Marfa Girl (2012)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Pretentious boring and who cares, I could not believe this film won the best film prize at the 2012 Rome film festival it must have been a bad year for films in the official competition. The film about bored teenagers in El Paso, TX who look like there were ripped off Calvin Kline a fashion ad, bad acting bad sex, and of course stereotyping border patrol agents as bad people who are to get you and make life miserable. Larry Clark should learn from his greater film like Kids and Bully and remember when he could actually make films and not bore audiences to death. nothing much to say about a film with nothing much to tell.

Larry Clark the director of this flick became notorious for a few reasons. He is known to use non-actors in his flick. For most parts he did. He just picked up teenagers from the street and let them act in his flicks. But what the teenagers had to do was shocking for some. His first flick Kids (1995) made in full grunge bloom he let kids under-aged smoke cigarettes. It shocked the world back then but it put his name on the map. From there on he made the still unreleased flick in the US, Ken Park (2002). Again teenager were picked from the street to perform sexual acts on-camera. Teenage Caveman (2002) was another perfect example. Always the theme in his flicks are youth skating around and bore themselves a lot. It shows in this picture that not all is the American dream. This flick takes place on borderland. You know what you will get, the typical Romeo And Juliette situations. But here Larry Clark goes a bit further. Were he wasn't afraid to show naked breasts from teenagers (always above 18) here in Marfa Girl I was surprised that they go all the way this time with even boner shots. It's all just on the edge of getting in trouble as filmmaker but he still does it and was never sentenced or whatsoever. Of course the border patrol has the annoying cop who never got laid with the ones crossing the border and he's out to catch some chica available for his needs. You can see it coming that it turns out wrong. It's just a depressive flick were teenagers are doing it with each other because there's nothing else to do...This isn't a flick for everybody due a lot of blah blah going on and some music being made by the teenagers also going on for ever and of course the nudity shown. Were Ken Park did had a good story here it hasn't. But it's out there if you want to see were Larry is famous for. Gore 0/5 Nudity 2/5 Effects 0/5 Story 0/5 Comedy 0/5

*This review may contain a spoiler, so perhaps you do not want to read it before seeing the film, but I have kept this sufficiently vague, in my view.I have to comment on another reviewer who wrote that this film represents Larry Clark's disappointing and lackluster comeback film. I have not known any of Larry Clark's filmography. I do not believe I have seen a single one, so I was a bit surprised Mr. Clark had a comeback to make. Mr. Clark is foreign to me and the actors are also completely unknown, which has the added bonus of keeping production costs low, but seems to degrade the overall quality of the film. Sometimes I even felt as though the actors were searching for lines or emotions, but did not know where to look. Perhaps the director had stepped out for the moment.No doubt, I am equally foreign to this film. I considered stopping the film 5 or 10 minutes in because my initial reaction was one of bewilderment (why are these people in this film?) and one of disgust (why are these border patrol agents harassing a young, and why is a teacher, moments later, spanking him in a school room with a paddle fashioned out of wood). By foreign I felt as though I was in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, playing the role of Gregor Samsa. The world I see portrayed in Marfa Girl is totally foreign to me. It is a world with brutal quasi-police forces who prey upon the public. It is a place where all hope is lost and where people turn to spiritual healing for some substitute of courage and intellect. It's a world where the only place to find entertainment is apparently in a semi-abandoned apartment complex/RV park where teenagers are dancing dispassionately to music of a guitar strummer and a kid with an electronic sound board. More fascinating is why anyone would want to visit this southern border town. The young artist known as Marfa Girl (played by model Drake Burnette) mixes with the locals like oil to water when she suggests to one man that he should model nude for her sketches. I nearly laughed, but instead wondered why he didn't slap her coming on to a taken man in an ultra-conservative town in America.Admittedly, part of my foreign feeling toward this film lies in my lack of relativity to the main character, whose mother at one point reminds him that although lightly browned, he is "not a wetback." Admittedly, in my K-12 years I didn't fall into bed with older women/moms, I didn't roam aimlessly around my little middle-American town, and I didn't grow up in a place where I was treated as if I belonged to another species on another planet. Young people go through difficult times as adolescents; we get that. Young people do and say stupid things, and we get that as well. It's just that Clark does not quite bring this one home for me. Even at the end, I was still searching for something to cling to, but could not find it. Indeed, the reason for this review might very well be the fact that the film was so forgettable that I had to write down my thoughts lest I forget about it tomorrow.You might have wondered from where the film's title is derived. It turns out that the title is taken from the very real town in which the film is set, Marfa, Texas. As if the film had not turned me off the place, a review of Google Maps and Wikipedia resources suggests that it is a place on Earth that I am highly unlikely to ever find myself. No doubt, I am better off for steering clear, and you are better off for skipping this film.

It's hard to believe that it was seven long years between the release of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl. Clark's themes of destructive adolescent behavior, broken families, and teenage angst and sex are now more prominent than ever, and one would assume that Clark would be toying with every possible convention for the material in present times, when censorship restrictions is now far more liberal than it ever has been. However, Clark claims there is still apprehension towards his kind of material from "crooked Hollywood distributors," which is why he made the decision to release Marfa Girl on his website, with no plans of it ever coming to DVD or being released in theaters.It's sad when a man of Clark's caliber must resort to the broad and indistinguishable realm of online distribution to get his films seen but maybe that's for the better. He is not limited by any means, is his own boss, and still possesses the freedom to make the movies he wants to make. As a writer, I can respect that immensely. His film Marfa Girl could mistakenly be called a "return to form" for Clark, due to his lengthy absence, but just by watching the film you know he hasn't left. His last feature Wassup Rockers, however, felt nothing as much as a watered-down depiction of what Clark does best, which is handle the aforementioned themes.Marfa Girl concerns the town of Marfa, Texas, which is near the border of the United States and Mexico. The town is as sleepy as can be, often possessing a dreamy quality with its wide open spaces, soft blue skies, and frequently humble, muted colors. It concerns a number of people living in this town, mostly working class characters, one of whom is a teenager named Adam (Adam Mediano), a sixteen-year-old who is approaching his seventeenth birthday in a matter of days. He is beginning to become sexually curious, hoping to get lucky with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Inez (Mercedes Maxwell), who he trusts completely, but also being tempted with sex from numerous other people, including his twentysomething neighbor.The titular character is played by Drake Burnette, a local artist who also looks to have sex with Adam. The film's powerhouse scene comes when Adam and her talk about sex beginning when Adam is in the bathtub and continues when the two walk out in public. The scene touches on every topic of sex, from pleasing a woman sexually to elaborating on the unfair double-standard of when a man or a woman have many sexual partners. It wasn't until I saw this scene did I recall how much I missed Clark's naturalistic conversations and his characters' curiosity and interest in sex. Clark doesn't stray from making the dialogs explicit as well, with both characters going into intricate detail about the mysterious ways of a woman's clitoris.A subplot involves Tom (Jeremy St. James), a lowly, misogynistic border patrol agent who sets his sights on Adam, Adam's mother (Mary Farley), along with Inez. St. James does great work here as a first-time actor, effectively creating an unsettling atmosphere whenever he steps on screen. His character Tom is an unpredictable one, with an early scene with him taking place at a restaurant where he remarks to a waitress about how her feet wouldn't hurt if she didn't have such gigantic breasts. Tom is a scummy character, doing a thankless job to boot. It isn't until Burnette's mysterious character strikes a conversation with two of Tom's Mexican coworkers, questioning if they feel guilty in any way for arresting their own people. The scene, which takes place inside an abandoned warehouse, is equally tense and unsettling, perhaps providing subtle commentary about how every encounter, no matter how trivial or meaningless, with the border patrol is in some way.Despite the seven year gap, Clark stills seems to be interested in the Latino, "skater-punk" lifestyle. Frequent scenes involve some sort of skateboarding, gathering, or languorously wandering the streets of Marfa. Cinematographer David Newbert knows how to capture the look and appeal of a sleepy town, tucked away down in Texas. The dreaminess of the film's aesthetic is something that I can't easily shake, similar to the gritty and dirty aesthetic utilized in Clark's previous films.Clark's directorial debut is Kids, which is not only one of the most powerful debut films I have yet to see but one of the most powerful films that I have yet to see. Its honest depiction of teenagers and the degradation of values is something scarcely brought up but brilliantly handled overall, making for an exceptional debut film. He went on to direct Bully, a film showing murder for the sick, sadistic crime that it is, and not cheaply portraying or exploiting its subject for something to laugh at or for cheap shock. Marfa Girl tackles the familiar themes of Clark's earlier works, and while that could easily be turned into a criticism rather than a strength (Clark is seventy and maybe should look into other themes), seeing something like this particular film makes me glad to have him back and know that he won't be limited in his approach any longer.Starring: Adam Mediano, Mercedes Maxwell, Drake Burnette, Jeremy St. James, and Mary Farley. Directed by: Larry Clark.