5. Gummo - Harmony Korine
Gummo was the work of first time director Harmony Korine. The film is nothing more than a series of loose events that were completely improvised on the fly. Nothing actually seems considered to have actual meaning beyond shocking the audience. Korine was completely out of control and produced a pretentious incomprehensible mess of an art film that attempts to hide behind a nihilistic façade. Basically Gummo follows a group of kids in a narrative free "day in the life" style format. Tummler and Solomon the two main protagonists hunt feral cats and simply bumble into Velvet Elvis style white trash portraits. These scenarios have been dreamt up in the grind house mind of Korine or the hand-picked Ohio trailer trash that star in the film. They stumble into a man flirting with a gay dwarf, a creep peddling his down syndrome sister for prostitution, satanic rituals, skin heads boxing each other and a large assortment of other deranged dilemmas. Korine simply allowed the locals chosen for the film to get high and initiate whatever chaos they wanted to in front of the camera. Gummo was the equivalent of slumming on Youtube before there was a Youtube. There is something completely exploitative about the results of the film. It's like if Jackass attempted to have a storyline and present itself as art. Gummo is not art but the work of a director who thought himself to be an avant-garde genius and threw caution completely to the wind.