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.
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