Bully (the movie).

Bully on the other hand, while being a true story, is incredibly unbelievable as portrayed. The power relationships between the girlfriend and boyfriend, or between the two best friends is barely explored and it seemed to be implied that the bully's treatment of Marty could be reduced to his 'creepy' and (sometimes) hidden homosexuality and jealousy of women.

Several things in the film are intentionally nausea inducing, if not for their graphic nature than because of cheap camera stunts (like the scene where everyone is standing in a circle and the camera twirls around a couple hundred times before the conversation finally ends).

Bully had a lot of potential to build tension, to develop unusual characters, and to entertain or frighten along the way. Instead, Clark seems only concerned about shocking and tittilating his audience, although he is barely even capable of that. If the point was supposed to be that murder was not "real" to these kids and that their lives consisted of sex drugs and boredom, that's fine...but why hammer the audience over the head with the 'banality of evil' schtick for over two fucking hours?

So basically, lame cinematography, poor character development, little emotional involvement, preachy 'evils of suburban youth culture' message, exploitative direction, (mostly) bad acting, crappy dialogue, worse script, and the direction of a man who you can almost hear beating off behind the camera. I can't even hail it as a successful trashy movie.

That said, the murder scene is still affecting, although I felt like a victim by the time the credits were rolling.

It is fascinating and disturbing. I think people have trouble with the movie because they have trouble in acknowledging that these kids exsist. I know I did. As I had come from a upper class background but without the empty dimensions that those children had faced.

Though if you want a truly disturbing cinematic experience I would suggest an evening's viewing of the Hubert Selby Jr's adaptations along with Bully. You will need to bathe after a night like that.

(Bully's tagline = "It's 4 a.m... do you know where your kids are?" cf. Road to Ruin, Assassin of Youth, Reefer Madness - haha aka "Tell Your Children"!! - "Shame, Horror, Despair, Weird Orgies, Wild Parties, Unreleased Passions")

fitzpatrick sticks out to me as the actor who's in over his head, but most of the others did a fine job. i especially like heather and her freakout during the murder.

good casting of the parents

Bully is in fact a reactionary movie. The fearless exploration of visual truth highlights Clark's disinterest in contextual complexity. It doesn't just show the stupidity and debasement of these kids, it REVELS in it. Take for instance the story of Heather's mother growing up watching her alcoholic dad kill his wife with a clawhammer and fuck the corpse for several days. Supposedly a true story. OK, but when Heather tells it in the movie she is made to look ridiculous, like she thought this was a light-hearted thing that "fucked her up." Or the scene in which they kill the bully, "Is he dead?" "Getting there." Is this humor? The only point of a movie so full of hatred for the people it portrays is to "wake us up" to what society is doing by creating a generation of amoral insipid nihilists. Clark seems bent on trivializing abuse and emotion, while sensationalising neglect, promiscuity, and drug use as if these constituted the only pertinent context to this murder.

Just because it follows the book, doesn't mean it is realistic. The book itself, while being "true crime," is not necessarily realistic either. The co-dependent relationship between Marty and Bobby is only skimmed over, and as much as she is the catalyst for Bobby's murder, Clark reduces Miner's character's (probably rather complex in reality--why is abuse suddenly no longer tolerable for a group of kids who supposedly view themselves simply as animals or objects?) motivations to the point of non-existence. Clark doesn't explore the facts, he selectively uses them as a vehicle for his own moral crusade.

The only thing dangerous about Bully is its utter lack of compassion for humanity. Its reductionist mocking tone does nothing to counter the supposedly "vacuous" nature of American film.

i think that people often wear their troubled past as some kind of badge of honor. i think this is going on w/ heather.

But seriously, I found the movie engaging. Rather so.

Kids could've gotten away with all this raunch because it (Kids) seemed vital -- a story that needed to be told. Well it's 7 years later and this new shocking tale of wasted youth just doesn't have remotely the same impact. Maybe it seemed to me like a desperate attempt to capture that same impact, but at the expense of a bunch of kids' modesty/dignity... (uh oh I guess I am on that side)

I did watch the movie later on TV and it was more palatable that way, and it was also plainly forgettable.

nevermind -- Bijou and the other young actors were not victims; they are old enough to decide whether they want suffer all the crotch shots and sex and rape scenes, and if this movie is going to be worth it (given that all the nudity/sex is even considered any sort of happy sacrifice, I don't know). so I guess I, dare I say, pity them, but don't see them as victims of LC's perversion.

Though I think it's a fact that LC used footage that BP didn't agree to (and is angry about).

Clark has been very vocal about wanting to do away with the "after-school special" approach to teen stories, and about the business of telling it like it is from the teen's perspective [sidenote: it's interesting how often he arrives via this method right back at some of the worst cliches of the j.hughes-type films he wants to distance himself from - i'm thinking in particular of the cardboard-cutout absentee parents and their non-relationships w/their kids]. The real work should then rest with the young cast (who i thought were great btw - and yes i am looking forward to Ken Park, partly just to see whether Clark can actually direct actors his own age - prior evidence quite slim on that front - haha hello Another Day In Paradise) and on Clark's rapport with them.

It's when Clark the Adult Director interjects that this point starts to come across as oddly insistent ("b-but this movie is Telling It Like It Is! Look: they're filled with anomie and fucking nonstop DO YOU SEE?!"). If the b.philips crotch shot is gratuitous it's at least partly because it undermines the strength of her performance by suggesting Clark doesn't really trust it to get his message across = he's not actually all THAT concerned with the "teen perspective" after all

(It also underscores how incompatible his morality is with his desire to not make "just another teen movie", to the extent that what really sets Bully apart from those movies is the 18+ content. That conflict wouldn't bother me if it didn't yank me out of the story whenever it became apparent, or if it were even half as compelling as what the actors are up to onscreen at any given moment, which it isn't)

i have v.high hopes for Teenage Caveman which i've rented twice and not watched.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), May 20th, 2003.

Bully had a profound effect on me, but I always tend to qualify my feelings about it and am still not sure whether or not it is a "good" film or not.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), October 8th, 2003.

I liked Bully. Mostly it demonstrates the banality of evil more intensely than any other film I've seen. It was actually really affecting.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), June 9th, 2004.

Hmmm, I might be tempted to file Larry Clark / Harmony Korine films under the opposite category of "It was really bad, I liked it." And I don't mean in a campy, "so bad it's good" way.

Like, I'm not quite sure Bully is a good, well-made film, and yet it had an extraordinary emotional impact on me. julien donkey-boy is kind of a mess, and yet there are images in that film that I found haunting. The exploitative, shock-value elements of these two filmmakers especially make me cringe -- but I also find it all terribly intriguing.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), March 13th, 2003.

Bully is maybe a great film, but I've only been able to watch it twice, it disturbs me too much. I literally feel unclean afterward. But I think Kids was also great in its own way, and Clark doesn't strike me as moralistic at all - he neither revels in the excesses of youth nor condemns them from a position of self-righteousness.

oh my fucking god