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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Kaboom (Film)

by Colin Fraser | March 21, 2011 15:27 | Edited March 21, 2011 15:28

While its style is interesting and it never takes itself too seriously, this feels like the work of someone desperately trying to remain hip and relevant.

With Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki caught the public eye with his scorching drama about a gay hustler for whom the lure of New York is not without peril. Astute direction turned Joseph Gordon Levitt (500 Days Of Summer) into hot property, and Araki into America's answer to Pedro Almodovar. So with 2007's half-baked follow-up-flop Smiley Face a distant memory, a keen sense of now-or-never weighs heavily over Kaboom, a pan-sexual, sci-fi comedy no less.

 

Bisexual college kid Smith (an eye catching Thomas Dekker) is eighteen and ready for it. Lots of it. He doesn't spend much time in class, because he's too busy trying to make sense of his increasingly erratic, smart-mouthed friends, and his fantasies mostly involving his straight roommate. His quest for sexual expression walks in hand with his search for identity, and a long lost father. It also involves drugs, witches and an impending apocalypse. Think David Lynch partying with Hunter S. Thompson and John Waters.

 

Kaboom is an insanely stylised affair that seeks to challenge, among other things, audience expectations surrounding the sexualisation of teenagers. It's something of a director's trademark, here sodden with humour. Shot with a palate where Warhol and Lichtenstein connect, Araki has great fun exaggerating the philosophical viewpoint. Fortunately, he doesn't let anyone take any of it too seriously. And we don't, for a while. But as the jokes wear thin and are herded toward an ending that underscores a notion about journey and not destination, it also underscores Kaboom's hazy scope and Araki's growing irrelevance in matters collegiate.

 

After a string of moment-defining works (The Living End, The Doom Generation) that culminated in the blinding maturity of Mysterious Skin, it's uncomfortable to watch him return like an ageing Gen-X'er cuddling up to Y: a man less and less connected to the source, and with each passing year, less and less cool.