User reviews

In a city in California, the skateboarders Shawn (James Bullard), Claude (Stephen Jasso) and Tate (James Ransone) and Peeches (Tiffany Limos) are friends of the suicidal teenager Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck). Shawn has intercourse with his girlfriend and her mother. Claude has an abusive, violent and alcoholic father and a neglectful and passive pregnant mother. Tate is addicted in masturbation and hates his grandparents that raise him due to the lack of privacy in his own room. Peeches practices kinky sex and has a fanatical religious father that misses his wife.

"Ken Park" is a sad story of dysfunctional families and their teenagers. Most of the characters have sick and abnormal behaviors, but fortunately it is just a sample in the universe of director Larry Clark, who seems to like this theme, and does not correspond to the majority of the society. This uncomfortable movie is indicated for very specific audiences. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Ken Park"

ken park or krap nek as they say is basically four episodes with each episode dealing with an individual's family situation or lack thereof. These episodes are inter-cut within each other.

Though Larry's Clark's movies deal with very explicit, or "realistic" subject matter his presentation is overwrought. Characters are more caricatures than 'real' people. The zealot father, the aging housewife, the weird kid, the father with unrequited love. The scenes with these characters were hard for me to take in. The actions and reactions they take seemed so hackneyed to me. Could it be that Larry Clark is developing a "larry clarkness"? a style? As one who is purported to be a breaker of styles and conventions this movie was shot pretty conventionally with lots of sex. I wasn't too impressed with this effort. Some shots, as Larry Clark says, are there for realistic purposes but I just found it to be sensationalistic and unnecessary.

The cinematography was great that is probably due to the Ed Lachman. The blue and red tinge really added to their respective scenes. Probably use of tungsten for outdoors and daylight inside.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I could swear Larry Clark is moving from realism to symbolism. In one scene he has the family gather together on the front steps. Your good Ole' American suburban family, full of deceit and infidelity but putting up a great face none the less. It seemed like a tableau.

I didn't enjoy this latest offering by Larry Clark. It was as if he took Todd Solondz' Happiness, removed all wit, all semblance of plot and character development, and threw in a few explicit sex scenes for some shock value.

After watching Bully and Kids, I have come to accept Clark's style of storytelling, however I felt that this movie went nowhere. He's usually good at juggling multiple story lines that end up converging in a natural sense, but I felt that in Ken Park he didn't have a enough time to delve into any single character's storyline deep enough for the audience to become engaged with the characters, which to me is a crucial element in any good drama.

When the 1h10 mark came around, I was more alarmed by the fact that there were only 20 more minutes in which to resolve the story than by the incest and murder taking place on screen.

This failure was akin to Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart. I hope Larry Clark's work will only get better after this.

Anyone who finds pornography disturbing will find "Ken Park" disturbing for both the wrong and the right reasons.

Its not pornography, but it will be confused with it easily since it contains many of the same powerful ingredients: nudity and explicit sexual behavior. What separates it from pornography is that "Ken Park"'s intent is not to arouse but to provoke an emotional response by placing these same powerful ingredients within a troublesome relational context. Unfortunately that's also the problem with "Ken Park".

An average viewer can't witness explicit sexual behavior and be unaffected by it. We are all sexual (mostly) and (most of us) respond to visual stimuli. "Ken Park" demands that the viewer suspend that response, look beyond any arousal or outrage generated from the explicit sexuality and focus on the relationships in the film (of which sex is merely the expression). This asks of the average cinema viewer much more sexual maturity than most films ever hope to ask.

We may demand more pressure on the envelope as a viewing public, but the cumulative effect of pushing the envelope is still in the realm of speculative sociolology. Also, the extreme youthful appearance some of the characters in the film will cause some companies to avoid distribution risks. Free speech is one thing; defending accusations of spreading pedophilia is quite another, and few companies can afford that kind of publicity.

Personally, I think that the Clark and Lachman have made a great film; its a moral and compassionate statement. The characters feel very real; in their banality there is real pathos. In fact, the bland dialogue and delivery explains why sex holds such a powerful lure for these kids. They have access to rare delight and comfort with sex and, weirdly enough, a sense of peace. It rings true. The tragedy plays out that they are all compromised by clueless or pathological parent figures and the sexuality reflects a history of thwarted attachment. The final scene with the three main characters together struck me as very bittersweet since it plays more as a fantasy than a likely scenario.

Art enjoys such a complex, troubled relationship with the American public. We are such a rapidly changing audience with a huge appetite for challenge, yet we don't necessarily absorb the changes we witness. As an audience, we expect far more cultural sophistication than our capacity for balanced interpretation. "Ken Park" is evidence of that.

I've seen kids and i really liked it. Generation X kind of thing. Now with Ken Park it's almost the same, but i didn't get any point or message from the film. It was just provocative and 'shocking' at some moments. But maybe my parents would consider it to be that way, I wasn't the least shocked by any of it. Nice film to watch, glad I've seen it but wouldn't have missed much if i hadn't.

Considering I grew up in Visalia, and spent much of my youth at the skate park featured at the beginning of the film, I can attest there is plenty of realism in this film. Our society is deeply troubled, and maybe YOU don't see things like this every day, but I certainly have. In fact, just this week one of the locals that starred in this film came to my friend's house in the middle of the night spun out of his gourd on meth. It would have fit perfectly as a scene in this film.

To those who argue detractors don't "get it", I promise you I do. My problem is for those who won't. I get it because I've lived in this town and seen its dirty side, which I'm positive can be seen in many other cities in this country. To someone who has led a sheltered and fortunate life, watching this movie will not help them to understand anything. To someone like me who hasn't led a sheltered and fortunate life, well there isn't much difference, this film is pure shock value with absolutely no plot.

It's possible to make a movie as shocking and graphic as this and still provide some sort of coherence and plot, but that's not Larry Clark's style. He simply confronts you with tragic and disturbing situations, with little empathy, understanding, or context. You're left just feeling disgusting.

Living in Australia, there has been a lot of controversy about this movie, leading to the government banning it (and even forbidding it to be shown at film festivals, to intelligent, consenting adults), so I had some idea what to expect when watching it.

The thing that surprised me was that there was almost none of the "explicit sex" that the tabloids and conservative politicians would have us believe. Sure there are a couple of shots of erect penises, but nothing most adults haven't seen themselves.

The part that didn't surprise me was that the story was so good. I have seen all of Larry Clark's films, and this is by far the best. A depressing tale of kids who are beginning to realise that their parents, their biggest role models, are not perfect. Far from it in some cases.

I urge everyone who is interested in pictures that may not be light entertainment (and who is not offended by the occasional sexual organ) to try and obtain a copy of this - especially Australians. Don't let the government dictate what you can and cannot see.

Larry Clark shocked the world with Kids (1995) and he did it in a dynamic, unashamed way, with the help of a young screenwriter named Harmony Korine - perhaps the great symbol of youthful American cinema in the nineties and, why not? , synonymous with great viscerally, especially in relation to the awareness of adults about the needs and freedom of young people, their sexuality and discovery, growing to the point of suffering the consequences and no longer ignoring them. The two artists reunited seven years later to perform the highly controversial "Ken Park" (2002).

Set in the suburbs of Visalia, California, Shawn (James Bullard) is an ordinary teenager: he has friends and a beautiful and passionate girlfriend. However, this is not enough. During the absence of the girl and her father, he pays visits to the girl's mother, with whom he has sexual relations. Later we have Claude (Stephen Jasso), an educated boy, but who has to live with a hypocritical, alcoholic and violent stepfather, and with his mother, who sports a huge pregnant belly and remains passive in the face of everything. Then we meet Tate (James Ransone), probably the most disliked character. Tate is considered a smart guy, but he doesn't do much besides mistreat his grandparents, with whom he lives, and lock himself in his room where he masturbates all day. Peeches (Tiffany Limos) is the pride of his father, a religious fanatic who preserves an eternal mourning for his late wife. The girl behaves well and gets good grades, but, out of her father's sight, she practices the most creative sexual modalities with her peers.

When Ken Park commits suicide - let's assume that he did it because he knew he was going to be a father, even though there are no explanations for this type of thing - we are invited, like him, to leave so that we can reflect on our deepest questions based on to four characters, they have in common the same incommunicability with the family, they are the result of a waste of words and the boys have to deal with the imposition of masculinity as a proof of power and domination, while the only female character among them, Peaches (Tiffany Limos), suffers the same oppression coming from her father, an extremely religious man who reflects in his daughter the image of his wife who died.

Parents are children too; we forget about it constantly. The family is developed here as a cynical entity, walking through the despair of feeling and educating, as an instinctive impulse that yearns that the next generations will not be as failed as the previous one. The father who gets drunk and teaches his son to lift weight; the mother who even alone with her daughter allows her to watch inappropriate content on TV; what else exists here is this inherence of being in projecting their melancholy onto their children and vice versa. There is a need for all characters to be accepted, so Shawn (James Bullard) is shown visually trapping his brother in a game while forcing him to say he loves him. The role of the rebellious young man is demythologized when Shawn leaves this aggressive figure aside to become a loving son in his mother-in-law's bedroom, who is also his lover. Because she is older, she teaches him the secrets of sex, at the same time that she mediates the relationship between pleasure and communication, playing the simple lover at the same time that she feels touched when the boy creates a comparison between her and the girl. Daughter, past and future confront each other and time is felt as a crucial dilemma for understanding the family void that Larry Clark works so well.

The relationship between Claude (Stephen Jasso) and his father is the most explicit, a personality conflict where issues of sexual choice, guilt and retardation will be explored. A symbolic scene is when your father breaks the skateboard apparently for no reason, then falls and cries, drunk. The skateboard, representing vehicle and freedom, when broken limits the character to the common space, so that he is forced to confront his deepest feelings and which he constantly tries to ignore.

If all stories here have a thematic and visual link, as well as several scene transitions happen and reinterpret or give even more meaning to the previous one - from a father crying on the sidewalk for having broken a skateboard to the other on the table, about to drink coffee and whose custom is to do it on his knees, as if he were punishing himself at every meal, a moment linked to family interactions - the most striking, without a doubt, is that of Tate (James Ransone). His life is shown differently, most of his motivations and melancholy are hidden from the viewer, his grandparents treat him very well and the young man's moments of anger are caused by his interpretation of the facts, not based on the general context. There is a past whose importance, despite being transparent, is never mentioned, which makes the character extremely delicate, even because it is the most violent action of all against adults.

Tate is the last step, where the consequence of silence and abandonment reaches its maximum level, through it we perceive the danger of distancing the young person with feelings related to purity. The character is the counterpoint of the "Island of Paradise" mentioned at the end, in a scene that intentionally differs from all the development so far, sex is shown and related to freedom. The utopia inserted at that moment is the key to understanding the human ties that, linked to their ethical duty while belonging to a social environment, forget who they are and why they came, distancing the individual more and more from their femininity and, consequently, from their nude version.

Much of the elements of "Kids" continue in the filmmaker's fourth feature film, as well as the idea that America's fathers and children are no good, but it's hard to know if it's the director who lost steam or the theme was beaten, explored exhaustively in the middle of the Bush Era. Anyway, without the harsh reactionary messages of the first film, such resources become just sequels that seem to serve as a mere excuse for the unbridled use of these controversial elements.

The cast of young people is totally amateur and contrasts with the professional actors who play the parents (from famous to Amanda Plummer, from Pulp fiction). This time, Clark also had directing help from Edward Lachman, the director of photography for Far from Heaven, perhaps to better capture the consistency of oozing sperm, the angles of light reflection by urine or the texture of pubic hair on teenage boys. Whoever decides to face the film, it is better that he is properly aware of what he will find. Worse than that, it's sad to see that Clark doesn't understand the power of what he has in his hands. Situations that handled well, without appeal, would yield a decent narrative. A good example is the story of the boy rejected by his father, which, for a good few minutes, seems to be the best of the parallel plots, the most balanced and least affected. The boy rides a skateboard and smokes marijuana. His father thinks he's a bum, but he can only be distinguished from his son by his habits: he prefers beer, bodybuilding and television. It would be a suggestive portrait of the abyss between parents and children and the need that this causes. Unfortunately, at the end of the short story, when the father falls asleep drunk in his son's bed, Clark doesn't contain himself: he spoils a witty ending with yet another session of free pornography.

The director makes no concessions, he is never parsimonious. On the contrary, the film lavishes sex scenes between teenagers (actually, well-characterized adults): oral sex, ménage à trois, sadomasochism. All explicit, with generous close-ups of both female and male genitals. Some scenes are disgusting and purposely sound gratuitous, such as the character Tate masturbating and asphyxiating himself while listening to a female tennis player gasp during a televised game.

Professional photographers, directors Larry Clark and Ed Lachman unavoidably focus on themes that Korine tends to approach in a free, personal and direct way. "Enfant terrible" of a generation of mutants, Korine exposes the innards of the (failed) "American way of life" with the authority of one who survived it. "Ken Park", that's the problem, it doesn't speak to us from within, it only simulates. If Ken Park were Clark's first feature, we could accuse it without batting an eye of gratuitousness with the clear aim of shocking. But the director has previously shown that he is capable of not succumbing to this expedient in order to attract attention. In fact, in my view, he made a kind of caricature of a lost youth in his own time. There is exaggeration, but there is also truth and honesty in his film. On screen, in addition to sex, what you see is an acidic critique of the way people usually face life's frustrations. Adults hiding theirs and leaving young people without references to deal with theirs. The result could be... Ken Park.

Ugh, I should have known better...Ken Park - the third installment in Clark's portraits of teenage alienation - is even worse than Kids and Bully. This guy deserves his status and reputation of artistic film-maker as much as I deserve the Nobel peace-price. I hope, when all the hype cools down, more and more people will realize that he's nothing more than an untalented and dull cineast who's only out to shock audiences. When watching his films, I get the idea that his only goal is to get banned and censored in as much countries as humanly possible...because that provides him with an easily deserved cult reputation. The story and especially the characters in Ken Park are pathetic, uninspired, empty and not at all that offensive... And this film is completely arrogant and egocentric. You can actually hear Larry Clark thinking: "Oh, look at me...I'm controversial". Bah, how pitiful. There's nothing artistic about explicit and outrageous sex scenes (read: semi-pornographically scenes)! When I first saw this film - at a festival - the public spontaneously started to applaud at the close up of a masturbation sequence...Why, why...WHY, I ask?!? If things like masturbation, sodomy and incest can be considered 'artistic', then why is everybody embarrassed to admit they watch porno? Ken Park is a soporific and utterly annoying anthology that unites a couple of messed up teenagers (and their even more messed up parents) you don't care about to begin with, anyway. I surely hope your VCR-player has a fast-forward button! Yet, the most hilarious statement I keep hearing is that Larry Clark movies are eye-openers and realistic portraits of society nowadays...What a load of nonsense is that? Life isn't like this and surely people aren't as stupid and depressing as Clark pictures them. And if you think they are, you should go out more...or at least start to watch better movies.

I have no problems with the explicit content in the film, go ahead and show whatever you like, just do it for a reason other than to push the boundries. There's nothing less interesting than watching a movie that is based on the premise of Let's Make People Accept Something New. That's lame. It's cheap. The movie is not interesting in the least. It never goes anywhere. It seems as though Larry Clark's ideas for characters were just him thinking he wanted to push the limits of sex on film, and so that's what the characters are doing. They are in no way representative of a real person as this film tries to convince us. This film would be boundry pushing if it was able to contextualize the behaviour and not just put it on a screen. At the film festival Clark answered a question about the inclusion of the character of Ken Park, who seemed to exist for no real reason other than to begin the film with a suicide. Clark responded by saying that he wanted to deal with teenage suicide in the movie, which is fine, but just showing someone shoot themselves in the head is not dealing with teenage suicide. It just exploits violence. There doesn't seem to be any thought, beyond the voyeuristic tendancies of the film makers, in this movie at all.

Larry Clark, who made the controversial teenage sex drama 'Kids', goes one step further with Ken Park by actually filming explicit sex scenes performed by a cast who look a lot younger than they actually are.

Mix in the occasional moment of extreme violence, and the result is a shocking and sometimes uncomfortable viewing experience that makes one sometimes question the makers' motives. Is Ken Park a serious study of adolescent life in the modern world, a brave attempt at seeing exactly how far the boundaries of cinema can be pushed, or just a source of cheap titillation for pervs? I don't have the answer—but I do have my suspicions.

The film opens with the bloody suicide of the title character (played by Adam Chubbuck), and then goes on to follow the lives of several other teenagers: Shawn (James Bullard), who is secretly banging his girlfriend's mother; Claude (Stephen Jasso), a skateboarder with a drunk bully of a father; Peaches (Tiffany Limos), a pretty girl experimenting with sex, whose bible-thumping dad believes her to be pure—until he catches her indulging in a spot of the nasty; and psycho Tate—messed-up mad masturbator and, ultimately, murderer.

Ken Park's narrative is a collection of disparate ideas, connected only by the theme of dis-functionality in the family unit; the story cuts randomly from one character to another and by the end of the film, not much has really been resolved. However, the film is never boring thanks to good performances from all involved—and all that deviancy, of course.

Some may argue that this is just porn disguised as art; others may argue that the film just captures the reality of life, of which sex is just a part. However, one thing is certain—this is a gutsy movie from a brave bunch of risk-taking film-makers, and one that you won't forget in a hurry.

This movie was painful to sit through. It was extremely disturbing, depressing, boring, and poorly written. None of the stories were remotely interesting.

Too bad because I loved Kids, Another Day in Paradise, and Bully.

Here are some of the "highlights": 1) a teenager (he looks like he's 15 yrs old) goes down on girlfriend's mother, 2) a kid (around the same age) blows his brains out, 3) A widower catches his daughter having sex with her boyfriend, beats the crap out of him, then forces her to put on her mother's wedding dress and marry him (the father)4) a teenager kills his grandparents 5) A teenager's father tries to go down on him.

Also, do we really need to see a shot of a guy peeing?? Or of him masturbating? Or of the ensuing "money shot"? I'm all for nudity in movies, but here it was just pointless.

If this sounds like your idea of entertainment, then you're in for a treat.

Ok, so the movie tries to express a message about today's youth and their disorientation. It tries it through shock technique, depicting sex at pornographic levels. But really, haven't we all seen it before, in a softer (and much better) way precisely on Larry Clark's "Kids"? I can acknowledge that there was an effort of putting morality together in this one, but really, what comes out even for an attentive spectator is that this movie ends up pushing the limits too much, and becomes boring at it. The result is another shock movie, another art house hardcore piece, that, to me, didn't stick too much. Clearly, more gratuitous than mind-bending. Give us a story instead.

Reading the local (Belgian) reviews for this movie, you'd seriously think we're moving back in time. Critics seem to be bending over backwards in their defense of sexually explicit imagery (okay, there's a little bit of what could be considered hardcore footage here, but nothing on the level of, say, BAISE-MOI for instance), once again trying to establish the thin line between art and pornography, forgetting (conveniently, perhaps ?) to really focus on the film instead. Could it be that Harmony Korine's razor sharp screenplay, largely based on the personal experiences of some of director Larry Clark's friends and models, actually hit too close to home for a lot of people to admit ?

Though the sleepy suburb in this movie might qualify as quintessential Americana by definition of many, I can assure you that the stuff that happens over there takes place all over the world. A lot of things both the adolescents and their parents go through were instantly recognizable to me personally, and I'm a 35 (going on 36) year old employee from that minuscule ant heap of a country called Belgium. How's that for universal appeal ?

Too many adult viewers would still seem to prefer to deny the very possibility that their teen-aged children harbor strong sexual desires, let alone the likely consequence that they've already acted upon them ! It may strike some as slightly unsavory that now 59 year old Larry Clark addresses such issues (especially given the level of unflinching honesty and carnal frankness demonstrated here), as he did in both KIDS and BULLY previously, but nearly no one else apparently dares to come anywhere near this topic as of yet. Much more than simply courting controversy, Clark (and co-helmer Lachman) have crafted a beautiful, funny, touching, heartbreaking and absolutely haunting (those final frames with the titular Ken Park will be etched in my mind for life) work of, yes, art.

A lot of older viewers have remarked that the film is somehow unfairly slanted in favor of the young characters (compelling actors the lot of them), rendering the adults as grotesque caricatures. As far as I'm concerned, only very inattentive viewers could ever come up with that assessment. Tate's grandparents may initially come across as whiny and pathetic yet there's a sweet little scene later on that shows their genuine affection for one another. It is both telling and sad that their grisly fate apparently elicits far less shocks from its audiences than those scant minutes of groin action. A world gone mad, indeed.

Claude's macho dad is another case in point. His ultimate transgression towards his son manages to be both disturbing and weirdly touching. Each adult character (let's not forget Claude's mom, engagingly portrayed by the underrated Amanda Plummer) gets at least one scene where the admittedly stereotypical surface is scratched away and subtleties like a single wounded glance can turn the whole story on its head. I sincerely love this movie precisely for doing just that.

Harmony Korine wrote the screenplay for this, and the one thing I can say for him is that he knows how to make people feel like crap.

I'll admit that Ken Park had me glued to the screen. It's like watching a horror movie, you're disgusted but you can't turn it off because you have to know what awful things will happen next. And, much like a horror movie, it's pretty predictable (Oh no! Dad's home, put your clothes on!!). As in Korine's other post-Kids works, the characters come across as either pathetic or revolting, and sometimes both. They're generally unlikable, and while it's easy to feel sorry for them its hard to really care what happens because you never get over the feeling that the director is trying really hard to shock you. Hence the graphic sex, violence, statutory rape, child abuse, cruelty to animals, and drug/alcohol abuse. Seriously, this film depends so much on shock tactics that they should have just edited out all of the character development and just released a 90 minute film of teenagers having sex and engaging in various violent and criminal acts. Oh wait, that would be Kids, wouldn't it . . . in fact, just skip Ken Park and go watch Kids again.

***SPOILERS***

I have read that this movie was made for only $1.14 million. Hopefully they spent all of that on on a few of the actors and donuts, because everything else was a waste. It seemed that the segments on Peaches' family were from a completely different film, director, etc. There was a quality and depth of acting from those three characters that never appeared anywhere else in the film. Truly that should have been the movie, expanded to 90 minutes, and the rest left on the floor.

The gratuitous suicide at the beginning had no bearing on the plot at all, apart from a hackneyed tack-on ending to try to tie it together. LIke a baloney-miracle whip-twinkie sandwich, none of the parts are very good and they certainly don't fit together.

Any deeper meaning found in this film is in the mind of the viewer. Perhaps it is a sign of artistic merit to prompt analysis, but in this case it had to be merely coincidence. I was able to reach some parallels in contrast between Tate's situation and the skateboarder (so bad I don't remember the characters names.) However the film lacks so in sophistication, character development, insight etc, that this must have been an accident on the film maker's part.

I've also read that the film was constructed from the writer's journals and stories. How sad that these events in his life obviously had enough impact to prompt written stories, a screenplay etc, yet no one involved in the film was able to draw any substance or coherence to what appear to be random depressing events. I think everyone encounters these meaningless, pathetic situations and personalities in our lives, but hopefully we move on to something with more merit quickly, unlike this film.

To the film's credit, most shots were in focus, the color was fine, and the audio was intelligible. Other than that...blah.

www.grahambanks.com

This is a film about relationships. My congratulations to the people responsible for making this film because I've never seen anything remotely like it. Not even "Kids". Shocking, gripping, honest, mature, in-your-face. "Ken Park" is the first film made that takes us into the world of American families to show us what really goes on. Life is not all sweet and charming even though we might wish it to be. Movies don't have to be sappy and happy. There don't have to be car chases and killings, cops and good-guys and bad-guys. To those viewers raised on soap operas and "Friends", turn away because you won't find this film funny.

A shocker for sure...banned in most countries tells you a lot about it. When I see that it makes me WANT to see it. The sex is totally credible. You don't have actors grabbing for sheets or towels to cover up their bodies--hey just like real life!! The scenes are tense, the technical side perfect. You are going to be exposed to some troubled people and they're not only kids. Adults are having a hell of a time getting through life too. Some want a lot more than the 2 point 3 kids and a white picket-fence house in the 'burbs. They long for illicit sex. But look for more, you'll find it in this film. These are characters disturbed by life and not able to function, exactly like your friends and co-workers and neighbors. Lots of people stumble through life and don't have a clue how to behave, how to be loving or tender. Relationships with some people are constant conflicts which they don't even understand themselves. This film shows us some. The sad part is most people don't even realize how screwed up their lives are.

I'm not going to review the plot. You just have to see it yourself and form your own views. Because films have to be seen---that's the art form. I'd also like to congratulate and thank everyone involved in this production for having the courage to give us something worthwhile. In the 1930's there was a film movement called surrealism which was designed to shock people. It did, but today we don't get much shock value out of those old films. "Ken Park" isn't surreal, but it really does shock...maybe it's "hyper-realism". So real you feel totally nervous, never knowing what you are going to see next. All the green-screen and digital video effects dished out by Hollywood can't compare to the plain, good, unselfconscious acting and direction. Every character gets my "Oscar" and the direction and camera-work are so incredible they defy description. Whoever wrote the script knows how to write. Kids aren't as verbal as a lot of movies make them out to be. That lack of dialogue is what always distinguishes a great film for me. I'm not a big fan of voice- over to make plot points, but this film is so outstanding in so many ways the short bits of narration do not diminish it. Great work all around but if you grew up on "Disney" forget it.

Bully was amazing to me and didn't have too much sex although it was a big part of the true story. This film is just almost all over... Instead of sticking to drama they go all out porno when the movie would've been much more impactful if it wasnt interrupted with 3 ways. While watching Bully or Kids you could probably sit down with your pre teens and show them how not to be...But with Ken Park?? I wouldn't show my kids this film until they're 17. Lol he mixed Bully and Kids into one movie but in the worst way!

I'm beginning to think that Larry Clark cares more about "pushing the envelope" by depicting exponentially more and more gratuitous teenage sex with each of his films than he does about ensuring any realistic plot. This was yet another in a string of pointless 'those crazy kids!' flicks where we get to (oh joy!) follow around a bunch of vacant teen miscreants on their outrageous, totally unbelievable sex and drug-fueled adventures. Even if you're very, very creative and desperate to find a message or lesson to be learned from this contrived bit of garbage, I'm afraid you're still going to be somewhat disappointed.

However, if you enjoy the illusion of kiddie porn disguised (not so cleverly) as a hip, edgy indie flick then you'll probably think it's great.