Ken Park (movie review)

I went over to a friend's house and he wanted me to watch this movie called "Ken Park."  He'd done a google search for "fucked up movies" and watched this by himself and then wanted me to watch it.  He turned off Let Me In, which I'd really wanted to see and said, "I want to watch something 'funny.'"

The movie we watched depicted actual sex, a kid choking himself while he jerks off all the way to completion, murder, incest, child abuse, rape, and so forth.  It wasn't funny at all. 

"Why in the hell did you want me to watch this?"  was my first reaction. His answer is why I'm taking time to write a review for the movie.  "I watched this movie and it was so fucked up; I just wanted someone else to watch it and see."

When your mind is exposed to something traumatic it doesn't know how to interpret it so it keeps going over and over the traumatic event until it finds a way that it can process what it has experienced in a way that it can understand.  This is basically the idea behind why people with post traumatic stress disorder have flashbacks.  The mind is experiencing the trauma over and over and over until it can be processed.  It's not that this movie gave my friend PTSD, but it was upsetting enough that he couldn't process it, so he had to show me to feel better.

I don't like movies like these that rub something awful in the viewers face.  If you are going to do this, there had better be a purpose to it and it better be done well enough to justify something like actual sex and an extended masturbation scene. 

Ken Park, is a movie like Gummo (and I believe written by the same person, but don't quote me) which attempts to show the bizarre and twisted worlds of white suburbanites beneath the surface of their every day lives.  Although the acting in Ken Park was far superior than most of the acting in Gummo, I'd consider it a far inferior film.  It lacks the nightmare/dreamlike quality that made Gummo so endearing and falls far short of reaching the emotional depth that Gummo did.

However my biggest gripe is that if the director/writer is trying to show the very real filth, depravity, loneliness, anger, and sexual frustration that real everyday people try to hide, I have to ask: Why do the majority of the characters in the movie lack any real depth?

In Ken Park a homophobic man is secretly gay, and a super-religious man is secretly a pervert, and so forth.  The majority of these character's have absolutely no depth at all.  These two were especially grating as they were just one dimensional caricatures based on douchey liberal stereotypes of their right-wing counterparts.  

If you are going to put real sex in a movie it had better be a purpose to it, and there had better be real depth to it.  Otherwise it is just pointless exploitation.

I'd rate this movie 1/10