Kaboom

Since other reviewers of Kaboom have mentioned Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Polanski, Hitchcock, and Craven I might point out that the character, Smith is introduced as film student who is actually studying "Un Chien Andalou" by those naughty twenty-somethings Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Our wiki friends inform us that "The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed..... It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes." Sound familiar? Chien was essentially a student film but one might say that it has had some staying power.

I liked Kaboom but it was certainly a bit silly, especially toward the end. About as silly as a lobster telephone. And if characters were continually waking out of dreams (and being interrupted during "spanking" sessions), perhaps that was a hint to the viewer about where the film was coming from.....

If you want image and attitude this can be fun. If depth of vision, on the other hand, it will seem small.

I'll have you imagine this as a guy with a bunch of comic-books and magazines on his floor, he cuts up strips and glues them together, now something about sex and college relationships, then a strip off Scooby- Do, another resembles Lynch, a third is about life on campus, then back to sex, more sex and obsession.

He is from that 90s crop of makers (Tarantino, Smith) who thought that life had no business being seen as deeper than the way stuff just hang together, the fun in having so much stuff to pick from: movies, comic- books, TV. He briefly tried something more coherent in Mysterious Skin, here he's back to a collage.

Two main thrusts here. One is the college journey of discovery, here he tries to paint a picture of sexual life, the confusion and reluctance - Nowhere was angsty, this is more relaxed in its skin, there's a sweetness around discovery. The second thrust is about mysterious happenings around campus, there are figures in animal masks who come out at night, a witch, a girl found dead. This is the more endearing part, all about how confusion in his mind around sexual identity manifests around campus as some inscrutable power of rearrange.

It's all in the opening scene, a recurring dream where he walks down a corridor lined with girls and comes up against a mysterious door marked 18, his age: sex, dreams, locked mystery.

It's fun for a while to see him do it, the fun all in the imaginative jumps from one strip to the next, in that it all loosely hangs together around a dream. But then it's as if he gets bored or can't see any point to it so he just keeps throwing stuff. A cult, the end of the world, a discovery about the father, more trysts, a car chase. None of it sticks, too much paper weight so it all just tumbles down in a heap of scraps. This is its own insight then on craft, if the patching doesn't begin to rise up into shape that guides the eye from forms to the possible thing they give rise to, it remains artless patchwork.

Lynch also takes a lot of care in picking out cinematic wallpaper so it's seductive when you enter, but that's after he has mulled long and hard about where the walls are going to be and what kind of space they will define.

I'm not gonna spend my time talking KABOOM up and up. There is no need. It is, in a way, a return to form from Gregg Araki, and also somewhat exploratory, with genre. It's not his best film, but it's not his worst either. What constantly strikes me about his work is the way so many people who negatively review it, cite all the wrong things as why it's bad. It's as if every negative review of his films, and every negative reviewer is determined to showcase precisely the things which are intentional, to the film, as mistakes or reasons for it's overarching badness. Does POST-MODERNISM really get lost on so many? Case and point: The first review on this page (at the time of my writing THIS review) is titled, "Pointless photoshopped farce perpetrated on your wallet. Take your kids" I mean, yeah. Duh. That WAS the point. It's pointless, photoshopped, vapid, and....YOU MISSED THE RELEVANCE. You weren't IN on the joke and that's your fault. It's social commentary. Surely, you can understand social commentary's place in art? That statement may as well be a blurb on the cover of the DVD, trying to gather attention for it's purchase. It's not really doing it any injustice. Now, like I said, this film certainly isn't perfect, but boy do some people need to better train their eyes.

Gregg Araki's breakthrough film, 1992's THE LIVING END, was a gay THELMA & LOUISE in the age of AIDS, very cutting edge, and I thought he'd go much further than he did but, then again, big things were also predicted for John Dahl (RED ROCK WEST, THE LAST SEDUCTION) at the time. Oh, well. Anyway, Araki's been on the indie scene ever since and KABOOM takes his "apocalyptic teen angst" series (TOTALLY F***ED UP, THE DOOM GENERATION, NOWHERE, MYSTERIOUS SKIN) on a psychedelic roller coaster ride to a trippy -and inevitable- eve of destruction. It's a stylish (with vivid colors you can eat with a spoon), funny, sexy, college-set CLUELESS-on-acid that morphs into a cross between Sergio Martino's ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK and THE WIZARD OF OZ after a horny, existentialistic film student begins to realize he may be at the center of a global conspiracy with cataclysmic consequences. Fairly indescribable, free-wheeling sci-fi fun that'll leave you with a WTF? feeling. I liked it.

I've watched most of Greg Araki's films, weather online or by accident. In university I was directed to several of his movies, for his wild and outrageous plot-lines, and desolate themes of helplessness. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but I did enjoy the 90's drug escapade "Nowhere"(1997), which was a precursor to many well known stars of the early 2000 era. Araki leads viewers on a non-oriented vision of college life, complete with all the oddball events of his previous films, but ends up as a rather dull entry.

For most of the movie the viewer is listening to our main character (known only as Smith), discuss the trials and tribulations of his young adult life. Bi-sexual, awkward, unfocused, and generally ignorant of other people around him, we are forced into his fantasies, absurd lifestyle, and unrealistic grip on reality. Sounds like fun right? Well, unfortunately you'd be wrong. The events that we witness unbearably forced, despite its unnatural and science-fiction theme. I felt most of the actors were just terribly strained and the unnatural dialogue between characters only draws attention to the situation. I think the actors were just terribly tedious in their delivery, and before long, I found there wasn't as single one that was believable.

As with most drug riddled, and absurdist films, this movie has some interesting happenings. There is everything from serial killers to witchcraft here, and they certainly match Araki's usual plot-lines. Some are pretty amusing, and somewhat surreal, while others simply fall flat and actually take away from the enjoyment of the film. Several of them (if not most) have no significance to anything at all, and they leave you with the feeling that Araki is trying his hardest to stay relevant in his own way. I didn't mind the craziness, in fact, I was expecting it. However, by the end of the film, you find yourself more than confused (which is probably his goal in the first place).

If you're a fan of Araki, you'll probably like this film very much. I didn't really think it had anything to offer besides that "WTF is happening" feeling he brings to movies. An irrelevant event with an abrupt ending.

4/10