Kaboom

Director Gregg Araki had been moving from a camp/cult status gay filmmaker to a rather interesting chronicler of the gay experience as told with offbeat flare and raw honesty. His film "Mysterious Skin" starring Joseph Gordon Levitt represented a giant leap forward in his approach to film and his storytelling skill. "Kaboom" is a giant step backward. This film takes us to college with a confused young man of ambivalent sexuality. He's having dreams of weird abductions and strange sex and mysterious men in masks. I went with it for a while. Then the story degenerates in to a psychotic nonsensical nightmare involving a lost relative, outer space and the end of the world. I was less concerned with the end of the world than I was with the end of the movie. It seems like this film was constructed by a half dozen frat boy film students on a tequila bender. It's that silly. There are very few talented gay filmmakers that have the kind of platform that Araki has. Squandering that opportunity is shameful. Araki should re-watch "Mysterious Skin", grow up and make better films about gay people and gay culture.