Movie Review: Gummo

Sometmes, when the mood strikes me, I volunteer a movie or book or product review to Amazon.com. Here's what I wrote about the film, Gummo:

Director Harmony Korine may or may not be the latest "enfant terrible," but he's certainly given us something to think about with "Gummo." He's given us about 90 minutes of in-your-face immersion into a culture that most of us only glimpse in "Cops" and other "reality" programs that deal with the hopeless, hapless people who make up the bottom strata of White America.
We suddenly find ourselves immersed in a culture where single moms huff glue with their teenage sons and their buddies and where boys hunt neighborhood cats with BB guns and sell the carcasses to a guy who supplies meat to Chinese restaurants.
As the story develops, we learn the boys spend their cat money on glue and the services of a young prostitute who looks like Anna Nicole Smith with a lobotomy.
This movie is like a train wreck - at once horrifying and mesmerizing.I disagree with an earlier reviewer who saw Gummo as an outrageous piece of elitism.
I think that charge misses the point. This is not some arrogant exposé of the quaint ways of the poor, it's a 90-minute tour of the self-perpetuating Culture of Stupidity that can be found on the fringes of every city and town in America. These are people who turn bad choices into a way of life because that's what their parents did and their parents before them. Yes, Korine packs the screen with enough geeks and freaks to populate a dozen circus sideshows, but his point is well taken. This is a strata of society that Hollywood ignores, except for the occasional cameo role in films like "Deliverance." It's a vision of a reality that we recognize instantly from our day-to-day experience, but which is carefully filtered out of the mass media.Whether Korine has talent or promise in any convential sense of the words remains to be seen, but he's created a unique film that is destined to become a cult classic.
But, as an earlier reviewer noted, this is not a suitable date night substitute for "Casablanca" or "The Sound of Music."