Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)
Directed by Harmony Korine
Undiagnosed, untreated and generally untethered schizophrenic Julien lives with his pregnant younger sister, anorexic aspiring wrestler brother, sympathetic grandmother, and severely depressed and abusive German father.
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What critics compared Julien Donkey-Boy to
Grandma Joyce saw Kids, which starred Korine's then-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny and for which Korine contributed the sex-and-scatology screenplay.
The twisted family of "Julien Donkey-Boy" is captured in a concept pioneered by Danish directors in low-res, jerky, cinema-verite fashion by the mind behind "Kids" and "Gummo."
"Julien" is the second film, after "Gummo," from professional Wunderkind Harmony Korine, who first slouched into the media margins with his screenplay for Larry Clark's "Kids."
No less a cinema provocateur than he was when he debuted in the Nineties as one of the writers of Larry Clark’s infamous Kids and as the director of purposefully alienating Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, Harmony Korine has finally found popular success with his new film Spring Breakers – if the numbers from the film’s boffo opening weekend hold steady as it now goes into wider release.
His 1999 film Julien Donkey-Boy was done Dogme-style , and Trash Humpers was constructed to look like a found-footage film shot by the titular characters on crappy VHS.
Actually, the film was made by Harmony Korine, the wunderkind who wrote "Kids" at 22, and then quickly turned into the blunderkind of such unbearable experiments as "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy."
The end result is a pervasively weird yet oddly compelling effort from a filmmaker that clearly has no interest in going mainstream, although, if past efforts like Julien Donkey-Boy and Trash Humpers are any indication, this is probably as close as Korine will ever get to a movie made for the masses.
Indie veteran Harmony Korine learns a valuable lesson: why hang around with disconsolate small-town weirdos (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) when you can film young women shaking their bare breasts?
The youthful prodigy who wrote Kids went on to make the messy, fitfully intriguing Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy.
The movie was shot on DV by the extraordinary Anthony Dod Mantle (Celebration, Julien Donkey-Boy ), who helps Boyle exploit the visual possibilities of this still-emerging format.