Ken Park (2003)
Directed by Larry Clark
Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
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What critics compared Ken Park to
The creators of Kids (1995), director Larry Clark and writer Harmony Korine, reunite for this equally disturbing but sadly less cohesive film.
I can’t imagine Ken Park being anywhere near as tolerable as it is without the tender and surreal uplift of its brilliant bookends, but it’s also difficult not to take these lovely moments as desperate attempts to offer a context for this otherwise familiar Kids procedural.
“Ken Park” continues “Kids” helmer Larry Clark's cinematic view of troubled teenagers.
Co-directed with his Bully cameraman Ed Lachman and based on an old screenplay by Harmony Korine (he wrote for Clark circa Kids, but then they fell out), this is the director's third film about teen alienation - and the best.
I was not, to put it mildly, a big fan of Larry Clark's 1995 debut feature "Kids."
With Kids , he shocked moviegoers (especially parents) with his group of smooth-skinned city teens humping like mad, partying to disgusting excess, and spreading death.
Movies like Kids and Ken Park have been labeled pornographic and offensive, treating the teenage years of its characters like a visit to Caligulas falling Rome.
Ken Park is more a study of adults in extremis than a scuzzy portrait of teen life; it has more in common with Todd Solondz' Happiness than with Kids.