Review of Kids (2013) by Filius S — 03 Jan 2016

Penned by Harmony Korine at the age of 19 and directed by Larry Clark, Kids is one of the most realistic movies about teenage life that you'll probably ever see. Out go all the suburbanite clique tropes that riddled 80s teen comedies; Kids comes along and bitch slaps the John Hughes out of your expectations within the first scene.

The film follows the misadventures of a group of 15-ish New York City types and their standard adventures: drinking 40s, skateboarding, talking about sex, trying to have sex, smoking blunts, and partying. Telly and Casper play the two male leads, with the former obsessed with devirginizing any 12/13 year old girl he can get his hands on, and the latter trying to get laid by anyone (mostly unsuccessfully) and getting fucked up on drugs for something to do instead.

Over in the female lead corner, the now famous Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson play two best friends who discover that Chloe's character has contracted HIV from Telly. The remainder of the film involves Chloe trying to track Telly down in pre ubiquitous cell phone New York, while Telly and Casper chill and party around town.

When this film came out it received an NC-17 rating, which is funny because a lot of the typical behavior shown in the movie centers around characters a couple of years younger than that. Nevertheless, the film was a success, earning almost 15 times its budget back at the box office. It has also since gone on to become a cult favorite, and its not hard to see why. The film doesn't treat kids like choir boys, and it doesn't treat them as idiots. The film could have been reshot with a bunch of 20 year old college students, and been equally relevant, and that scares the ankle-length skirts off the old crones rating these films and ruins their utopian perception of children everywhere.

Kids is known for a handful of memorable scenes, some very quotable dialogue, extremely natural acting, a cinema verite approach to shooting, sets that are all on location, and its overall presentation. Ultimately, what makes Kids a success is it doesn't try to bullshit you. There's no attempts to shock you with the actors day-to-day lives; it's just showing you a scene from real life and offering you the option to go fuck yourself if it offends you.

TL;DR - 8/10.

Kids is probably the best teenage movie ever made. It should be required watching in school for its honest portrayal of drug use, sex, and the dangers apparent when combining the two. It's also generally a really good film, so give it a watch if you haven't already.