Bully

These are all great kids. They are your neighbor's kids, they are your kids. They go to the same high school that your kids go to. They don't mean any harm, they just want to have a good time.This is exactly how you would see them if you were wearing rose-colored glasses. The reality is that these kids were spoiled dropouts, druggies, and didn't work most of the time.Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl) is cruising through life, waiting for daddy to set him up with his own business, but not wanting work to interfere with his playtime. Bobby is a bully, he is verbally and physically abusive even to his best friend Marty Puccio (Brad Renfro). And if Bobby wants to have sex with a girl, he will have it by force if necessary.The movie starts where Lisa Connolly (Rachel Miner) and her best friend Ali Willis (Bijou Phillips) meet Marty and Bobby at a deli. They meet later at North Beach and even later have sex, and Lisa falls head over heels in love with Marty. The only thing that bothers Lisa is Bobby. She doesn't like the way Bobby rules Marty's life, or the way he treats her.After Lisa tells Marty she is pregnant and Marty blows up at her, Lisa decides that it is all Bobby's fault. She believes the world would be perfect for her and Marty as long as Bobby wasn't in it. It's not hard for Lisa to get Ali on her side, especially after Bobby raped Ali, but the murder job she has planned will involve more people.Ali brings in her new boyfriend, Donny Semenec (expertly played by the talented Michael Pitt) and her close friend Heather Swallers (Kelli Garner). Lisa enlists the aid of her cousin Derek (Daniel Franzese) and another local boy known as The Hitman (Leo Fitzpatrick).The gang invites Bobby out to a deserted area along one of Florida's many canals, using the promise of sex and drugs to lure him in, but instead they murder him in cold blood.Bully is based on a true story, and really surprised me at how well it came out. I urge you to watch it closely, because there is a great deal of sex in the movie that can be rather distracting. At first, I thought it was like a Calvin Klein underwear commercial, there was so much teen nudity and sexual situations, even those flashing buffalo-shots of panties, shorts, packages, and whatnot. But then the message sunk in; this was the way these kids treated sex! Casual, no-big-deal, something-to-do, more like having a cigarette than sharing intimacy.At first viewing I thought the beginning to be a bit slow, mostly because of the many sexual scenes, but the portrayal of these kid's deviant behavior is important to the set up of their overall mentality. So kick back and relax, and keep watching. It definitely gets better.It struck me how little regard these girls held for themselves and their bodies, social acceptance based on sexuality, breeding like cats in an alley, and treating pregnancy as if it were of no consequence. It's no wonder to me that they were capable of murder.The acting is really quite good in Bully, but its plain that Michael Pitt is far above the rest. You will swear that he really took dope to play his character, even pulling down a few laughs from me, especially with the clothespins.Overall, Bully is a great movie. The mood is captured well, the photography good, the acting good, and the script definitely well written. If you are shy of nudity or a bit of violence, you may want to cover your eyes a bit. Enjoy!

Bully is brilliant. The effect of the great American institutions of sex, intoxicants and gadgets (the gadgets here being cars) on kids is the real story here. Strictly within the parameters of the film, Bobby Kent was a walking nightmare, and his dispatch is most satisfying.Okay, just the film then: exceptional performances all around (except perhaps for Stahl, who has a lot of awkward line readings). Miner's strange combination of sleepwalker and Lady Macbeth is genius-level film acting, Renfro is good throughout with some nicely nuanced subtleties, and Pitt, with his charisma, works his best lines into something resembling giddiness. The real standout is Garner - you'll know it when you see it. Clark cut his film to a mashup of hip hop, Sonic Youth and two of Tricky and Fat Boy Slim's creepier songs, which gives it an energy the best films have (even quiet, still films). Almost everything post-murder is played for black comedy ("Lisa, give me the bat back or otherwise I have to pay for it!"). It's just a great film.Sadly, the DVD is bargain-basement. Either the negative from which it was struck is missing frames, or the physical disc is a flimsy cheap-o, or both, this is Lions Gate after all. Bully desperately needs rediscovery and an Arrow release. If you want to see Bully, and you should, get this disc and just put up with the stuttering (which calms down about 20 minutes into the film), and send Arrow an email asking if they could license the film for at least one print run. Bully, and the audience, deserve to see this film without distractions. It's just a really fine film. All I gotta say is, "Getting there" which, if you've seen the film, you'll know how funny it is.

This film does more than confirm a long-held theory of mine that even social degenerates have sex. It unapologetically tells an unpleasant tale of haphazard and fatal conflict resolution in a suburban setting lacking any guidance or vision of a world beyond itself with such realism that the viewer, already knowing what ultimately will come to pass, finds himself wishing someone with a brain cell will interject, "Hey, let's get a pizza instead."There is no reason for this murder to have happened. Larry Clark shows us the reason it did happen: Once the idea was given life, no one could think of a reason not to do it. Were it not based on a non-fiction account of a case in Florida, this film would no doubt be panned as lacking any sense of reality. (A common criticism of Clark's debut flick, "Kids.") Alas, the aimless zombies featured here do exist in larger numbers than any of us truly wants to admit. This is the only time I have seen them portrayed on the screen. They are the American Pie kids, without the charm or wit. They are the Clueless kids, without the introspection or class. They are Jay and Silent Bob, without the ability to utter anything approaching intelligent or a sense that a world exists beyond their lives and today. The only way one cannot be sincerely disturbed by this film is to deny its reality. It is not surprising that so many do the latter, since denial is the easier route.Naked bodies of teenaged girls do absolutely nothing for me. I did not find the nudity distracting at all. For those who can't see someone naked without calling attention to either how much they enjoy it or how much it offends them: This movie is not for you. A certain degree of maturity will be necessary to see that this movie has no protagonist, no heros, no one with whom the audience should empathize. This makes the film decidedly un-movie-like and, in the process, all that much more real.

Storytelling at its finest.Kept it raw and let the flaws in these characters show how culture and society had a hand in the killing.