Word: donkeys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After Giron, we're headed to Cienfuegos, through more fields of tobacco, then bananas. When night comes again, there are no streetlights, no lights anywhere, and on the winding two-lane roads, the avoidance of donkey carts and tractors and people requires tremendous, arcadelike hand-eye coordination. All is dark, and then things will suddenly be in front of us, lit as if by a camera's flash; swerving is an essential skill. Up ahead a car is parked, hazards blinking. There is a group of people around the car. Obviously an ambush. We should not stop...
...psychological nihilism of adolescents living at the fringe. In his 1997 directorial debut, Gummo, Korine attempted to "push humor to extreme limits" by provoking random passers-by into fistfights and then filming the results with hand-held cameras. The filmmaker's latest audacious feature, the uniquely bizarre julien donkey-boy, strips cinema to even barer levels. Starring Ewan Bremner ("Spud" from Trainspotting) and Chlo Sevigny ("Jennie" from Kids), the film provides a keyhole view into the life of a schizophrenic and his disturbingly dysfunctional family. Using no formal script and few special effects, donkey-boy is at once an avant...
...school for the blind. He lives at home with his pregnant sister (Sevigny), tyrannical father (played by renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog), athletic brother Chris (Evan Neumann) and unnamed grandmother (played by Korine's own grandmother, Jorce). In terms of structure, that's about all there is, for donkey-boy is not a traditional narrative. Certainly, there's a sequence of events (albeit bizarre ones)--Julien kills a boy in the park, Julien befriends a blind ice-skater, Julien goes to church, etc.--but no particular story is told. Instead, the viewer is presented with a motley assemblage of images...
...promptly left the theater. Others, however, sat rapt with attention throughout the closing credits. The wildly mixed response to the film is likely because of its unconventionality. As the first American "Dogme 95" film, a Norwegian cinematic movement that calls for the "stripping down of film," donkey-boy was shot using hand-held cameras and without written dialogue or special lighting and sound. Throw in some low-tech visual effects (superimposing, slow motion, etc.), and the result is a visual spectacle unlike anything in the American film tradition. Rumor has it that Steven Spielberg is planning his own "Dogme" film...
...Bizarre, unpredictable, grotesque and yet strangely poignant, julien donkey-boy is above all unforgettable. If you're tired of the standard Hollywood fare, check out this daring experiment in cinematic syntax...