Harmony Korine on “Trash Humpers.”

I guess it wasn’t surprising that most New York critics had negative reactions to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers at yesterday’s New York Film Festival. This is a movie with incredible avant garde aspirations—a first-person movie assembled out of morbid imagery and feelings of isolation. As Korine intended, it does play like found footage by leaving out a generic narrative or mythology to guide its characters. It also works as a provocation, pushing audience’s limits as far as what they’re willing to endure, but if you jive with the rhythm of this playfully bizarre experiment (and I do), it’s no less engaging than a Jonas Mekas diary film. (And if a Jonas Mekas diary film bores you to tears, then Trash Humpers won’t do it for you, either.)

But I do have a problem with a number of critics having hostile reactions to “the idea” of Harmony Korine and allowing that to inform their hostility toward his latest film. I spoke to several people who freely admitted that while they had only passing familiarity with his other works, they found him to be an outrageous figure whose latest film was exclusively empowered by his reputation. Puh-leeze. The “naughty Korine” legend was kickstarted by the media ten years ago, when a punkish kid not yet old enough to legally drink randomly stumbled into the spotlight with a major first screenplay. Couple that with these same critics simply hearing about how Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy contain meaningless subversion, and you have two vaguely defined ingredients that often lead to Korine hatred. (Some people who have seen these movies dismiss them only because they think Korine is aesthetically lazy, which I find troublesome as well.)  This treatment is unfair to Korine’s artistic intentions. He’s a guy heavily inspired by underground cinema and video art, which makes Trash Humpers wholly consistent with his earlier achievements (with the exception of Mister Lonely, an enjoyable digression) and an impressive elaboration on them.

Here’s my interview with Korine from this week’s New York Press.

Check out the Trash Humpers “trailer” below:

erichkohn posted on October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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