' disease. There's even a scene where one female character grabs another's breasts for no particular reason than to create nervous laughter. It's true that this anime's strong points are less about its dire attempt at raising a chuckle and more about its bombardment of sorrow. There's also a strange choice of music when it comes to the credits of every episode. While the intro sequence is a beautifully crafted mix of Latin classical music and Klimt paintings, the end credits jump into some shitty J-rock that totally spoils the mood.

The anime-watching community seems divided on Elfen Lied. Some call it a daring masterpiece that questions the value of life and the darker sides of humanity, and some call it ridiculously gratuitous in its X-rated elements and heavy-handed with its repertoire of depressing storylines. I myself think it's genuinely brilliant. It's not perfect in any way, it's all over the place and most of the characters act a little too illogically, especially regarding everyone's acceptance in finding a girl with fucking horns coming out of her head, but when it comes down to it, this morose and melancholy series of tragedies is going to be haunting me for a long, long time to come. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you can stomach the first episode and you felt sad at the end of Of Mice and Men, then you're probably going to enjoy this blood-soaked gem.

No trailer in the world could truly explain this beautiful monstrosity, but click here for a nice try. (In English)