Movies
Bully
Self-important exploitation film based on a 1993 case of murder among rudderless adolescents in suburban South Florida: a hundred decibel wake-up call to a slumbering America. (Rap music and gory video games, for post-Columbine relevance, help crank up the volume.) The noted still photographer Larry Clark, back on the turf of his Kids, and perhaps even a little hotter now over its failure to change the world, is arguably a serious filmmaker: if he's going to give you a shot of Bijou Phillips's crotch in blue-jean cutoffs, he's not going to hold the shot any longer than absolutely necessary to establish that she's not wearing underpants. And then, too, the consistent coldness of his gaze can be bracing when it isn't completely numbing. Yet there's something almost laughable about the sledgehammer monotony of his shock tactics. (You cannot phone up one of these teens without interrupting, or rather not interrupting, a kinky episode of sex and hot wax.) Fewer shocks might have meant stronger ones: when belief goes south, the shock value follows. Besides which, the acting here, by such "professionals" as Brad Renfro, Nick Stahl, Rachel Miner, and Leo Fitzpatrick, is several degrees hokier and hammier than that in Kids. Maybe that's simply to say there's no replacement for Chloë Sevigny. 2001.
— Duncan Shepherd
Reader Rating:
- MPAA Rating: R
