Perfectly adorable

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This movie drags human sexuality through a very filthy gutter.Once again Hollywood glorifies illegal aliens, demonizes border guards who try to stem the tide! This movie treats men, women and sex as if they were all on filthy euro heroin! A True piece of Hollywood Filth!Spanking seems to be a fetish with Mr. Clark, how many of You were spanked by Your junior high school Teacher? Every filthy dirty thought a teenager ever had is played out over a stark West Texas Landscape! An Ugly Film for Ugly Minded People!

...is what seems this film is striving for at first. Ignoring Larry Clark's notorious reputation of a cinematic perv and exploiter of young, underweight and under aged non-actors (quoted: I wondered about the availability of porn everywhere and how it affected what they thought about sex, what it was, what influence it had...). He makes films about specific not-for-everybody subjects and does not hide his fascination by it. Fair enough. The problem here is not weather to approve or disapprove Clark's fetishistic obsession by young & aimless, beautiful & doomed, or his over the top raw shots of them having sex, doing drugs or shooting people (Kids, Ken Park, Wassup Rockers prepared us for it) but his stubborn persistence in denying the strength and the possible depth of the material.His lazy semi- documentaristic approach makes it all more so interesting, just that it feels as if he's not in control of the outcome...And that can be tricky if you're dealing with such cold-blooded realism. Though amazing cinematography and mood cover for the lack of narrative and acting force, Clark likes to show off his talent in photography and lets his story suffer for it.Marfa girl revolves around a half-Mexican charismatic 16 yr- old skater boy in a self-titled town in Texas, which is another character of the movie. Located on the border of US and Mexico it is the perfect setting for all kinds of weird stories and conflicts. The mixture of locals and outsiders, "breeds" and racist psychopaths, like the patrol officer Tom played by Jeremy St. James. He is a savage and brutal sociopath that, for some inexplicable reason, gets away with everything, whether showing Adam's Mom "blue waffle" pictures or abusing every single person he meets. As we learn by the end, he is in pathological relationship with pain, weather inflicted upon him or on other people... So called "circle of violence" that goes on until something really bad happens. Though St. James' performance is great and believable in every second, I find the character in the end abruptly degraded and pushed to fit the plot assignment, pretty much like the rest of them. Marfa girl, misleading "main character" of the film played by the fresh model (what else) Drake Burnette is like a patch for the others, bringing in a breeze of fresh air and liberation from their established patterns and beliefs, but coming off more as snobby and reckless then true and free spirited. She is an Artist in residence, white and privileged but nevertheless doomed and lost as her fellow townies. Maybe that's the part I feel the most ambivalent about in Clark's films. The fact he doesn't really give any chance to his characters. As if in his eyes they are all losers by birth certificate.There are two amazing sequences in the film that made me think it would take it to a whole new level. One is an off-beat dialogue between Adam's mother and Mexican spiritual woman and her brother, involving dead parrots and their emotional bondage with them. As weird as it may sound, this was the most genuine and natural part of the film. Second one is the sequence between the Marfa girl and young Adam where she tries to pass on her liberal, kind of feminist, values of free love and double standards in male/female relations. It's the talk that feels more natural then all the stiffed sex scenes and unnecessary violence in the end. It also shows that the actors are not really that bad or inexperienced but, actually, well directed, portraying true awkwardness of the outsiders- inhabitants of the infamous American canal. I really loved those seemingly effortless dives into complexities, coming from faces of Dazed and Confused magazine covers...I am more interested in seeing their emotional landscape,their quirky philosophies and thoughts on life then the platitude of sex, drugs and violence that fits the frame all too familiar.They are all kids (with less edge than the original "Kids") and their paths are still not determined, in spite of their aimlessness and utter lack of interest and integrity.The end result feels as if that no-future philosophy of ghost town and its Martian Marfa citizens, so pointedly and viscerally portrayed, was forced into some kind of a tragedy just to fulfill the plot assignment.Too bad Clarke didn't feel it was worthy of more thorough investigation, or maybe he found it boring comparing to visually more satisfying exploration of his fantasies.

*This review may contain a spoiler, so perhaps you do not want to read it before seeing the film, but I have kept this sufficiently vague, in my view.I have to comment on another reviewer who wrote that this film represents Larry Clark's disappointing and lackluster comeback film. I have not known any of Larry Clark's filmography. I do not believe I have seen a single one, so I was a bit surprised Mr. Clark had a comeback to make. Mr. Clark is foreign to me and the actors are also completely unknown, which has the added bonus of keeping production costs low, but seems to degrade the overall quality of the film. Sometimes I even felt as though the actors were searching for lines or emotions, but did not know where to look. Perhaps the director had stepped out for the moment.No doubt, I am equally foreign to this film. I considered stopping the film 5 or 10 minutes in because my initial reaction was one of bewilderment (why are these people in this film?) and one of disgust (why are these border patrol agents harassing a young, and why is a teacher, moments later, spanking him in a school room with a paddle fashioned out of wood). By foreign I felt as though I was in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, playing the role of Gregor Samsa. The world I see portrayed in Marfa Girl is totally foreign to me. It is a world with brutal quasi-police forces who prey upon the public. It is a place where all hope is lost and where people turn to spiritual healing for some substitute of courage and intellect. It's a world where the only place to find entertainment is apparently in a semi-abandoned apartment complex/RV park where teenagers are dancing dispassionately to music of a guitar strummer and a kid with an electronic sound board. More fascinating is why anyone would want to visit this southern border town. The young artist known as Marfa Girl (played by model Drake Burnette) mixes with the locals like oil to water when she suggests to one man that he should model nude for her sketches. I nearly laughed, but instead wondered why he didn't slap her coming on to a taken man in an ultra-conservative town in America.Admittedly, part of my foreign feeling toward this film lies in my lack of relativity to the main character, whose mother at one point reminds him that although lightly browned, he is "not a wetback." Admittedly, in my K-12 years I didn't fall into bed with older women/moms, I didn't roam aimlessly around my little middle-American town, and I didn't grow up in a place where I was treated as if I belonged to another species on another planet. Young people go through difficult times as adolescents; we get that. Young people do and say stupid things, and we get that as well. It's just that Clark does not quite bring this one home for me. Even at the end, I was still searching for something to cling to, but could not find it. Indeed, the reason for this review might very well be the fact that the film was so forgettable that I had to write down my thoughts lest I forget about it tomorrow.You might have wondered from where the film's title is derived. It turns out that the title is taken from the very real town in which the film is set, Marfa, Texas. As if the film had not turned me off the place, a review of Google Maps and Wikipedia resources suggests that it is a place on Earth that I am highly unlikely to ever find myself. No doubt, I am better off for steering clear, and you are better off for skipping this film.

It's hard to believe that it was seven long years between the release of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl. Clark's themes of destructive adolescent behavior, broken families, and teenage angst and sex are now more prominent than ever, and one would assume that Clark would be toying with every possible convention for the material in present times, when censorship restrictions is now far more liberal than it ever has been. However, Clark claims there is still apprehension towards his kind of material from "crooked Hollywood distributors," which is why he made the decision to release Marfa Girl on his website, with no plans of it ever coming to DVD or being released in theaters.It's sad when a man of Clark's caliber must resort to the broad and indistinguishable realm of online distribution to get his films seen but maybe that's for the better. He is not limited by any means, is his own boss, and still possesses the freedom to make the movies he wants to make. As a writer, I can respect that immensely. His film Marfa Girl could mistakenly be called a "return to form" for Clark, due to his lengthy absence, but just by watching the film you know he hasn't left. His last feature Wassup Rockers, however, felt nothing as much as a watered-down depiction of what Clark does best, which is handle the aforementioned themes.Marfa Girl concerns the town of Marfa, Texas, which is near the border of the United States and Mexico. The town is as sleepy as can be, often possessing a dreamy quality with its wide open spaces, soft blue skies, and frequently humble, muted colors. It concerns a number of people living in this town, mostly working class characters, one of whom is a teenager named Adam (Adam Mediano), a sixteen-year-old who is approaching his seventeenth birthday in a matter of days. He is beginning to become sexually curious, hoping to get lucky with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Inez (Mercedes Maxwell), who he trusts completely, but also being tempted with sex from numerous other people, including his twentysomething neighbor.The titular character is played by Drake Burnette, a local artist who also looks to have sex with Adam. The film's powerhouse scene comes when Adam and her talk about sex beginning when Adam is in the bathtub and continues when the two walk out in public. The scene touches on every topic of sex, from pleasing a woman sexually to elaborating on the unfair double-standard of when a man or a woman have many sexual partners. It wasn't until I saw this scene did I recall how much I missed Clark's naturalistic conversations and his characters' curiosity and interest in sex. Clark doesn't stray from making the dialogs explicit as well, with both characters going into intricate detail about the mysterious ways of a woman's clitoris.A subplot involves Tom (Jeremy St. James), a lowly, misogynistic border patrol agent who sets his sights on Adam, Adam's mother (Mary Farley), along with Inez. St. James does great work here as a first-time actor, effectively creating an unsettling atmosphere whenever he steps on screen. His character Tom is an unpredictable one, with an early scene with him taking place at a restaurant where he remarks to a waitress about how her feet wouldn't hurt if she didn't have such gigantic breasts. Tom is a scummy character, doing a thankless job to boot. It isn't until Burnette's mysterious character strikes a conversation with two of Tom's Mexican coworkers, questioning if they feel guilty in any way for arresting their own people. The scene, which takes place inside an abandoned warehouse, is equally tense and unsettling, perhaps providing subtle commentary about how every encounter, no matter how trivial or meaningless, with the border patrol is in some way.Despite the seven year gap, Clark stills seems to be interested in the Latino, "skater-punk" lifestyle. Frequent scenes involve some sort of skateboarding, gathering, or languorously wandering the streets of Marfa. Cinematographer David Newbert knows how to capture the look and appeal of a sleepy town, tucked away down in Texas. The dreaminess of the film's aesthetic is something that I can't easily shake, similar to the gritty and dirty aesthetic utilized in Clark's previous films.Clark's directorial debut is Kids, which is not only one of the most powerful debut films I have yet to see but one of the most powerful films that I have yet to see. Its honest depiction of teenagers and the degradation of values is something scarcely brought up but brilliantly handled overall, making for an exceptional debut film. He went on to direct Bully, a film showing murder for the sick, sadistic crime that it is, and not cheaply portraying or exploiting its subject for something to laugh at or for cheap shock. Marfa Girl tackles the familiar themes of Clark's earlier works, and while that could easily be turned into a criticism rather than a strength (Clark is seventy and maybe should look into other themes), seeing something like this particular film makes me glad to have him back and know that he won't be limited in his approach any longer.Starring: Adam Mediano, Mercedes Maxwell, Drake Burnette, Jeremy St. James, and Mary Farley. Directed by: Larry Clark.