Mister Lonely.

"As a filmmaker, [Harmony] Korine - who made an instant sensation 13 years ago as the teenage author of the Kids screenplay, and earned the undying enmity of the entertainment press with his subsequent Andy Kaufman-esque mindfuck antics - combines an installation artist's eye with a Catskills comic's affection for the threadbare fringes of showbiz," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Co-written with his brother Avi, Mister Lonely is startlingly straightforward compared to his earlier work. But, like that work, it stands or falls on each single, self-contained scene. And it falls, often.... But letting a movie keep its intimations of chaos... sometimes yields moments of wonder."

Updated through 5/6.

"Mister Lonely reveals that the punk abrasiveness of Korine's youth has been replaced by a lyrical self-pity - the apparent upshot of a decade on the skids," writes New York's David Edelstein. "I'm glad he has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos."

"While the film falls short in comparison to his other films, Korine remains one of the most innovative and surprising new voices in American cinema," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "As a champion for the beautiful and the strange, I'll take bottom-shelf Korine over just about anything else currently playing in theaters."

"What to make of it all?" asks Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended."

"As he tells it now, the Harmony Korine of the 90s was not just a precocious upstart but also a thin-skinned kid," writes Dennis Lim, who met him recently for a New York Times profile. "Even then, he said, he realized that it was partly his youthful hubris and pranksterish humor that made him such a tempting target. 'It's one thing to understand it intellectually,' he said, 'but another to live through it.'"

Eric Kohn talks with Korine for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Toronto.

Updates: "All that Korine asks in exchange for his not passing judgement on characters is that the viewer does not either," writes Alex Ross Perry in the Tisch Film Review. "Considering the natural spectator/spectacle relationship that immediately arises when presented with a street performer or a celebrity, by giving you people who are pretty much both - at least as far as the film is concerned - Korine has already put the viewer at a distance from which judgement is difficult, if not impossible."

Mark Olsen profiles Korine for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 5/1: "Mister Lonely is enigmatic, its moods and meanings sometimes elusive in the way that dreams can be, but nearly every frame is an image of arresting clarity and beauty," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And even when it strays beyond the border of sense, you can’t help accepting its logic and its truth, much as you do when your unconscious spools pictures in your sleep."

"While Korine's earlier films contained many moments of sheer artistic brilliance, they never congealed into a deeper, unified feeling in the way that they do here," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Sonically, visually, and structurally audacious, Mister Lonely firmly establishes Harmony Korine as a major voice in world cinema."

"I certainly don't mind if a filmmaker works with the same ideas and themes in more than one film, but while the two portions of Mister Lonely spoke to each other, I don't think they necessarily formed a single whole," writes Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "But the two films still operate as separate meditations on some of the same themes."

"Offbeat?" asks Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Sure. But not as strange as, say, your average Charlie Kaufman screenplay. It's too bad, because for once Mr Korine has given audiences the sense that he was trying to create something that might play before midnight."

For the Guardian's Danny Leigh, Kids "still feels somehow under-appreciated to me, the combination of its teen-sex subject matter and the role of busted flush Larry Clark as director still keeping it from its rightful status."

"Mister Lonely has its moments of wonder and beauty, but the film is obscure by design, and meant to appeal to those who favor the alternative canon of directing greats: the one that includes the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, John Cassavetes, Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara and Vincent Gallo," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Korine clearly wants to be on that list too—though at the moment, the best he can do is pretend."

Korine is "a sideshow barker and Mister Lonely is his freak show," growls Armond White in the New York Press.

"Though Mister Lonely seems sweeter and more mainstream than Korine's other films, it still has that sense of randomness, of pathetic luck and habit and wisdom all combining to make up a life, or a collision of lives," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth talks with Korine about his media diet.

Andy Battaglia talks with Korine for the AV Club.

Erica Abeel talks with Mamet for indieWIRE.

"Mister Lonely is richer and sweeter than anything [Korine's] ever made," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

What it all boils down to, I think, is that Korine belongs more to the visual-art tradition of cinema than the psychological-drama tradition. It's simplifying only a little to say that all narrative filmmaking comes out of two strains of modernist theater, the Eugene O'Neill-Tennessee Williams strand in one direction and the Brecht-Artaud strand in the other. What most people expect in a movie, most of the time, is the O'Neill-Williams tendency, with naturalistic characters and cathartic resolutions. It's safe to say Korine isn't interested in that. He comes partly out of the more confrontational Brecht-Artaud tradition, and - like Godard and Jim Jarmusch and Peter Greenaway, to name filmmakers I bet he likes - out of photography and dance and advertising and postmodern art. It's not coincidence that he's spent the last decade making music videos and performance art projects rather than feature films.

Updates, 5/4: For Michael Sicinski, Mister Lonely is "a film riddled with as many good ideas as shoddy ones and in its own weird way all the more admirable for being such a sincere, ramshackle piece of junk."

"Although Harmony has never made a big deal of it, certain characters in his movies appear to have been influenced by people who appeared in his father's films," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News, where he also takes stock of recent developments in the distribution of art house movies.

Update, 5/5: "Korine's influence on American film culture has been minimal, all told," writes Nick Pinkerton in Reverse Shot. "I'm surprised to find myself thinking that this might not be entirely a good thing; slogging through any given season's slate of 'smart' indies, his spazziness seems a boon."

Update, 5/6: "Mister Lonely has gotten under the cinetrix's skin." And she's got some online viewing for you.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2008 2:14 AM