Customer Reviews

Gummo (Widescreen)

5 star:		(135)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(51)

 

 

Well, what can I say, director Korine seem to want to challenge the audience to find the justification for his debut film. Following by his screenplay, Kids, which he wrote at 19, further carves out his relevance in today's cinema as one weird director. This movie without a story or seemingly without a script can form many reactions. Korine follows various characters in a backwoods town at Xenia, Ohio which was once nearly devastated by a tornado. The lives followed here include mostly adolescents and centers on two boys, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). Solomon's father was killed during the Xenia tornadoes...and the film follows these boys on various destructive and self-destructive exploits that defy any cinematic validity. This is not film in most ways, it is real life. This "real life" includes glue sniffing, riding dirt bikes, sex and watching such challenging scenes as a man pimping his mentally ill wife who spends her days bedridden and dolled up like a 2-dollar hooker. At the same time we also meet two sisters, Dot (Chloë Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Glucksman), who want to become stripper's .Then there is also a boy (Jacob Sewell) who wanders around town wearing pink bunny ears.

Korine constructed his movie as a series of vignettes depicting these characters and various others engaged in disruptive behavior. The episodes range from funny and beautiful to gratuitous and senseless. I found the cinematography of "Gummo" stark, depressing but oddly hypnotic. It's really the way that the director filmed it (scratchy montage, digital low-quality shootings), and the conversations between the two boys that make the movie compelling and fascinating to watch. . I found the performances, including that of Chloe Sevigny to be honest, authentic and sad.

The movie is filmed like the lives of all the people in the village. There's no real development, people don't really do much to improve their situation, and it's a secluded world they live in. The weird southern-style music and the many unexplained characters like the pink-bunny boy make it a surreal experience. The most memorable scene: was Solomon bath scene.....tell me just how disgusting can a bath be and on top of that while eating dinner?!?

It would be nice to think that, if they do exist, at least we shouldn't have to look at them... This movie is, indeed, a more gritty and honest version of "Slacker". They make a good double feature. Of course, after seeing "Gummo", you will see the cast of "Slackers" Many viewers have despised this film and it's good that people are offended. Maybe it just means that the movie accomplished its goal.

This movie was a horrible waste of film and time. Not only was the plot very hard to follow, the acting was beyond unwatchable. This movie was possibly one of the worst i've ever seen. It was so bad i could'nt finish it, I nearly passed out.

Most tattoo artists I know say they are inundated with customers requesting to have American flags etched permanently into their bodies. I only wonder if any of these patriots have seen the movie, Gummo, a disturbing portrayal by filmmaker Harmony Korine of life in one small American town that they might not be so proud of. The film begins with a shot of Xenia Ohio, and a voiceover of a child's deadpan description. "A few years ago a tornado hit this place. It killed people left and right ... Houses were split open and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees ... I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt." These few sentences suggest the tragedy, mystery, and humor that surge through this film. However, most fans of your typical Hollywood flicks with explosive action and character developments may not be able to appreciate these features of Gummo. The movie has no plot, just a series of situations, no big screen stars, just small-time and even amateur actors. The characters they play simply exist on the screen without growing or changing. Most of them are lower-class white children of the type we rarely see outside the realm of trashy daytime talk shows. In fact, Korine actually tracked down Nick Sutton to play Tummler after he saw him on an episode of "The Sally Jesse Raphael Show" called "My Child Died from Sniffing Paint." When Sutton, who's a paint-sniffing survivor, was asked where he thought he'd be in a few years he replied simply, "I'll probably be dead." It was at that moment Korine claims to have fallen in love with the boy's image.
In the movie, Tummler is one of two boys who cruise through Xenia on BMX, looking for stray cats to kill and then sell to the local butcher. The other boy, whose odd-looking face and underdeveloped body made him the promotional poster boy for Gummo, is Solomon. Other characters include the local pimp whose only prostitute is an attention-starved mentally-challenged woman, a couple of local teenage girls with bleached out blond hair who spend their time doting on their youngest sister while trying to make their nipples larger, and Bunny Boy, who doesn't speak at all during the movie but haunts many scenes as he passes by donning little else but a hood of long bunny ears.
One gets the feeling that none of these people has ever left Xenia, a place of grimy poverty, casual cruelty, and the type of boredom that gives way to drunken parties where men arm wrestle and in a make-shift ring pit themselves one by one against a kitchen chair. Although this film will likely disturb and disgust most viewers, it is a chance to see one man's unique cinema graphic vision-a dreamy yet poignant art project that is not meant to be defined but reacted to. Gummo is an electrifying succession of startling, strange, and tender images. Whether or not moviegoers can claim they were enthralled or they walked out halfway through-two perfectly legitimate responses-it is nevertheless a type of poetry on the screen.
Towards the end of Gummo there is a scene where Solomon's mother is simultaneously giving him a bath and feeding him a spaghetti dinner. For dessert, after his hair is washed, he receives a candy bar that he accidentally drops into the brown bath water and then, completely unphased, eats. There is barely any dialogue in this sequence, no background music, and if you look close enough you can see a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall behind him with Scotch tape. This is Harmony Korine's idea of entertainment, bizarre images that stick with you long after the movie has ended.
At one point, Solomon's mother joins him in the basement while he is lifting weights-really handfuls of silverware bundled together-in front of a huge mirror. We watch his puny reflection, his deadpan determination. There is a hint of tenderness in his mother's eyes as she looks at him, a hint of pain as she puts on her dead husband's tap dancing shoes and begins to flop ridiculously around in them. Also when she picks up a handgun, jokingly holds it to her child's head and tells him to smile, there is a hint of something else, though it is difficult to determine exactly what it is. For sure, however, it is something entirely unique to Korine, a different brand of humor or tragedy or irony or beauty or perhaps none and all of the above. Scenes like this seem just to happen naturally in Gummo, and Korine, with the eye of an artist and the help of cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, shows them to us without judging or condescending to any of the characters involved.
The idea that places like Xenia actually exist in our country won't sit well with many people, yet Korine seems to want to play this lifelike texture up with grainy cuts from "home videos" of tornadoes and real people doing absurd standup routines for the camera. And while Gummo is confined to life in this one small impoverished American town, the soundtrack canvasses almost all aspects of American culture, ranging from Hoosier Hotshots to Madonna to Almedo Riddle singing the children's song, "My Little Rooster," to the death metal sounds of "Sleep," to Roy Orbison.
Ultimately, whether its lurid images of life are upsetting to viewers or not, Xenia is undoubtedly one pocket of American culture that should not be ignored. Neither should Harmony Korine's vision; and one must not forget that Gummo is, in essence, a visual experience. Without a storyline or any character development there's little else to go on anyway. However, the subtlety of each camera shot, the way each scene can be shockingly real, over-the-top, dream-like, touching, cruel, funny, and beautiful all at the same time makes for one bizarre film that's not to be missed.

I first saw this film in the late '90s. I had mixed feelings about it then, but some of the images have stuck with me to the point that I recently bought a DVD copy. After repeated viewings I have to say that this is one of the most interesting and original films I have ever seen.

This is a remarkable piece of cinema. Now, do not interpret this as an unqualified endorsement of the film - it isn't. There is much about Gummo that is puerile, self-conscious and pretentious in the extreme. On the other hand, the film is visually stunning (thanks in no small part to the acclaimed cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier) and many of the images and scenes possess unescapable power and beauty. And this is a highly visual film. The dialogue is sparse and appears to be be largely improvised. (I say "appears", because Korine has demonstrated a talent for scripting and a remarkable ear for natural dialogue - see Larry Clark's "Kids"). However, with some glaring exceptions, the dialogue works quite well.

There is no plot or character development in this film. To critize Gummo on that basis is missing the point. Rather, it is a series of vignettes portraying the lives of lower-class inhabitants of a fictional southern town that had been devastated by a tornado. Much has been made of the fact that many of these characters are, to put it politely, marginalized (a midget, an albino, several mentally handicapped people) and Korine has been criticized for exploiting these people for their shock value. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth and the director has actually shown uncommon respect and compassion for his characters. Unlike Hollywood caricatures (a la Forrest Gump), Korine has managed to potray these characters as real people possessing self-awareness and dignity under difficult (or even tragic) circumstances. No small feat, this.

Although far from perfect and NOT for every taste, Gummo is an original. Arguably the film shows such diverse influences as Werner Herzog (Even Dwarves Started Small), Terrence Malick (Badlands) and Richard Linklater (Slacker). However, it is a unique film that deserves a wider audience. Harmony Korine is undeniably talented and to dismiss him as a precocious wunderkind, while true to some extent, is far too facile. While you may disagree with his vision, it is nevertheless a valid one. I for one look forward to seeing his future output, even though he seems to have gone into hiding following the release of his equally impressive "Julien the Donkey Boy".

This movie was the biggest waste of time I'll never get back, don't bother with this one just let it go. Absolutly the most white trash movie ever!!!!! Wish I didn't even have to give this one a star!!!!

I have to take a few seconds out of my day to help out my fellow man and tell them to avoid "Gummo". And I mean avoid.

I've seen my share of bad movies. "Glitter"? Horrid. "The Real Cancun"? Mind numbingly awful. BUt they all pale in comparrison to this movie, which has my vote for the worst movie of all time.

You maybe asking yourself, what is "Gummo" about. Well, nothing. Absoulutly nothing happens. Some kids kill cats and sell them to a grocery store to buy gas to huff. Shocking. Shockingly bad. And then there's these albino girls who do, well, uhm nothing.

There are several scenes here that are either so bad there funny, so disgusting that you may break your stop button trying to make it all stop. The head charactor works out by lifitng spoons while his mother dances to Madonna and threatents to kill him. A group of drunk rednecks wrestle a table. A kid bathes in dirt brown water and drinks it. Does this sound like fun? Well, if you say yes, you need to have your head checked.

The writter/ director Harmoney Korine said he wanted to make something origanel. Well I have something origanel. lets string him from a tree and punsih him for punishing us. "Gummo" isn't just bad. There are no words to say how awful it is.

In a time when the film world is filled with art-house geeks(myself included) and resentment for the Hollywood conglomorate is abundant, there are films like this that seem to come out of that very hatred for the system. Harmony Korine is one of those angry geeks too, but all he knows how to express is anger and hatred towards, well, everything inside and outside of his films. After writing the screenplay for the controversial film "Kids" at only the age of 19, he goes on to make his first feature, "Gummo", a pseudo-documentary presented in a series of disconnected vingnettes that pretends to comment on how life in Ohio is once all is lost by a series of devastating tornadoes. It enraptured film artists like Werner Herzog and seemed to create a small fanbase for Korine. He would later go on to make America's first Dogma 95 film, "julien-donkey boy". Many have said "Gummo" will digust and disturb but also mesmerize and provide profound artful insight into the minds of all that see it. Sure not everything is made for everyone, but there's a place for everything and all things should be looked at. I tried to keep this in mind while watching "Gummo".

After having seen it, I've come to the conclusion that what it really is is pure angry elitism, distancing itself from the characters in the film by indirectly poking fun at them, and distancing itself from the audience by stating it's superiority to those who fail to understand it. First of all, Harmony Korine admittedly didn't attend film school, but perceives himself to know everything about the art of film production. He claims to "change the way" we see movies. What he really ends up doing is spitting in everyone's face. There's this underlying pretense that says because stupid Hollywood films are glossy and sound really nice, it's artful to go in the opposite direction. Consider the scene where the sisters rip electric tape off of their nipples(what's being said here?) and they bounce about on the beds to Buddy Holly's "Everyday". Korine then cuts to one of the girls dangling her tongue about erotically with the music no longer being sung by Buddy Holly, but by a terribly recorded version of the song by the cast members that's not only barely audible, but irritating to the ears. Watching this sums up the entire idea of the movie, that in order for it to be artful, it has to look and sound really ugly. Intelligent or insightful? On what? That beneath the surface of a perfect world, the world really looks like the sinkhole in "Gummo"? Oh dear, I've learned a lot from your "life experiences" that only YOU know about. Idiotic, pretentious and self-aggrandizing? Most certainly.

The final message of "Gummo" pretty much says in no uncertain terms, that if you are poor you are a circus freak. If you lose everything to a tornado, you'll want to kill cats and sell their dead bodies to sniff glue. If you have no money, you and your children will turn into white trash and attack boys dressed in rabbit suits that [tinkle] off of highway overpasses, play an accordian on a toilet, and run to the camera to hold a dead cat in front of it. "Gummo" is the cinematic equivalent of the painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung and paper cutouts of testicles strewn about it. It gives the arthouses and independent film movements a bad name. Harmony Korine is an angry geek who ran around with a camera enough to produce something that feels like a slice-of-life collage to many, but is actually more vacuous, technically and intellectual inept and stifling than anything the Hollywood system could ever produce. It is pure hatred and filth pretending to be art. It is idiocy masquerading as intellect. It is the product of a self-absorbed wannabe who somehow managed to get his hands on a camera and a contract with Fine Line Films. Avoid.

I'm not going to tell you not to see this movie, because everyone should see it, if only because it simply must be seen to be believed. It is very possibly the worst film I have ever seen in my life. This movie severely disturbed me--not necessarily because of its grotesque images, but because they were empty, because the film's sole purpose is to sicken. Apparently there are moments meant to be taken as funny, but the few times I laughed don't make up for the sleepness nights that I experienced afterward, so horrified was I by what I had seen. Sick can be funny, but very rarely is sadism--and it takes a more talented filmmaker than Harmony Korine to make sadism funny.

The film is nothing more than a series of horrifying episodes. There are numerous scenes of boys capturing, killing, torturing and mutilating cats from their neighborhood, and then selling the bodies to a resteraunteur. Boys visit a prostitute with Down's syndrome who is being pimped out by her own husband. A mother threatens to shoot her son in the head because he won't smile. Teenage girls put duct tape on their nipples, make out with boys in their pool during a rainstorm, and are almost molested by a man who helps them look for their lost cat (no points for guessing what happened to it). A little girl describes her father molesting her. Whole families get high together. Deaf people are openly mocked.

And, in the film's most nauseating (but not necessarily most disturbing) scene, a little boy is bathed by his mother while eating spaghetti and gulping chocolate milk (when his candy bar falls into the murky brown bathwater, he fishes it out and continues eating it). Words cannot express how disgusting this is to watch--you have to see it for yourself to understand.

The only even remotely funny scenes in the film include (1) an albino waitress dancing hysterically to music from her car radio and expressing her love of Patrick Swayze, and (2) a sequence in which a kitchen full of rednecks beat each other with chairs that is so endlessly long that, eventually, laughter is the only method of relief.

I am an openminded film-viewer. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about cinema--and I can understand why some critics have compared GUMMO to the work of many celebrated film directors like Fellini, whose AMARCORD is a similarly unstructured, episodic film about life in a small Italian town. Both films are surreal and sometimes disgusting, but AMARCORD is also poetic, meaningful, and entertaining (in other words, worlds away from GUMMO). Some have said that GUMMO is comparable to the films of Fellini or Werner Herzog. I fail to see the connection.

See GUMMO at your own risk--I found it the most reprehensible viewing experience I have had in many, many years.

..."Gummo" has no plot; it's a series of vignettes about "life" in Ohio that (kind of) come together. There's all the stuff that's "commonplace" in the Buckeye State: rape, incest, cat torture, drug use, you name it, it's there. There's not much else to say about the movie; one could extol its virtues, but then one could extol the virtues of early Stalinist propaganda, or "Die Eternische Juden" as well. Extol all you want, it doesn't change the underlying ignorance and bias inherent in those films - or this one.

That being said, "Gummo" is exactly the kind of bigoted [garbage] that people think small towns are like - specifically, people who have never been to small towns, or the only time they spent in small towns was driving through (or watching "Deliverance")."Gummo" was even filmed in Tennessee, using extras from Tennessee - they couldn't get the location right, and Korine's so-called experiment" by using "real Ohio people" is as false as Miss Cleo's fortune telling.

In other words, it's not reality. It's a made-up bourgeoisie Candyland created by pseudo-intellectuals who like to turn their nose up at the very people they supposedly want to drag out of corporate oppression. If you REALLY want to learn about small-town Ohio life, go visit Ohio. I can suggest some very nice bed and breakfasts, and central Ohio is wonderful in the autumn. If you REALLY want to depress yourself with someone's invented fantasy and use your dollars to support ignorance, by all means, buy or rent "Gummo". It's your call.

Final Grade: F

Gummo takes place in a small Ohio town where the audience follows some kids that lead bizarre and disturbing lives without parental supervision or guidance. The imagery is grotesque and distressing as it dissects the daily life of the children and displays their violent nature. The film elicits thoughts of social learning as the children display adult behaviors and seek attention and affection in adult-like patterns. The adults escape their reality through alcohol as the kids do through glue. The morbid tone is enhanced as the film is displayed like documentary, which it is not. In the end Gummo offers an interesting perspective as it does not have a beginning nor an ending. It merely displays scenes that should initiate thoughts of the disturbing reality of children without parental guidance, which leaves the audience in disbelief.