Cinematical

As Jack Silverman puts it in his interview with the filmmaker in the Nashville Scene [via GreenCine], "nobody has ever walked away from a Harmony Korine film feeling neutral about it." Bursting onto the scene at 19 as screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids, Korine and then-girlfriend Chloe Sevigny traipsed through the 90s like the new John and Gena (or, at the very least, the new Kim and Thurston). They made the spookily-beautiful portrait of poverty-chic Gummo, and dabbled in international relevance with Julien Donkey-Boy, the only American Dogme film that matters. They both gave interviews about how they had no respect for Hollywood, about how they (well, really mostly Harmony) were going to change the world.

And then what happened?

 
The rumour mill contends that, sometime after Julien's 1999 release and Sevigny's Oscar nomination the same year for Boys Don't Cry, the couple broke up. Sevigny went on to new heights of indie-film overexposure, and Korine fell somewhat off the radar. He exhibited art in international galleries; he published a limited-edition coffee-table book full of photographs of Macaulay Culkin, and an art book with Christopher Wool; he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Ken Park, which was never released in the US.

But Silverman's interview suggests that Korine has had a lot more on his plate. A few of the projects he mentions include:

• Fight Harm - this mythic project (it's been mentioned in every article related to Korine in the past six years) consists of footage, mostly shot by David Blaine, of Korine picking fights with strangers on the street, and subsequently getting his ass kicked. Korine tells Silverman that he plans to release it on DVD.
• Above the Below - speaking of Blaine, Korine colaborated with the "magician" on a film ostensibly about a stunt where Blaine stood suspended in a glass box over the river Thames for seven weeks - but as Korine tells Silverman, "it's not just him in the box; we did stuff for a month-and-a-half previous ... him getting punched in the stomach by boxers, doing magic tricks for strippers. At one point he pulls his heart out of his chest for a girl on the street. You'll see."
• Last Days - Korine plays a small role as "a sychophantic ... a leper, kind of" in Gus Van Sant's new film, which will premiere at Cannes.

Other projects mentioned in the interview include a music video for Will Oldham's Bonnie Prince Billy, a film Korine is planning to shoot in Brazil and Iceland, and something involving "Johnny Depp in blackface."