In Kids, Clark created a movie with a series of powerful images, scenes and ideas–most chillingly that a 15 year old unknowingly has HIV and is spreading it to his equally unsuspecting partners–but nothing to tie these individual parts together. The result was a day-in-the-life film that didn’t seem to have any particular ebb or flow to it.

In Another Day in Paradise, Clark drifted away from his nihilistic examination of kids and focused on the relationship between a drug dealer and his wife (James Woods and Melanie Griffith) and a much younger couple (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson-Warner). While it was nice to see that Clark had found a more specific subject in the mentor relationship between a small time drug dealer and his protege, the same lack of story structure ultimately doomed the film.

I don’t find it necessary for scripts and films to follow the studio proscribed guidelines to structure (26 page of intro, 48 pages of rising action, 23 pages of resolution, etc), but I do find it necessary for something to happen in a given project.

Interestingly, not having anything substantive happen in one’s motion picture is becoming quite in vogue.

Director Harmony Korine is one of the most prominent Americans involved in this new radical left-wing film movement; given Korine’s involvement as the scripter of Clark’s Kids, this shouldn’t come as much of a great surprise. Based on the principles of the Dogme ‘95 movement (no sets, no unnatural lighting, no special effects, etc) and then taken one step further, Korine films have become essentially recorded versions of life. But, one has to ask, why does anyone want to watch this?

And the answer is that, at least for the majority of Americans, they don’t. Controversy can generate a slightly bigger box office for a film, but it cannot generate a good movie on its own.

Finally grasping this principle, Clark took on a new type of project for himself in Bully, a true story that has a distinct and definite beginning, middle and end.

Brad Renfro stars in Bully as Marty Puccio, an out-of-high-school teen, working in a south Florida fast food establishment with his best friend, Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl). Marty’s relationship with Bobby isn’t your typical ‘best friend’ relationship though. Bobby continually belittles, hits and hurts Marty; a typical interchange between the two came at work, soon after two girls began to flirt with them: for no real reason, Bobby takes Marty’s head and slams it into the side of the counter.

Upset about Bobby’s poor treatment of him, Marty repeatedly asks his parents to move to a new neighborhood. With his request repeatedly turned down and Bobby unwilling to change, Marty and his girlfriend, Lisa (Rachel Miner) decide to solve the problem in the only way of which they can conceive: they are going to kill Bobby.

This decided, Lisa and Marty recruit their friends, friends of friends and a suspiciously inept hitman (Leo Fitzpatrick) to help do Bobby in.

Once the crime is committed, the group begins to fall apart, turning on one another as their worries begin to get the better of them (this is why people do not normally commit murders in groups of 7 or more).

What impressed me the most about Bully was the realistic nature of the teenagers at the core of the film. Clark’s teen subjects have always been hard-living teens, drinking, using drugs and having sex–which is generally why his films are so controversial–but, in Bully, Clark took the characters past this initially voyeuristic examination.

In almost all Hollywood films, teenagers are made out to be 14 and 15-year old adults. Hollywood teens don’t always do the right thing, but they always know what the right thing to do would have been. And in real life, this isn’t the case. In real life, a person’s teenage years are almost always the most awkward years of his life, precisely because right and wrong are not always that crystal clear, because peer pressure is really a bitch and because sometimes better options aren’t as readily identified as they are later in life. Clark captures this sense perfectly in Bully.

The seven teens that perpetrate the crime at the center of this film are organized, in some cases, because they have nothing else to do on the day in question. Several of the teens, who are now spending life in prison, didn’t even know Bobby Kent before they agreed to murder him, simply doing it because their friends were. After the murder, the seven talk to their friends, associates and even their parents, asking strange "what if" questions that ultimately leads to them getting caught.

The casting of Renfro as Marty, a very submissive and browbeaten teen, was unusual, given Renfro’s off-screen antics and teen appeal (he attempted to steal a yacht the night before production was to begin on Bully). The same held true for the casting of Stahl as Bobby. On paper, it seemed that the two would have been much more suited for the other’s roles, but, in the end, both delivered surprisingly rich, textured performances that helped propel Bully forward.

This stunning motion picture is Clark’s best and most accomplished film work to date.