Review of Kids (2011) by Jesse B — 26 Oct 2010

Don't listen to the synopsis which this website gives for the film. They make it sound like a cheap exploitation film with a lot of jiggle shots and hip 70's soul music. If anything, this film is about as damn close a documentary as you're ever going to find about "Kids".

Watching this film is an uncomfortable experience. From the first frames of the young Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and his inexperienced virginal prey are sharing what must have been mouthfuls of saliva in an extended make-out scene which is gag inducing and frightening at the same time. The implications from this opening sequence sets the tone for the whole film: stupid kids trying to fake it in an adult arena.

Telly is a teenage sex addict (from what I can tell). He traipses around his skunk-head best friend Casper (Justin Pierce) talking about his latest conquest, allowing Casper to smell his hand which had just returned from a short voyage up virgin territory. They talk about who they've had sex with, who they want to have sex with and how they want to do it, all with the user of street slang and an overly used explicit tongue. This all adds to the idea of the film, however. These kids -- these children have no idea what they are really doing. They're play-acting with real lives, real people.

On the flip side to Telly and Casper you have Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) and her best friend Ruby (Rosario Dawson). Both have been sexually active and talk openly about their experience, likes and dislikes with a group of girls in a wonderfully contrasting montage which cuts slowly back and forth between the boys of the story and these girls. The young ladies are just as sexually hungry as the guys are, but their views are a bit different from the other, less mature gender. While the guys talk solely about how good it feels to give it, the young girls speak openly about how it can sometimes be a pain to be on the receiving end.

At one point early on in the film, Telly is speaking to Casper about his philosophy of life -- deflower as many virgins as possible because it gives you the power of being the first one ever. He says that they will recall the event to their grand kids and tell of what an amazing thrill it was to have Telly do his thing to them.

On the other hand, the girls speak about their first times and how awful it was and that the quicker you get it over with the better.

This film does not really have that much of a plot -- which is a good thing. Any kind of device which would have made this film more "watchable" would have been a disservice to the actual lives which we are encountering here. Yes, Jennie finds out that she is HIV positive, although she has only ever had sex once and with one guy (while Ruby, who has had nearly a dozen partners, gets off Scott-free) -- Telly. And yes she does go looking for Telly when she learns of her disease and that he may have been the one to give it to her. And yes, this is all intertwined with the impending conquest of Telly's next victim, but this is not the plot.

As far as Telly goes, we never really learn if he knows that he is carrying the deadly virus or not, although there is one clue toward the middle of the picture which might give us pause. While the boys are over at the apartment of a local ex-dealer, they drink and smoke weed, inhale toxic gasses through a balloon and once again talk about sex (as if they didn't have anything better to do). The subject of STD's comes up and the fellas shrug it off as nothing more than an urban myth. When the taboo of AIDS is mentioned and one of the young men says that if they are going to die, then they'd want to go out having sex, we see a brief glimpse of a flushed Telly, looking as if he had just had to swallow a bitter pill in the face of his friends. Perhaps that is who Telly truly is, a boy who knows that in his future is death, so why not cause as much destruction as he can. They might think they're men, but really, they're all just a bunch of stupid kids.