Ken Park

2002

Action / Drama

18
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 54% · 13 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 54% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.8/10 10 31899 31.9K

infidelity california home pregnancy abusive father harassment

Plot summary

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.

Director

Edward Lachman Photo
Edward Lachman

Top cast

Maeve Quinlan Photo
Maeve Quinlan as Rhonda
James Ransone Photo
James Ransone as Tate
Julio Oscar Mechoso Photo
Julio Oscar Mechoso as Peaches' Father
Patricia Place Photo
Patricia Place as Tate's Grandmother
480p.BluRay
789.83 MB
720*480
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
N/A
Seeds 37

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by kangdan 5 / 10

overwrought

ken park or krap nek as they say is basically four episodes with each episode dealing with an individual's family situation or lack thereof. These episodes are inter-cut within each other.Though Larry's Clark's movies deal with very explicit, or "realistic" subject matter his presentation is overwrought. Characters are more caricatures than 'real' people. The zealot father, the aging housewife, the weird kid, the father with unrequited love. The scenes with these characters were hard for me to take in. The actions and reactions they take seemed so hackneyed to me. Could it be that Larry Clark is developing a "larry clarkness"? a style? As one who is purported to be a breaker of styles and conventions this movie was shot pretty conventionally with lots of sex. I wasn't too impressed with this effort. Some shots, as Larry Clark says, are there for realistic purposes but I just found it to be sensationalistic and unnecessary.The cinematography was great that is probably due to the Ed Lachman. The blue and red tinge really added to their respective scenes. Probably use of tungsten for outdoors and daylight inside.Correct me if I'm wrong but I could swear Larry Clark is moving from realism to symbolism. In one scene he has the family gather together on the front steps. Your good Ole' American suburban family, full of deceit and infidelity but putting up a great face none the less. It seemed like a tableau.
Reviewed by t-lund-1 6 / 10

A strange movie, and as said, not for everyone

It had been a few years since I saw KIDS, but remembered it as a film that made an impression on me. When hiring Ken Park at the local video store I was not sure what to expect. After seeing the film I think the director has made a few very good scenes and a few not so good. The relation between Claude and his father was very realistic and spot on, the way the father treated Claude, pushing him downwards, instead of helping him and motivating him, was very much like the relation I had with my mothers' husband. Still, where Claude's father crosses the line after a night out drinking in his car, never happened to me. I ask myself if that is needed in the film as well. The behaviour of the father should be enough for Claude to leave, but I guess that night is the famous drop that makes the glass run over.Peaches and her father is another relationship that is completely dysfunctional. Somehow I could guess though, that the innocent girl bringing home a guy from bible studies was not as innocent as her father believed her to be. Which is demonstrated when her father comes home to find Peaches in bed while she is about to orally please her boyfriend. The boyfriend, which she has tied to bed, has no way to defend himself against the insanely religious father of Peaches, and gets a nice beating. This was another predictable scene, but it was still a bit nerve wrecking on Peaches behalf as we could see her father get closer and closer to opening the door to her room.Shawn, who sleeps with his future mother in law (Rhonda), and is obsessed with finding out if he is more hung than his future father in law, is another character in the film. To me it feels a bit overkill to include all the sex-scenes with Shawn and Rhonda. Especially the scene where Rhonda comes out of the shower seems a bit too much. Not that the scene includes a lot of sex, but the dialog could have been included earlier.Tate is serial killer material, and I thought so in the beginning of the movie. His killer talents were revealed in the movie, not very surprising.It all starts and end with the story of Ken Park. The story about Ken isn't actually needed in the film if you ask me. It would do just as well without. The characters very briefly mention him, and he doesn't really add anything to the film. That we are watching dysfunctional families is beyond doubt, and perhaps is it that Ken Park did not want to end up like his parents that drive him to it, but I still think he could be left out.I understand it that we have an uncensored version in The Netherlands, and that really makes me ask what people saw in the cinema. It must have been a very short movie then. Do I recommend this film? Yes I do, because it shows how narrow minded and unsupportive parents can be towards their children. How little they understand, and how quickly they forget that they have been young themselves. It makes you think.
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