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3.6 KiB
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I am of the opinion that it'll take Hollywood (and everyone else for that matter) at least ten years to catch up to what Gregg Araki is doing. His films are the most progressive, challenging, cutting-edge, darkest being made.<br /><br />Nowhere is one of my favorites. I also love Doom Generation and Mysterious Skin (Splendor isn't bad but it isn't one of my favorites). Nowhere is essentially (for me, anyway) a simple story about high school life among a bunch of kids told through hyperbole. Everything is stretched out, exaggerated, hyper-exposed and drawn out and revealed. It is very much like high school as I remember it. Colors are three times as bright, everyone moves three times as fast. Cars fly everywhere. The music is bright and loud and jarring. There are lots and drugs and drinking. Everyone is constantly going somewhere or coming from someplace. It's a world on the brink of total disaster. And a world that is desperately searching and aching for love and tenderness. Someone else was correct when they said it was like an LSD trip. Video visions of an LSD world. <br /><br />The basic plot is simple. Four or five different stories involving teens who know each other play themselves out over a 24-hr period, American Graffiti-style. Bart and Cowboy are a queer couple who are also in a band together. Bart's spiraling heroin use threatens their relationship. Egg and Dingbat are nerdy best girl friends. Dingbat is in love with Egg's virginal brother Ducky. Egg has a chance encounter in a cafe with a television idol dreamboat that seems too good to be true and, in fact, is. (encounters in this movie begin innocently and turn nightmarish). Dark is a brooding young video-obsessional (and the film's main character) who wants simplicity in his relationship with girlfriend Mel, a raving hedonist who pursues sex with anyone, including vicious lesbian Lucifer. Dark secretly has thoughts about anxiety-ridden schoolmate Montgomery, who seems to like him back. Mel's younger brother Zero is desperate to impress his girlfriend Zoe, and assures her he knows where the big party all the high schoolers are going to that night (Zero and Zoe seem to be junior high age). <br /><br />It starts with everyone ditching school and going to a sleazy cafe where there are foreboding whispers of that day being the predestined date of the apocalypse. There's also talk of the big party later. Then everyone goes their separate ways and has adventures (most of which are fairly grim in a cool way). Recurring characters pop in and out - the drug dealer who supplies Bart as well as the two ultra violent S&M girls he pimps (Dark fantasizes over them), a giant scaly alien from outer space with a ray gun who wanders in to blast teenagers from time to time (this also may be the key to the apocalypse talk), and a soapy televangelist with an 800 number who actually becomes the key to the film's "point". <br /><br />That is another matter. Some will say this film does not have a point. I disagree. The point to this film is in its texture and in the ultimate fates of Bart and Egg. I believe Araki is making a statement about modern kids. I don't believe this is lost among the nihilism either. It also has to do with the song that is played over the end credits. <br /><br />That is my take/. <br /><br />I'm not sure what high school was like for everyone else but for me it certainly wasn't anything like 90210 or Gilmore Girls or Dawson's Creek. Not AT ALL. I remember intense fights and disappointments, intense romances. Heartbreak. All of the stuff that is covered in this movie Plus alien abduction!!!!!!!!!!!! What more could you want??? |