JULIEN DONKEY-BOY A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): *
I have good news for you. You -- yes, you! -- could be a filmmaker and have your name in lights.
No, you don't have to go to film school. You don't have to think of a story. And you don't even have to film your movie; you already have the ingredients on the shelves in your den -- those homemade videotapes. No, not those sharp looking new ones made with your fancy new camcorder. Those old, grainy, shaky ones, in which your subjects ramble quasi-unintelligibly. Take those, purposely assemble the clips in random order, and, voilà, you are a filmmaker. Your masterpiece can even win the "Dogme 95" seal of approval, which says that your film was made without use of artificial lights, sounds, props, etc.
Lest you think the chance of your rise to fame is a pipe dream, consider JULIEN DONKEY-BOY by writer and director Harmony Korine (KIDS and GUMMO). There is probably a story buried there somewhere, but it takes the press notes to decipher it, not that you'd care. The film is the first American movie made according to the Dogme 95 precepts.
Sandwiched between long cinematic wastelands are periodic incidents designed to disgust us. One has the lead character, Julien (Ewen Bremner), take out his false teeth at dinner and dunk them several times in his red soda. (The colors in the film are so far off that one can never be sure what the actual color was.) Another has Julien leaning over the camera as spit comes out from his mouth and snot drops from his nose. In the story's pièce de résistance, a performer comes to entertain some kids. His trick is that he stuffs more and more lit cigarettes into his mouth, pretending to swallow them. Eventually he crams in an entire dozen and then spits them all back out, still smoking. Impressed, huh?
In another episode, an armless card player jokes about not having a card up his sleeve. And then there's the incident in which Julien's father (Werner Herzog) wants Julien to put on the dress of his dead mother so the father can dance with him.
"Shut up, shut up," the father says after hearing Julien recite a poem made up almost entirely of the word "chaos." "I don't really like it. It's too artsy-fartsy." The father then goes on to describe part of a "real movie" -- a Dirty Harry movie. The father's mere description of a scene from that movie was better than the entire JULIEN DONKEY-BOY, a movie so edgy that you'd like to push it off the edge of a cliff.
JULIEN DONKEY-BOY runs a tediously long 1:36. It is rated R for language, some sexuality and disturbing images. It would be acceptable for teenagers, who would likely be just as bored as the adults.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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