“Mister Lonely” opens this weekend. We better write our review, quick like.We’ve been following Harmony Korine’s comeback rather closely, cause even when his films are bad, he’s always an engaging and fascinating personality.
“Mister Lonely,” we’re happy to say, is probably his best effort to date and finally warrants all the press he’s received in the past. Every one’s checking in to see where he’s been in the last 8-9 years and the New York Times did the same this weekend and illuminated some more of his whereabouts in the M.I.A. years (that we haven’t already charted elsewhere).
However, Korine is a notorious fabulist and you’re never sure what’s fact and what’s a heightened act of performance art when he’s being interviewed. Videogum recalls a story that they were told about several years ago that featured Korine’s house burning down and the only thing that survived was a picture of the director and Ol’ Dirty Bastard smoking crack together. They figured the story was bullshit until they read the Times profile this weekend that confirmed (for the umpteenth time), the news about Korine’s two house fires (guess they haven’t read all the previous profiles on the former enfante terrible.)
The Times did say however that one house fire was in Connecticut and one was in Queens – ODB’s old stomping grounds, no? (or at least a lot of his criminal troubles seemed to center from of arrest warrants out of Queens). Could be, who knows. It’ll probably go down in more of Korine’s lore.
Then there’s the whole infamous story of Korine moving to Panama to follow his nomadic parents where he met a group of cult of fishermen called the Malingerers, who were trying to find a fish with gold scales.
After a few months he got into an argument with the cult leader — he thought they were living a lie — and as he was leaving, a fisherman’s wife handed him a dog leash. “She said she was walking the dog. It was an invisible dog.”
In New York recently he offered further details. After he moved to Nashville, “I mounted this leash on the wall and I heard it bark,” he said. “I swear to you. Something at that moment just felt right. I know it sounds weird.”
“I don’t know if that story’s true,”Korine’s friend David Blaine said. But added, “The real story about Harmony and his life is more mind blowing than any story he could ever make up.”
Other things that Korine did in his drug-addled lost-weekend period (aside from living in Panama, Paris and losing teeth as he “rotted from the inside”)? He worked as a lifeguard at a Jewish community center, mowed lawns to raise cash (NY Times) and worked as an intern for a Russian cobbler.
“Mister Lonely” is surrealistic, but sweet– a major change of pace from the usually scabrous filmmaker. But that might not last for too long. “I think the next one will be more provocative,” he told the Gray lady. “Otherwise life just gets too boring.”