Bene Cumb I had heard about this movie but it was only yesterday I found an opportunity to watch it. And at present, in 2018, I am amazed what depiction is so shocking that this film was so restricted or even banned - Ken Park is still a 21-century work! The approach when male genitals are not shown in "decent" films (vis-a-vis female ones) has always been mystery to me, plus the performers here depicting minors were adults in real life... There are some sex scenes, but they are realistic, aesthetic, and the percentage of the total film duration is small.The main focus of Ken Park is not the consequences, but the reasons why those teens have come to life such a life. Sanctimony, broken families, limited resources, boredom, different needs are the main keywords here, with acceptable (yet not too interesting) presentation. Apart from the young, some good character actors like Amanda Plummer and Wade Williams provide distinct supporting performances.Here, realism clearly dominates over enthrallment and dynamism. Not too bad, but not impressive, too static for me ("Kids" is catchier). But better thay any shades of gray, for sure...

jackcwelch23 I have always been fascinated with people who do some of the lurid stuff you read about in the news. The face of a civil society, with smiling faces on billboards, chirpy television show hosts and politicians talking about morals and ethics. This of course, is not the tone of every day peoples lives behind closed doors. We all have unacceptable desires that we seldom share. Trying to marry your own daughter to keep others away from her, strangling yourself while pleasuring yourself and having an affair with a teen aged boy are just a handful of the taboo topics dealt with here very bluntly. While the film has the subtlety of a bag of sledgehammers and basically lacks a plot the performances are strong and the sequence of events is admittedly interesting. Having been a fan of Larry Clarks for years, this was his last movie that was truly daring, wassup rockers and marfa girl being complete wastes of time. Ken park works as it doesn't filter any of its subject matter and as such was doomed to only be seen by a tiny amount of people in its initial run. As time has passed its shocking content has not become easier to handle and it really is a movie you cannot recommend to anyone. I still value having watched it, because it reminds me that were all a little twisted, these people are just on the end of the spectrum.

Det_McNulty Ken Park is Larry Clark's second collaboration with Harmony Korine, following the success of Kids in 1995. Although it does not match the continuing social relevance of Clark's controversial debut, Ken Park does merit viewing. Returning to themes that can be found in his earlier photography work like Tulsa, Clark presents an extremely unsettling image of a skateboarding subculture struggling to overcome the monotony of their existences. By exploring the lives of a group of troubled teenagers and their dysfunctional backgrounds, Clark offers an insider's look into a community troubled by sexual abuse. Beginning with a suicide in the middle of a skate park, it then charts the lives of four different people who knew the individual who killed himself. Whilst there are moments of dark comedy to alleviate the bleak mood, this is mostly a painful study of fractured human relationships and bad parenting.Struggling to acquire distributors for the film, Ken Park has permanently situated Clark outside of the mainstream film community. As before with Kids, Clark's intentions have been deemed suspect because of the film's explicit nature. In addition to this unfortunate assumption, Ken Park is sometimes wrongly labelled as 'pornographic' and although there is, admittedly, a voyeuristic aspect to the director's style, this cinema vérité approach is necessary when considering the context of his work. Clark is offering viewers a chance to see the unseen side of teenage life and gain an insight into the roots of moral corruption prior to adulthood. Many viewers are often bothered by Clark's lack of overt condemnation towards the decadent lifestyles of the characters in his films, but I feel this misses the point, as it is not for the director to be some kind of moral crusader; it is for him to execute his artistic vision. Providing viewers are aware of the challenging nature of Ken Park's content and are willing to watch it with an open mind, they might end up finding a highly perceptive vision of alienated American youth.

daijohbudesu Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim. But they spend precious little time together and none of them seems to know much about one another's family lives. This bizarre dichotomy underscores their alienation. The result of suburban ennui, a teenager's inherent sense of melodrama, and the disturbing nature of their home environments. A movie that reflects America society more than any other movie done before. A story structured in parallel narrations of spread out America suburbs. Many characters melt together in a lyric and yet minimalistic view on a disoriented society where the commune sense is lacerated by a the idea of the perfect family, or the perfect life. We see a desperate portrait of love, and hate. The film is amazingly shot, with a constant focus on the subject as element separated from the background. I strongly suggest this movie for who is not familiar with the hidden faces of America society.