Don't be put off by the man's reputation: the film is about dreams, theillusions our selves weave to tangle with things.
The first admission is that the film is the precursor to Trash andSpring but the vision is not refined yet. Contrary to variousmisconceptions, Korine is not a nihilist, about nothing, though heflirts with provocation. This has all manner of that, in its mainthrust however it is about beauty and meaning as much as any Malick.
The provocation is as in his other works about the ways we consumeculture, as biting as Godard in his time and at least here assuperficial. The image always reflects your view of the thing pictured,so when you perceive superficial things to rail against it's going tobe a superficial perception. Here an example is the segment in theretirement home with senile old people gawking at Michael Jackson, oneof them tapping his head with a hammer.
Now about the thing that matters here.
The film is centered on people acting roles - in Trash they werepretending to be old people, in Spring it's even more subtle and deep.Here impersonators of cultural icons; Jackson, Marilyn, Chaplin. Amongthem, Abe Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth and the Pope so he can haveopportunity to provoke later on; a Pope who stinks and so on.
So this is about people who are not content to be who they are, whohave to adopt an image that lets them go out and do things, opening upa horizon of life as performance with the complexities of self moreevident than just people on the street.
Part of the fun is to see the famous faces in all sorts of hijinks, thefaces picked because they're so recognizable; Jackson, Marilyn,Chaplin, each one's demons as famous as their glamorous light. Butmore, it's an opportunity to conjure our preconceptions ahead of us,show the complexity of that image we know: where we expected theneurotic self, we find people doing things, happily drinking in a pondor playing pingpong, where we expected glamorous light, we find thesame troubled souls as the rest of us, feeling small or neglected.
It falters for me in that Korine decided to have this play out in aseparate stage, a castle in Scotland, removed from life. It is his wayof hitting up against the problem: an inner life of dreams as thedesire to be someone else, as an escape to a stage that has no life togracefully perform for no one (seen as a performance they stage for anaudience of three people), so in the end when Jackson sheds theartificial self and returns to the world an ordinary guy, we see thatit's this world and your own self that has to be lived. (Korine musthave realized that if it is to pose a real question, the stage ofdreams has to be seen around us, accessible; ordinary middle America inTrash, the this-worldly illusion of Florida.)
So a mild failure from this view, but with hindsight a necessary one tomove beyond it. The gamble is to not be stuck grooming a view.
There's a great image here where we see the man cultivate the intuitivereach. In a separate subplot Herzog packs nuns in a plane to fly overthe tropics and drop parcels of food, a nun finds herself airborne; theecstatic rush of sky, the apprehension of god as the swirl of the wholehorizon, everywhere light and air.
The first admission is that the film is the precursor to Trash andSpring but the vision is not refined yet. Contrary to variousmisconceptions, Korine is not a nihilist, about nothing, though heflirts with provocation. This has all manner of that, in its mainthrust however it is about beauty and meaning as much as any Malick.
The provocation is as in his other works about the ways we consumeculture, as biting as Godard in his time and at least here assuperficial. The image always reflects your view of the thing pictured,so when you perceive superficial things to rail against it's going tobe a superficial perception. Here an example is the segment in theretirement home with senile old people gawking at Michael Jackson, oneof them tapping his head with a hammer.
Now about the thing that matters here.
The film is centered on people acting roles - in Trash they werepretending to be old people, in Spring it's even more subtle and deep.Here impersonators of cultural icons; Jackson, Marilyn, Chaplin. Amongthem, Abe Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth and the Pope so he can haveopportunity to provoke later on; a Pope who stinks and so on.
So this is about people who are not content to be who they are, whohave to adopt an image that lets them go out and do things, opening upa horizon of life as performance with the complexities of self moreevident than just people on the street.
Part of the fun is to see the famous faces in all sorts of hijinks, thefaces picked because they're so recognizable; Jackson, Marilyn,Chaplin, each one's demons as famous as their glamorous light. Butmore, it's an opportunity to conjure our preconceptions ahead of us,show the complexity of that image we know: where we expected theneurotic self, we find people doing things, happily drinking in a pondor playing pingpong, where we expected glamorous light, we find thesame troubled souls as the rest of us, feeling small or neglected.
It falters for me in that Korine decided to have this play out in aseparate stage, a castle in Scotland, removed from life. It is his wayof hitting up against the problem: an inner life of dreams as thedesire to be someone else, as an escape to a stage that has no life togracefully perform for no one (seen as a performance they stage for anaudience of three people), so in the end when Jackson sheds theartificial self and returns to the world an ordinary guy, we see thatit's this world and your own self that has to be lived. (Korine musthave realized that if it is to pose a real question, the stage ofdreams has to be seen around us, accessible; ordinary middle America inTrash, the this-worldly illusion of Florida.)
So a mild failure from this view, but with hindsight a necessary one tomove beyond it. The gamble is to not be stuck grooming a view.
There's a great image here where we see the man cultivate the intuitivereach. In a separate subplot Herzog packs nuns in a plane to fly overthe tropics and drop parcels of food, a nun finds herself airborne; theecstatic rush of sky, the apprehension of god as the swirl of the wholehorizon, everywhere light and air.
In 2005, Garry Wills wrote 'What Jesus Meant', in which he examined 'What Would Jesus Really Do' (also a book review in Esquire Magazine). In April 2010 a film, WWJD, starring Adam Gregory and based on In His Steps by Charles Sheldon, was released on DVD. On 31 March 2015 a sequel film was released WWJD What Would.