The Doom Generation (1995)
Directed by Gregg Araki
Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embarks on a sex- and violence-filled journey through a United States of psychos and quickie marts.
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What critics compared The Doom Generation to
"Mysterious Skin" submits an interesting directorial challenge, requiring Araki ("The Doom Generation," "Smiley Face") to take reprehensible acts of exploitation and a swell of destructive confusion and find a position of cinematic inspection that doesn't inspire viewers to immediately lunge for the eject button.
Araki (The Living End, The Doom Generation) could have gone the usual brutal, oppressive route but instead finds an astonishingly beautiful center to his film, focusing on tender moments of re-discovery and re-direction rather than on pain and defeat.
While Araki’s previous films, such as Totally Fucked Up and The Doom Generation, were self-consciously trashy tales of teen angst and chic nihilism, Mysterious Skin explores the difficult, painful and frequently sensationalised issue of child sexual abuse.
The director, Gregg Araki, until now best known for such transgressive gay-themed underground films as "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere," has made the most mature movie of his career, one that deftly cuts not only between the stories of these wildly different young men, but also between past and present within those stories.
His previous films, such as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, were more concerned with shock value and surrealism than with plot and character and ended up sketchy and confusing as a result.
And yet, Araki, who made such thematically intense and sexually graphic films as "The Living End," "Totally F***ed Up" and "The Doom Generation," ratchets things even more acutely than those directors.
You can’t echo The Doom Generation and try wringing “girlboss” moments out of a heroic white cop.
Following Totally F----d Up, and The Doom Generation, Nowhere is the third in writer-director Gregg Araki's candy-colored, hyperkinetic, self-described ''teen apocalypse'' trilogy about lost Los Angeles young people with too much time, money, and consumer product on their hands.
Gregg Araki ("Totally F***ed Up"/"The Doom Generation") is the one man dynamo behind this scatalogical romp to nowhere, who zeroes in on teen nihilism in his attack on anything resembling taste or good sense or parental values.
The final installment of Gregg Araki's "teen apocalypse" trilogy (following "Totally F***ed Up" and "The Doom Generation"), "nowhere" wants to have it both ways, satirizing the affectless, brain-dead anomie of his characters while at the same time reveling in their nihilistic hedonism.
Following in the footsteps of Araki's previous overrated strident and pretentious diatribes -- The Living End, The Doom Generation, and Totally F***ed Up -- is Nowhere, an irritating melange of sex, drugs, and crass cliché.