Trash Humpers - Extras
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Published on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 20:00
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Written by BobFreville
| Title | Trash Humpers - Extras |
| Directed By | Harmony Korine |
| Written By | Harmony Korine |
| Starring | Harmony Korine, Rachel Korine |
| Release Date | 2010 |
| DVD Distributer | Drag City Film Distribution |
| MPAA Rating | Unrated |
| KillingBoxx Score | 4.0 |
| By It Now On |  |
Blood of Havana and Mac & Pac - The Trash Humpers Extras!
Quote: "Lost somewhre in the shadows."
In addition to being a consistently challenging director and an equally engaging actor, Harmony Korine has become unusually adept at the short form. The first indication of this, aside from his notorious Macauley Culkin music video or his long-since-jettisoned "Fight Harm" video, was with Crutchnap, a 43-second piece that he contributed to 42Below's "OneDreamRush" project (distinguishing him among 41 other artists).
His Special Features tone poem
Blood of Havana (on the
Trash Humpers DVD from Drag City) is probably his best one yet, an unreasonably gorgeous if typically bizarre work that takes the Trash Humper prosthetic aesthetic one step further in its focused portrayal of an old fogie talkin' revolution blues. Here Korine contrasts the grainy video images with the vibrant colors of antique automobiles and red face make-up. And the result can make a pervert blush, believe me.
Here Harmony provides the fluid narration that walks a tightrope between mockery and reverance in its treatment of one man's recollection of finding himself in a war-torn country, a lipstick-smeared stranger in an exotically strange land.
"Black sisters of the faith all nursemaids with lofty ambitions," he says of the women in whose arms he finds himself cradled in upon touching down. And when he speaks of the "gum drop tablets" in his water that made him all weak inside, our hearts break for the old timers...But one gets the impression that this may be a joke. At least in as much as anything serious can be completely unserious.
Like Joaquin Phoenix's much-debated quasi-doc I'm Still Here, Korine's films are tough to pin down, at once feeling like both indigo satires and stark romantic tragedies. This ambivalent orchestration works wonders in Korine's feature films, but is even more resonant in these succinct blasts of words and images. It's no surprise that Korine was the creator of several self-distributed handmade fanzines before writing his first produced screenplay. The same patchwork style and jagged delights of the fanzine realm are constantly bubbling up to the surface in his pictures.
We have Korine's colorful Carny background, a childhood in the Circus, to thank for this "new breeze blowing." And the "buck-toothed revolution" he details in Blood of Havana is just as apt a description of what Korine did to modern motion pictures as any other.
Alas! His revolution spawned many imitators but no soldiers of his mettle. And, so, it is that Harmony Korine is a one-man artistic army, joined on his personal creative battlefield, only by brave nomadic souls or his one equal warrior--mentor and frequent collaborator Werner Herzog, himself a cinematic iconoclast like no one else. Herzog, he of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and the julien-donkey-boy-like Stroszeck, has worked with Harmony on julien donkey-boy and Mister Lonely and has maintained a relationship, personal and professional, over the years.
Unfortunately he is absent here, but Korine's shorts consummately capture Werner's own "ecstatic truth," those images and situations of fiction that prove purer than the so-called facts.
Mac & Pac, the other short on the
Trash Humpers DVD, is, despite its title, little more than just another excised sequence from
Trash Humpers' raw footage, featuring all the same characters from the feature. It occupies some marginal category that has yet to be invented, a basement stand-up pseudo-porno where Woody Allen shtick is lingered on for too long, in the same way the pornographer's camera often holds on a bedboard or an artificial house plant when penetration proves predictable. In the end we'd rather study Rachel Korine's sneakers or examine the dryer ducts in the corner than listen to the yapping Aristocrat-esque anecdotes of the tangential twins. But maybe that's the point, that entertainment doesn't have to be what tradition has given us.
Still, even failure is interesting in the hands of H.K. And it's worth it to sit through this one to get to Korine's Deleted Scenes which are illuminated by digital reading of dazzling light prisms that act as nimbus to canonize his cretins as sin-riddled saints.
These extras can all be found along side the feature film
Trash Humpers which was also reviewed by Bob Freville.
