Leave it to Harmony Korine to be blunt about why Hollywood has been struggling to keep butts in seats during the pandemic era, and has instead resorted to an obsession with IP content as its go-to greenlights.
Korine recently led a Q&A at the Sarasota Film Festival, and it quickly became apparent that he doesn’t give a damn about recent modern cinema.
“I think it’s just because they suck,” Korine said. “Yeah, most of them just are not good. And movies were the dominant art form for so long, and for better and for worse, I don’t think they’re the dominant art form anymore.”
“I think life happened,” Korine said. “Radio was the dominant form, then television and movies. I think you have a period of time where things are the dominant, perfect art, and then something comes along. And it’s not just technology, but it’s people, syntax, the way that they view things, the way that they feel about the world, their internal rhythms and the cadences and the vernacular, the imagery of sight and sound, and it changes. It evolves or devolves. I don’t think movies are going away. I just don’t think that they’re the dominant form anymore.”
Rather, Korine says the medium is evolving into a whole other entity, and he’s trying to figure out the new language with his recent video game inspired experiments such as “Baby Invasion” and “Aggro Dr1ft.”
Korine’s dissatisfaction towards today’s cinema has been apparent now for a number of years. He’s just not interested in making movies. Hell, Terrence Malick wrote a script for Korine to film, and it’s so far been collecting dust on his shelf.
It’s come to the point where Korine admits that he’s not even watching movies anymore, and would rather play video games and create unusual content for his EDGLRD productions company — “Everything now feels so boring and homogenous.”
With the making of “Aggro Dr1ft” and “Baby Invasion,” Korine has more or less left cinema, or at least the current definition of cinema. He’s more interested in reinventing what a film can be, but critics have so far not been impressed.
It should be noted that many of Korine’s “classics” were initially panned by critics, and barely found an audience in theaters, including “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy” and “Trash Humpers.” Only time will tell if his EDGLRD experiments will have aged well.