Mr. Lonely - Harmony Korine

The first time I heard about Harmony Korine was back in 96, when Larry Clark's film KIDS hit an art house cinema in my hometown. I was 17 and stuck in this steamy industrial town where most of the people I knew were like me and we never knew someone with aids, neither did we hit the streets like kids in NY did...

Blew my mind. I felt disgust and attraction all at once. By then I couldn't explain to myself that there was beauty in "ugly" things or deeds.

A while later I saw Gummo and Julien-Donkey Boy but couldn't understand what I was watching. It was creepy, scary and nightmarish like. Where are those people, those freaks, those abandoned places and this feeling of displacement coming from? Almost a decade later, I had to watch this films again. A professor from my graduate studies, used to work with him (and apparently they had a "thing")and exemplified certain filmmaking skills with Julien.

Now that I'm back in Mexico, I find out that he's a cult director and that he already deserved a retrospective in the local film festival... dunno about that, but I did go see him talk and he's just a dude who shoots what he feels like shooting. Like hallucinations turned into reality.

Mr. Lonely is freaky as well. Seeing Diego Luna dressed up as Michael Jackson, being the lust object of Samantha Morton dressed up as Marlyn Monroe is quite a trip. I felt like I was in an Alice and Wonderland world. Overwhelmed, but weirded out by this people and their surroundings. Plus there's a scene with singing eggs... I enjoyed it, but still don't get it. I know you've heard about the flying nuns and Werner Herzog, but those scenes didn't impress me... I've seen similar stuff in old Mexican movies with la India María.