Kaboom

I needed to leave a review since the only one up so far was a super negative gay-bashing.

Kaboom is the best Gregg Araki movie I have seen to date. Smiley Face was charming, and Mysterious Skins was just perverted (Mino from Romania should watch that one, he'd love it). It is super stylized in the coolest way, and the presentation is very clean. This movie just has a glossy feel to it that is very impressive. Aside from the color and glitter, the story is very engaging and holds on to you. It is a funny movie, there are scenes that will make you laugh, and some scenes that will give you goosebumps. It is also very eerie at times, the stylistic devices implemented to be chilling are indeed so, and at times it is chilling in a sort of deeper X-Filesy kind of way. Unfortunately, my criticism is that the conclusion of the film is all rushed exposition and not very rewarding at that after the fantastic build up beforehand.

The film deals with sexuality in a very lighthearted way. I find Araki's treatment of sexual taboo's to be refreshing and comical. Not for the ultra-conservative or homophobic crowd.

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.

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.....

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.

That's how 'Kaboom' is billed on the DVD. I watched it, premiered on Film 4 last night.

Initially I rather liked it, the striking design, the casual attitudes to almost everything and the dialogue. Especially the catty one-liners. I'm not familiar with this director and on the strength of this one movie, I'm not in a particular hurry to explore further, however.

I realise that it's intended to be a surreal cult film and where it falls to pieces is where it starts to mess with your head, as it's just non-sensical and frankly, silly. I also realise that I'm not in the probable intended audience, age-wise. People running around in pig- headed masks just don't grab me, I'm afraid.

The liberal, mixed sex scenes were both interesting and fun and the attitude that good sex is just that, refreshing. Most of the young cast play their parts well, especially Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett and Juno Temple. I did watch it all and there were many good points and I enjoyed much of it, but ultimately, it's just too way out there.