What Not To Watch

If you want me to recommend movies, it's easier for me to list what you shouldn't see. There are movies out there that exist to shock, or appall. They exist to make you uncomfortable, and pivot around an disgusting premise, like Human Centipede, which I personally refuse to see since I was filled with revulsion just from the trailer.

But I have a list which I'll present here with reasons why you probably wouldn't want to see these films. Most of them I did enjoy, but one caused a co-viewer too much distress to the point you're blamed for that. As in why did you make me watch that? I don't make anyone do anything (I hadn't known the explicitness of the content at the time, to be fair. I went in with a vague understanding of the theme). I tend to see these movies when I'm alone purely so I can't have other people affect my viewing with complaints. You'll also note none of the below are horror/slasher/thriller films. They're all dramas or black comedies.

A Serbian Film
I personally don't feel this movie needs to exist. It doesn't endear me to the plight of the country the subject of the film revolves around. By wanting to illustrate how Serbians are "fucked from birth", you have to condone deplorable things done to an animatronic baby, and a child. You have to basically watch a string of snuff films and you're expected to find the final scene "ironic". It's a genuine assault on the senses. Most of the worst frames in question are burned into my memory. If anyone had asked me if they should see this, I'd warn them and dissuade them, but if my warning fails to put them off I won't take responsibility for their future trauma. I brought this upon myself from a friend's Facebook status simply decrying "NEWBORN PORN". My mistake. But I do tend to want to see things to form my own opinion. (PS I don't need to watch/read everything to form an opinion over whether it's bad). I mentioned this film in my Duck Butter rant as a case in point I endured A Serbian Film and not this Netflix monstrosity.

The Doom Generation
First Greg Araki film on the list. I don't particularly think the acting in this movie is stellar, it's meant to be the second film of a trilogy that ends with Nowhere, which is markedly better but not great either, and beginning with Totally Fucked Up, which I've not seen. Doom Generation begins as a romp and ends with rape. We're meant to follow three disaffected youths on this misadventure that involves the FBI and leaves room for a threesome. I could probably watch this again but not enjoy it for it's overuse of weird cliches and running gags. i.e. everything they buy costs 6.66 and the threesome's last names are literally Red, White and Blue. (I only just now learnt this from the Wikipedia entry - yes I depend on this heavily without access to these films). I told people not to watch it when I saw they rented it and I hope they ignored me, but I also watched this in high school so I was 17 and it had an R rating. My mother decided to drop her stance by that age on movies after she wouldn't let me watch Terminator 2 at 9 and worried about my watching Gremlins at 7, when I wasn't bothered by the movie, but she took me to bed to read me a story, probably to make her feel better. Either way, you're not missing a masterpiece by missing Doom Generation.

Mysterious Skin
Second Greg Araki film, which I did enjoy but haven't watched in many years. It's as confronting as Happiness, or Palindromes to a lesser extent, which I'll add to my list here for the sake of argument as a double bill. It's one of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's best movies. He took to this role with finesse, while Michelle Trachtenberg is much less compelling and was probably at the end of her Buffy stint so I always found her so hit and miss in terms of dramatic acting. Mysterious Skin is graphic as it is touching. Depictions of pedophilia always make for problematic films, you could hint at Lolita for a comparison, where the child is more the instigator or willing participant, but in this case the child is the victim despite their predilections, the adult is the perpetrator, and the victim has to console another child who had blacked out the abuse and mistook it for an alien abduction. It's a maturer film and handled well with the arc of the two boys realising their actual victimhood through a series of incidents throughout the film. There isn't a solid narrative per se, but I do like this film and if you're willing to see beyond the explicit content to the story itself, it's worth the journey to the end. But it's difficult and discomforting so I wouldn't blame anyone for checking out before the end of the first act.

Happiness/Palindromes
Both films are from Todd Solondz, another of my favourite directors, and both feature pedophilic themes. If you go back to my review of Palindromes, you'll get a rundown on how I felt so I won't go much further into this. I think Happiness is the harder of the two films to watch. You can only identify with the main characters on a small, fundamental level because they're presented as real humans with needs and internal conflicts who are in search of love but from literally all the wrong places. But the needs of one character, once they're played out, you can't sympathise beyond that point. It was suggested the molestation of the boy wasn't carried out when we cut away, but the person who said this missed vital info in the following scene of the boy's arrogant, homophobic father actually getting mad at the boy for not realising what's happened. It's the father's comments to the pedophile about his son acting like a gay that crystalise the pedophile's plans to have the boy sleep over. And the pedophile commits another act of indecency which gets him caught and arrested. Again, it's a confronting film and most of the laughs come from unease. Philip Seymour Hoffman could do no wrong, his pervert character whose wish to rape Lara Flynn Boyel's character, (who is desperate for something horrible to happen to her to lend authenticity to her maudlin poetry), is so close to being granted that the opportunity turns them both off completely, thus further humanising him. The stories intertwine through the three sisters, Joy being the most sympathetic since she fails to keep a relationship and is conned into sleeping with a student from her adult education class, all the while being pitied by her sister, the oblivious wife of the pedophile, for being single. The two of them look up to Lara Flynn Boyel's character for being rich and successful despite her dissatisfaction, but as in transpires, none of them have a perfect life. There's plenty going on in this film but whether you want to endure it to find the humanity within the main characters is another matter.

Ken Park/Kids
Films with controversy attract me as well. I knew about Kids when I was a kid, but I hadn't really understood how involved it was in terms of visuals until I saw it, I just knew of the controversy. Ken Park was banned here, I believe it still is, and a predominant movie reviewer was arrested for trying to screen the film for a small audience, the charges being dropped due to the backlash over the overwrought censorship laws in Australia. I've watched both films a couple of times. Kids is remarkable given a kid basically wrote it, but I never know how to feel about Harmony Korine's movies. (I still think of him as a kid and he's in his 40s now). Larry Clark has pervy eye - there are shots in Bully that are obscenely unnecessary. He seems to justify his films containing teenage sex as art but you can't trust this completely. However, ignoring that teenagers have sex, do drugs, run around at night and disobey their parents (be they ineffectual or oppressive) is a gross oversight on the viewer's part. It's ten o'clock, and yes your children are fucking their brains out, probably contracting illnesses due to poor sex ed practices, and are possibly even overdosing in bathtubs. They're probably down the skate park rolling joints and beating other kids with their skateboards. Kids was a wake up call style movie, and yes, the protracted rape scene in the end is very uncomfortable to watch considering the consequences being played out. Shot around the time the AIDS epidemic was still a major issue, where the misconception of it being a gay disease kept people complacent, Kids had a hell of a lot to say about the fact children weren't immune from this and covering their ears or turning a blind eye was a huge mistake. You're left with the opposing factors of Rosario Dawson's character being unsafe in her promiscuity and not getting infected, and Chloë Sevigny only having unprotected sex once with the shitty boy Lothario Telly, who's already carrying the virus and is running around town nailing virgins because it's his thing.(the irony with his character being he thinks sucking nitrous is dangerous). So then you're stuck in a "race against time" narrative before Telly hits up his next conquest and subjects her to the same fate. This thread keeps the film from being completely exploitative and shocking for the sake of it.

The major problem with Ken Park is the lengthy explicit scenes between the three main teens, and with the initial scenes between the bored housewife and one of the teens, Shawn, who's dating her teenage daughter. You're supposed to be shocked by the image of them sitting down to dinner with the oblivious husband and daughter, and neither party are caught out, but there's no other resolution to this story line other than you believe they'll keep the culprits will continue to sleep together until one of them (the housewife probably) gets bored. The boy is consenting to this but the wife is deciding to be irresponsible from her own dissatisfaction. You feel worse for Peaches, whose father is so obsessed with her deceased mother, he won't condone her giving her boyfriend a blowjob. Even after the physical and mental abuse he inflicts upon her, including forcing her through an ersatz marriage ceremony to him where she's wearing her mother's wedding gown, this doesn't keep her from continuing her sexual relationship with Shawn and Claude, the other main character of the film. None of them claim to be together romantically, they're wasting time because they live in a white trash town where some kid killed himself. Tate is the most broken kid in the film, who co-exists but doesn't interact with the other three teens. While his passive nature around the neighbourhood girls playing skip rope makes him appear innocuous, he's stuck in his own paraphilic tendencies which he doesn't apologise for, while tormenting his grandparents, whom he's living with, for invading his privacy and supposedly cheating on Scrabble. That last argument ends badly. Needless to say he's a sociopath and hardly deserving of any compassion for his disposition. Claude is bullied by his stepdad, his later actions prompting Claude to leave his apathetic and pregnant mother who hasn't defended him. No one wins in this film. The punchline may as well be you can either waste your time fucking and doing drugs or blow your brains out, like Ken Park does at the start of the film. I think the film had an agenda to paint a picture of lower income suburban towns where kids are destined for so little, like working grills at fast food joints or winding up pregnant.  "We might as well grow up, be adults and die," as Veronica Sawyer opined to a generation of disaffected youths back in the 80s. (PS I won't be watching the TV show, by the way, even if Greg Araki directed two episodes - otherwise I'll be here ranting for days).

If I think of any other films, I'll let you know. But for now, take the comments above as fair warning you're walking into some tricky subject matter watching any of these films.