Director: Larry Clark and Ed Lachman
Year Released: 2002
Rating: 1.5
Sexual dysfunction in suburbia that, in some ways, is an amalgamation of several other (better) movies: American Beauty, Tsai Ming-Liang's The River, American Psycho and any previous portrait of middle-class/white-trash life that involves incest, murderous impulses and/or repressed homosexuality. It isn't smart enough to provide any solid statement about the people it portrays - no one 'normal' is introduced to balance out the insanity - and too flippant and conceited to make any of its effective moments count (Clark and Lachman cut from a 'romanticized' scene where a teenage boy has sexual relations with his girlfriend's mother to a scene where his friend is cutting his very-pregnant mother's toe-nails in their dingy living room). It could just be a huge joke designed to get a rise out of everyone, since the character of Tate comes across as an extreme version of Harmony Korine (if you 'read' A Crack Up at the Race Riots, you'll notice that Tate's assigning names to mangled third-world children is an extreme example of his 'written' work), Clark casts himself as a hot dog vendor, perhaps a really off-color reference to his films' frequent display of full-frontal male nudity and the final three-way acts as a kick-to-the-pants of parent groups who obsessively worry 'about the children.'
