Send these kids to camp -- fast! Or do SOMETHING. Wow, what a life. Basically this is a picture of the life kids who occupy a certain social space lead during their summer vacations. It jumps from episode to episode with a few continuing characters, including Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.
To the extent that there is a story at all, it is this. The movie opens with the teen aged Leo Fitzpatrick successfully seducing the teen aged Chloe Sevigny, who is a virgin. Shortly afterward Sevigny is told she tested positive for HIV, meaning that Fitzpatrick is an asymptomatic carrier. Sevigny spends the rest of the movie looking for Fitzpatrick to tell him about it and prevent him from infecting anyone else. She is waylaid by encounters with strange teenagers, although to be sure they are all strange, and when she finally locates Fitzpatrick at a raucous party he is already putting the blocks to yet another virgin. Sevigny closes the door and staggers away to crash on the couch. Later that night, another creepy teenager wakes up, wanders about, notices the unconscious Sevigny, and does her in what appears to be two different ways. So much for AIDS.
That's the thread the movie hangs on, but it serves not as a point in itself but as an illustration of the absence of any point. The kids do everything that ordinary people would consider revolting. They begin using dope the minute they wake up. They shoplift clumsily. They pee on walls in public places. They get drunk. They vomit. They fornicate at will. They don't work. They litter freely. They swear constantly. They ogle each other's mother's breasts. They get into fist fights on the slightest of pretexts. They recognize no checks on their appetites. We hardly see any adults and the ones we do see aren't necessarily much better -- an overweight and ill-groomed mother smoking while she nurses an infant.
It's all distasteful but you can't really disengage yourself from what's happening on the screen. It would be like looking away from a gory traffic accident.
Maybe that's a problem, too, because the film is so impregnated with debauchery that after a while it becomes frankly unbelievable. One DAY of this kind of life would stun an elephant. More than that, it's too much of a bad thing. Not a single kid we see has any redeeming qualities whatever, except for two virgins who yield readily enough to Fitzpatrick's snake oil. And for all the vulgarity and all the violence done to our ideas of good taste, I'm not sure that the film makers have really gotten it all down accurately.
I'll just give two examples in which a viewer might become conscious of the effort it takes to suspend disbelief. (1) In a drug dealer's apartment (where kids who look about nine years old are doing dope) the music from the boombox is what sounds like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. I don't think so. I hate to buy into stereotypes too easily, but what I expect to hear is not demanding, classical jazz but hip hop. (2) In Central Park during a drug score, an exojuvenile intrudes on the gang and takes offense at some remark about a skateboard. The alien is a black guy. The gang of dopers who are buddies are racially mixed. They all gang up on the stranger and beat hell out of him, ending it with a possibly lethal whack full in the face with the skateboard. It doesn't jibe with experience. I have a feeling that the fist fight would gradually divide the group along racial lines.
This is a heck of a movie. Man, the kids should bottle that energy. They'd be on the Big Board in no time. It could be found in cans in Quick-Stop reefers. ADENORUSH -- for that "scootch" feeling. But it's too spelled out. There isn't a moment's rest. I'm not talking about sitting down to ponder Marcus Aurelius. I mean just shutting up for a few minutes. The final shot may be symptomatic. Dawn is crashing around the sleeping, benumbed and benighted bodies the morning after a party. During the night the place has been thoroughly trashed and two girls have probably now caught HIV from our index case. One body, still holding a bottle, stirs a little and comes to life. Its eyes open. It stares blearily into the camera lens and wonders aloud, "What happened?" In "The 400 Blows," 45 years earlier, Truffaut made the same point simply by ending on a freeze frame of the delinquent kid caught on the run, staring fixedly and silently at the camera. "Kids" suggests that at the end the director doesn't trust us enough to have gotten the point, although we've been hit over the head with it for an hour and a half.
To the extent that there is a story at all, it is this. The movie opens with the teen aged Leo Fitzpatrick successfully seducing the teen aged Chloe Sevigny, who is a virgin. Shortly afterward Sevigny is told she tested positive for HIV, meaning that Fitzpatrick is an asymptomatic carrier. Sevigny spends the rest of the movie looking for Fitzpatrick to tell him about it and prevent him from infecting anyone else. She is waylaid by encounters with strange teenagers, although to be sure they are all strange, and when she finally locates Fitzpatrick at a raucous party he is already putting the blocks to yet another virgin. Sevigny closes the door and staggers away to crash on the couch. Later that night, another creepy teenager wakes up, wanders about, notices the unconscious Sevigny, and does her in what appears to be two different ways. So much for AIDS.
That's the thread the movie hangs on, but it serves not as a point in itself but as an illustration of the absence of any point. The kids do everything that ordinary people would consider revolting. They begin using dope the minute they wake up. They shoplift clumsily. They pee on walls in public places. They get drunk. They vomit. They fornicate at will. They don't work. They litter freely. They swear constantly. They ogle each other's mother's breasts. They get into fist fights on the slightest of pretexts. They recognize no checks on their appetites. We hardly see any adults and the ones we do see aren't necessarily much better -- an overweight and ill-groomed mother smoking while she nurses an infant.
It's all distasteful but you can't really disengage yourself from what's happening on the screen. It would be like looking away from a gory traffic accident.
Maybe that's a problem, too, because the film is so impregnated with debauchery that after a while it becomes frankly unbelievable. One DAY of this kind of life would stun an elephant. More than that, it's too much of a bad thing. Not a single kid we see has any redeeming qualities whatever, except for two virgins who yield readily enough to Fitzpatrick's snake oil. And for all the vulgarity and all the violence done to our ideas of good taste, I'm not sure that the film makers have really gotten it all down accurately.
I'll just give two examples in which a viewer might become conscious of the effort it takes to suspend disbelief. (1) In a drug dealer's apartment (where kids who look about nine years old are doing dope) the music from the boombox is what sounds like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. I don't think so. I hate to buy into stereotypes too easily, but what I expect to hear is not demanding, classical jazz but hip hop. (2) In Central Park during a drug score, an exojuvenile intrudes on the gang and takes offense at some remark about a skateboard. The alien is a black guy. The gang of dopers who are buddies are racially mixed. They all gang up on the stranger and beat hell out of him, ending it with a possibly lethal whack full in the face with the skateboard. It doesn't jibe with experience. I have a feeling that the fist fight would gradually divide the group along racial lines.
This is a heck of a movie. Man, the kids should bottle that energy. They'd be on the Big Board in no time. It could be found in cans in Quick-Stop reefers. ADENORUSH -- for that "scootch" feeling. But it's too spelled out. There isn't a moment's rest. I'm not talking about sitting down to ponder Marcus Aurelius. I mean just shutting up for a few minutes. The final shot may be symptomatic. Dawn is crashing around the sleeping, benumbed and benighted bodies the morning after a party. During the night the place has been thoroughly trashed and two girls have probably now caught HIV from our index case. One body, still holding a bottle, stirs a little and comes to life. Its eyes open. It stares blearily into the camera lens and wonders aloud, "What happened?" In "The 400 Blows," 45 years earlier, Truffaut made the same point simply by ending on a freeze frame of the delinquent kid caught on the run, staring fixedly and silently at the camera. "Kids" suggests that at the end the director doesn't trust us enough to have gotten the point, although we've been hit over the head with it for an hour and a half.