Kaboom

Kaboom

I watched Gregg Araki’s Kaboom the other night. It reminded me a lot Nowhere — a bright color palette painted in scenes of surreal science fiction with ambiguous late teenage, early 20’s sexuality littering the screen. Only Kaboom didn’t have the celebrity cameos that Nowhere had.

Kaboom was a return to the style and themes Araki employed in his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy of Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere. And that gave me a lot of comfort. Comfort against what, I’m not completely sure.

I guess I am a product of the 1990’s anti-mainstream movement. There is a lot of comfort in these cardboard caricatures that spout vaguely sociopathic maxims. It’s a cool world that a person like me desperately wants to belong to, is happy that someone else has the same illusions but is ultimately disappointed when reality looks nothing like what is painted on the screen.

So it’s a bit distracting the lead character looks like Jared Leto, that the British-accented blonde looks like Cassie from the UK version of Skins, that James Duval looks quite unfortunate throughout most of the film. So the ending seems like it was slapped on during post-production, but endings aren’t what Araki is best known for. It’s for dialogue like:

“Do you want to fuck?” “What?” “Do. You. Want. To. Fuck?”

See? Fun! Well. Maybe just for me.