Nowhere (1997)
Directed by Gregg Araki
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
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What critics compared Nowhere to
Despite all that hipness, this film lacks the wit and insight that made the extreme visions of youth in Joseph Kahn’s Detention, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, and Bruce LaBruce’s The Misandrists such delirious, penetrating, and marvelous forecasts of cultural apocalypse.
What follows is an updated American Graffiti-style series of parallel couplings, misadventures, and tedious broodings about the meaninglessness of it all, punctuated by the odd alien abduction.
Sarah Lassez, whose indie resume includes Gregg Araki's "Nowhere," is enchanting as this demon turned sexy beast who dabbles in emotions she's never experienced before.
In the spirit of erstwhile teen-apocalypse king Gregg Araki (whose Nowhere belongs on Southland’s giant map of influences), Kelly compels unlikely sympathy for American Idle.
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That is, until Araki finished his apocalyptic trilogy of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.
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.
Much of Araki's filmography, including such extreme works as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, deals with the cruelties of youth, those formative incidents of sexuality and/or violence that permanently scar an impressionable teenager.
Independent filmmaker Gregg Araki ("Totally F***ed up"/"The Doom Generation"/"Nowhere") uses Scott Heim's 1995 novel to tell a sobering, mature and disturbing tale about two young men and the homosexual abuse they suffered as children.
GREGG ARAKI FOLLOWED his 1992 breakthrough, The Living End, one of the foundational titles of the New Queer Cinema, with what he called his “teenage apocalypse trilogy”: Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997).
For the last 25 years, Araki has been seemingly obsessed with the years of sexual exploration and teenage rebellion in works like “The Doom Generation,” “Nowhere” and “Kaboom.”
The film is directed by Gregg Araki, whose scintillating portrayal of disaffected youth in films like Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere garnered him a healthy cult following in the ‘90s, even earning him the chance to write and direct a failed pilot for MTV in 2000.
Death, too, lurks in the margins, not just because Kat is plagued by dreams of a ghostly version of her mother, but because she speaks and thinks with the same emotionally deadened tone that afflicted the more psychotic creations found in Araki’s early Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, a sequence comprising Totally F**ked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.
On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's Nowhere, and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn.
Writer-director Gregg Araki, he of a slew of sexually polymorphic, '90s-set portraits of teenage disaffection1994's "Totally F***ed Up," 1995's "The Doom Generation," and 1997's "Nowhere"finally branched out in recent years with 2005's altogether more cohesive and mature drama " Mysterious Skin " and 2007's loopy Anna Faris-starring pot comedy "Smiley Face."
Having made his ‘Teenage Apocalypse‘ trilogy – Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) – Araki addresses in Kaboom a literal apocalypse.
The series will also show Nowhere (1997), the Valley Girl meditation Araki famously described as “Beverly Hills 90210 on acid,” as well as the spiked-cupcake comedy Smiley Face (2007), with Ana Faris and John Krasinski.
He's explored all manner of genre - road movies (The Living End), black comedies (The Doom Generation), soaps (Nowhere) - but disaffected youth, clocking in at every point of the Kinsey Scale, are always at the fore.
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Christina Applegate, so good in Gregg Araki's Nowhere, reverts here to her Married With Children mode, while, in the background, Lela Rochon seems to screech every other line, drawing out her consonants in ways that'd make Urkel proud.
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.