Kids

[Jill]

Yes, KWP

I believe this film does accurately reflect the teen age youth for certain
party-wasted type US kids. But in the movie they are a couple of years
younger than I expected. But new york is different I bet, more distracted
and decadent. I grew up in suburbia in the 80's with pervasive similar
excessive drug use all around me (not crack, but pot, coke, acid, X) during
the later years of american "high school". Many kids just are not
challenged and have plenty of free time. To drink alcohol here, kids have
been trained with decades of overly restrictive laws in the US to drink
fast and drink hard, especially when unsupervised. and many junior
high/middle schools here have been poor at motivating or driving this age
of kids into high performance. and so many kids have parents that both work
outside the house with little benefits or holidays, that there is an
expectation that schools will be the guardians. Adults also have a longtime
ingrained fear and distrust in the US of children of approximately 13 years
old, and this corresponds to about 7th-8th grade of junior/middle school.
(pre-high school). Why? It is a blurry answer, but they cannot hold a job.
They are neither child nor adult and very few institutions in the US know
how to gain their trust. They are not an economic unit. They cannot drive
cars, they cannot vote or (legally) buy liquor or cigarettes, and no one is
paying any attention to them at all. However, they can now be tried as an
adult in a court of law in many states for certain crimes. There is a very
limited amount of literature that appeals to them, by the way, if you look
at the way libraries are arranged. There is a lot of k-5th grade
literature, but young adult literature is sweet but small. What do I think
about Kids? Have you read about rockdale georgia?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/georgia/etc/synopsis.html
Did you see basketball diaries? (excellent movie with Leonardo DiCaprio)
and a true NY story too. (The book by Jim Carroll is better). Kids was one
of the the scariest movies I ever saw, because I think it is true in a
dramatized way. I saw a news magazine program here called Nightline back on
June 3rd/4th? and they showed kids as young as 14 taking ecstasy during an
undercover expose about raves. Is it not like this in Germany?

jill

KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> I just saw "Kids" by Larry Clarke (1995) in German tv. Is "the" American
> youth so decadent as shown in this film? Instead of
> "sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll" aids, crack and tekkno. Sometimes the figures of
> the film reminded me at the "actors" in Andy Warhol's "factory". The
> difference is: they are not longer stars for fifteen minutes, perhaps for two
> or three...seconds. No transcendence, no ideas, no PynchonLand, only the dark
> side of the Zero Tolerance Zone of Mr. Guiliani. Now he has got cancer, and I
> doubt that some of the kids in that film are still alive.  And another thing:
> it is not a critical film it is perhaps really just only a film for
> paedophils.
> Is our western aesthetics - in film, literature, painting - completely
> wrotten? Has got lit-crit or film-crit an anachronism in the meantime?
> Sceptical, kwp