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Filmmaker Larry Clark reunites with Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine, with some additional directorial assistance from cinematographer Ed Lachman, for this look at a group of troubled teens and their guardians living in Southern California. Ken Park takes its name from the skate park where an ancillary character takes his own life in the film's opening moments, and then proceeds to chronicle the somewhat-interrelated lives of his classmates. The audience is introduced to Tate (James Ransome), a young man living in relative misery with his board-game-playing grandparents. Also tormented by his living situation is Claude (Stephen Jasso), a quiet, shy teen constantly henpecked by his brutish father (Wade Andrew Williams). Meanwhile, the vapid Shawn (James Bullard) occasionally trades verbal spars with his mother, in between leaving the house for sex sessions with his girlfriend's mom. Finally there is Peaches (Tiffany Limos), living alone with her devoutly religious father as she covertly experiments with her boyfriend (Mike Apaletegui). Though Ken Park played at such festivals as Toronto and Telluride in the fall of 2002, it would languish on the shelf for months and months afterward, as its explicit content made finding a U.S. distributor near-impossible. — Michael Hastings
Yet another excursion into absurd teen sensationalism from co-director Larry Clark — teaming up once again with screenwriter Harmony Korine, the enfant terrible who scripted their 1995 breakthrough Kids — Ken Park lays bare (as it were) the filmmaker's obsessions in a manner he managed to evade with his previous efforts. In its own arbitrary, inscrutable way, it's Clark's most truthful statement as a director: Ken Park forgoes any modicum of social commentary or realism in favor of presenting a languid, explicit fantasia on nubile, vapid trash teens. It's like a Warhol film without the humor. As his dubiously-legal cast of unknowns struggle their way through the episodic script's banal dialogue, Clark finds plenty of opportunity to linger on scenes of graphic onanism, oral gratification, and ritualistic violence. But to what effect? Free of the halfhearted, perfunctory cautionary-tale moralizing of Kids and Bully, Ken Park comes across as little more than a feature-length version of the vilified Calvin Klein "teen porn" ads of the late '90s. Co-director/cinematographer Ed Lachman lends his unerring visual sense to the proceedings, shooting the film in a steady, fluid style that's a departure from Clark's usual ripped-from-the-headlines shakycam technique. But the dreamy images merely underline Clark's agenda, which is to create a facile, dull paean to the joys of teen free-love in the face of brutal authority-figure punishment. — Michael Hastings
