Kaboom

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.

After the complex, challenging, touching and definitely mature "Mysterious Skin" (2004) I was really looking forwards to Araki's new film (And let's just pretend that the 2007 Smiley Face doesn't even exist). The trailer makes Kaboom look quirky, subversive and somewhat crazy in a fresh and fun sort of way…. Once again, a misleading trailer! Unfortunately the film itself has really none of that offer, as if Araki, instead of growing up, had been regressing to a film student again, because, that's what this film feels like: a polished and yet pointless student film! And believe me, I've seen many of those in my life! Thomas Dekker is quite likable and he's probably the best thing in the film and yet he's struggling with a story that has no beginning and no end (literally no end!)… and actually, come to think of it, no middle either! The film tries to be anarchic, dark, sexy, funny, rude, aping films like Donnie Darko and even The Rules of Attraction (which was a pretty faulty film anyway). In the end it is just too chaotic and definitely too silly to be taken seriously or to even recommend. There are very few original ideas and the little excitement in there is only given by the music and the editing, but certainly not by the story. Even the few good lines of dialogue in the script remain too isolated and detached be noticed, let alone remembered and they get lost in the ludicrous plot. What is real? Is there a conspiracy? Who are those people dressed like animals? Does any of this really matter? And actually, do we give a toss? In the end it's very hard to care about who does what and why, so basically you'll just end up waiting to see who's going to have sex with whom, (basically everyone seems bed down with just about everyone else in this movie despite their gender differences) and yet, none of the sex never has anything to do with the story. It is completely incidental and purely exploitive. But even if you take it as a sexy film , beyond its average straight/gay/bi soft-core porn clichés, it is all quite unremarkable and gets nowhere close to push any boundary and it thinks it does. In fact it all gets rather repetitive (I lost the count of how many times some character wakes up all of a sudden from some bad dream). This film might have been the director's wet dream, but none of that excitement shows up in the final product. I'll give Araki one last chance then I'll begin to think that "Mysterious Skin" was just a lucky mistake in an otherwise disastrous filmography MoviegeekBlog.wordpress.com

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.

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.