The second filmmaking venture of noted still photographer Larry Clark (the first was Kids), or in other words a second license not to hold the camera still. As before, the intended drift of the thing is to convince the comfortable, complacent moviegoer that he had no idea that reality could ever be so appallingly real. The first word out of anybody's mouth is "fuck." The second word, also. And very soon the speaker, a young and undernourished vending-machine thief, is in a tussle with a beefy security guard ("C'm here, ya little fuckin' bastard" and "C'mere, you little motherfucker") and is obliged to stick a screwdriver into him. After that, the juvenile offender is taken under the wing of an older and overconfident thief, and the two of them (Vincent Kartheiser, James Woods) take off with their respective girlfriends (Natasha Gregson Wagner, Melanie Griffith) on a torpid spree of crime, clothes shopping, and improvisatory acting. Even the slaps to the bourgeois face (the pregnant girlfriend blithely smoking cigarettes and snorting coke, a minister moonlighting as a weapons dealer and concluding a transaction with a hymn) lack force. Lou Diamond Phillips, coming in late, makes the biggest splash as a glittery gay thief, but maybe it's just that he has less time to become a bore. R&B songs of the period -- the 1970s -- provide an impetus unmatched by anything on the screen. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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