09 February 2008
Nowhere
"It's like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes."
- Dark in Nowhere
I totally didn't expect it, but I really liked Gregg Araki's Nowhere. It's the first Araki film I've seen. I'd heard a lot about his films prior to seeing this and they really didn't sound like anything I'd like, so I am quite pleasantly surprised by this one.
I really loved the cinematography, production design and especially the music - which is pretty much everything 90s from a pretty decent Hole track, to Sonic Youth, to two of my favourite Filter songs off their debut Short Bus. The music goes so well with whatever's on screen that it would really be an effort not to enjoy this film. Well, in the beginning at least. Mid-way it starts to get depressing when bad things start happening and people start dying.
Araki's sense of humour is wild, really, and that's what drew me to this film in the first place. I saw this ridiculous clip from The Doom Generation (which, incidentally, I have always wanted to watch since first hearing of it when I was 10) and knew that I simply had to get my hands on his films. What I really didn't expect though, was for the film to have any kind of real core or substance (which I think is nicely encapsulated by the quote from the protagonist Dark at the beginning of this post). In Araki's own words:
"Nowhere manages to have its subversive cake and eat it too. Its surface is very pop, supersaturated colour, like Clueless. But in its soul, it has a lot more on its mind. I didn't want to make an ugly, gritty movie like Kids. I wanted to talk about these kids living on the edge of oblivion, but I wanted to do it in an MTV language. I wanted it to mesmerize."
- Gregg Araki in this interview
"I approach films in the way a musician approaches music. It's just my means of expression, my chosen medium. I'm not out to produce propaganda for any sort of movement or political agenda. I think at some point that's when people get frustrated, because I don't have their political agendas in mind. I have my own agenda, which is to express myself via the medium of film. I'm an artist, not a politician."
- Gregg Araki in this interview
The film is available now in its entirety on youtube. Which is excellent because I may have never seen it otherwise. Check out the first of nine parts here.Labels: Film
posted by Abigail at 13:12
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