Harmony Korine’s ‘GUMMO’ Is Getting The Criterion Treatment

2024 is shaping up to be an incredible year for fans of Harmony Korine. His latest film, Aggro Dr1ft, which was shot entirely in infrared, experienced a limited run at select theaters back in May. The movie features rapper, Travis Scott, and is connected to his new company/design-collective/I’m not exactly sure what to call it, EDGLRD, which carries the same cyperpunk-style “gamecore” aesthetic through projects like video games and interactive movie/game hybrids, expensive 3D-printed alien head skate decks painted with automotive paint, “fashionable” horned-demon masks, and… whatever the fuck else they feel like making. This is a different guy than the skate rat who wrote KIDS as a teenager, and later moved back to Tennesse where he hung out with the likes of David Berman. Korine has been steadily heading in this direction since relocating to Miami and making Spring Breakers (2012), if not before then. It’s hard to know where the line or irony exists, or even if they do anymore,, but it probably doesn’t matter. Harmony has been embraced into the high end art world, has done work for GUCCI, and is fully embedded in a world of bright colors, white blazers and dinner parties. He seems to be loving this life of excess, but even then, one gets the feeling that he’s experiencing it from a slightly angled perspective than so many others that could be considered within the same demographic. EDGLRD relishes in extreme fluorescents and bright colors, but almost to a violent degree. Much of their aesthetic feels like mainlining LSD with a radioactive werewolf on a killing spree.

One thing that seems to remain at Harmony‘s core is a desire to progress into new territories with his art, while finding new ways to redefine what a film is or could be. It makes sense that someone who is known for venturing outside the established parameters of the medium, would similarly attempt to turn things that are decidedly not film into film, and vice versa. He’s been open from the beginning about his view that filmmakers need to explore different approaches to storytelling. During a 1997 appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, he expressed the belief that, “there needs to be a beginning middle and end, but just not in that order.” At the time, he was promote his directorial debut, Gummo. The film embodied the ethos of prioritizing emotion and energy through a collection of situations and vignettes over any straightforward storyline. To this day, it remains not only my favorite movies in his catalog, but one of my all-time favorite films, period.

Today, the prestigious folks at Criterion Collection have announced that Gummo will be given their patented treatment with a brand new blu-ray release. It’s something that a lot of us have hoped for, but didn’t know how long it would take, or even who would step up to make it happen. Earlier this year, Australia‘s Umbrella Entertainment released a deluxe edition of Korine‘s heathenous experimental destruction flick, Trash Humpers (2010), which includes a Seattle Q&A that I filmed of the director, as part of the special features. Not long after, Vinegar Syndrome began selling a blu-ray re-release of Mister Lonely (2007). Both of these were exciting to see happen, but questions about if Gummo would be next inevitibly pop up in every comment section. Trash Humpers and Mister Loneley are, arguably, the auteur’s least and most accessible films, respectively. To put things in Goldie Locks terms, Gummo seems to feel “just right,” to a lot of the fanbase, by splitting the difference between the two. For a film that is so widely respected, yet not always widely available, getting a Criterion Edition is pretty huge.
 
The release of the Gummo Criterion Edition is slated for October 22nd. It will be available in single disc version, as well as a 2-disc 4K + Blu-ray package. Prices on both are currently marked down and available for pre-order through the Criterion website.

Check out the full list of what features are included after the following description from the product page.

Harmony Korine’s debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America’s rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston. Shot in Korine’s native Nashville—standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio—the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos. At once transgressive and empathetic, disturbing and undeniably beautiful, Gummo is a one-of-a-kind portrait of angelic and devilish souls caught in a cultural void, circumscribed by poverty and the depleted, alienated spiritual life of late-twentieth-century America.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Harmony Korine, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Korine
• Conversation from 1997 between Korine and filmmaker Werner Herzog
• Projections episode from 2000 featuring Korine in conversation with Split Screen host John Pierson
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An appreciation by filmmaker Hype Williams
  
  New illustration by Joao Rosa