Ken Park (2002) - Larry Clark, Edward Lachman
Related: American cinema - eroticism in mainstream film - banned film - 2002
Ken Park (2002) - Larry Clark, Edward Lachman
Ken Park (2002) - Larry Clark, Edward Lachman
Ken Park is a 2002 film adapted by Harmony Korine from stories by Larry Clark. It was directed by Larry Clark and Edward Lachman. It stars James Ransone as Tate, Tiffany Limos as Peaches, Stephen Jasso as Claude and James Bullard as Shawn.
The movie revolves around the abusive home lives of several teenage skateboarders. It's a story of violence, alienation and teenage sexual experimentation, set in the rural town of Visalia, California.
It contains some explicit sexual behavior (Clark:"I decided that I wasn't going to turn the camera away, or shut the door, or shoot from the waist up."). It portrays suicide, murder, parental violence, alcoholism, smoking cannabis, skateboarding, weight-lifting, incestuous sexual assault by a homophobic father of his sleeping son, BDSM, solo strangling sex, religious fanaticism, a fake marriage of a father with his daughter, a boy having sex with his girlfriend's mother, and at the end an idyllic sex scene with two of the boys and the girl.
The movie is was not shown in the UK after the director Larry Clark punched and tried to strangle Hamish McAlpine, the head of Metro Tartan, the UK distributor for the film. Clark spent a few hours in a police cell, and McAlpine was left with a broken nose. The movie has never been issued in wide release in the United States, it has not found a distributor since its initial showing at the Telluride Film Festival in 2002. It has been banned in Australia for its violence and sexual content; though many consider the ban to have been ineffectual - in response to the ban, a protest screening was held which was shut down by the police - the resulting publicity, coupled with the ease with which the film could be purchased (or otherwise obtained) via the internet meant that a much larger number of people ended up seeing the film than would have had the film been allowed its inevitably short cinematic release. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Park [Oct 2004]
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