Gummo (1997)

Harmony Korine's directorial debut can be characterized as a hyper realistic view of unrelated vignettes depicting a poor white-trash population recently struck by a tornado. In its wake, the tornado leaves a small populace acting on impulse often in a juvenile and immature way. Making up about half the film are aged montages paired with a detached narrator serenely speaking of suicide, homophobia, prostitution, sexual abuse, euthanasia, or one of the many other issues covered in this film. The other half loosely follows two boys on a quest to rid the town of feral cats profiting at a local butcher shop with the mutilated animal carcasses slung over their shoulder in a garbage bag. Other single scenes include a drunk man(Harmony Korine) hitting on a gay midget, a man prostituting his Down Syndrome sister, several drunk men wrestling with a chair, and two boys 'killing' another boy with bunny ears in a junk yard in which my favorite line is spoken with absolution by a 7 year old cowboy. "It smells like a pile of bullshit!" Gummo is a beautifully shot, idiosyncratic, bleak, and sometimes humorous examination of a community stuck in a spiral of all kinds of bullshit.

6.5/10 - steven