"Keep young and beautiful. It's your duty to be beautiful," Annie Lennox trilled in her delightful remake of the flapper-era standard "Keep Young and Beautiful" on her first solo album. And that tongue-in-cheek maxim can certainly be lobbed at the comely young actors prominently displayed in two disparate yet equally pleasurable youth obsessed movies opening this week. (Both also offer plenty of overt and covert voyeuristic pleasures for queer audiences.)
Kaboom is the first of these. It marks the return to cinemas for out writer-director Gregg Araki after a three-year hiatus. For Araki, who broke through as one of the leading lights of the New Queer Cinema movement 20 years ago, the youth-centric Kaboom is both a return to roots and to form. Using his own college experiences as a film major, Araki crafts a sex comedy that spins off into deeper and deeper territory that's delightfully dark, playful and, naturally, queer as hell.
Smith (Thomas Dekker)Araki's 18-year-old version of his younger self, with his permanent five o'clock shadow and deathly palloris a film studies major who muses, "Is kind of like devoting your life to an animal that's on the verge of extinction" at a fictional southern California college. But Smith never picks up a camera or goes to class; instead, he's focused on getting laid as often as possible. In particular, he's fixated on his new roommate, Thor (Chris Zylka), a quintessential blonde surfer dude who struts around naked, boffs a series of female bed partners and tries out a bit of self-fellatio in front of Smith without embarrassment (in one of the film's most hilarious scenes). "I'm undeclared," Smith answers an unfazed Thor to his query about whether he's gay or not.
But then nothing sexually fazes any of the pretty young things inhabiting Smith's freewheeling worldcertainly not Stella (Haley Bennett), Smith's best gal pal who's an acid-tongued dyke and a junior-league Eve Arden who adroitly tosses one zinger after another. The gorgeous Lorelei (Rosane Mesquida), unfortunately, doesn't get Stella's dry humor and doesn't take the hint when Stella wants to break up (something to do with Lorelei's uncanny witchcraft abilities and stalker tendencies).
Smith himself picks up a male hottie on the beach, jumps into a tryst with the Aussie-accented London (Juno Temple) and finds plenty of time to masturbate in between. London, a lively little number, is as avid sexually as her new lover and her birthday present for Smith is the stuff of wet dreams. Alas, though the sex lives of these beauties are in spectacular overdrive as they drift through school, trouble's afoot. Did Smith, while tripping on drug-laced sugar cookies, really witness the murder of a pretty red-haired lass by a group of men wearing animal masks, or did he just get a bad dose? Are his nightmares really coming true? What do those threatening e-mails mean? Is the world really coming to an end?
As the sexual romping proceeds, Araki intertwines an array of mystery and paranoid-thriller elements, and the resultpart screwball comedy, part David Lynch and a whole lotta sexy timesis a lovely melange. It's easy to tag the energetic, unapologetic Kaboom an extension of Araki's famed teenage apocalyptic trilogy (The Living End/Doom Generation/Nowhere) for those familiar with this filmmaking renegade and a great starting point for those just arriving at the party.
Teen Flick Exhibit B is a sci-fi blockbuster (produced by Michael Bay) called I Am Number Four. These days it's not enough for teen heartthrobs to be beautiful and angst-ridden for movie audiences. Now the gloomy ones in question must have fantastical powers as compensation for their endless ennui. So they're secret superheroes, vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters and mythical gods/goddesses or, in the case of John Smith (played by mega blond hottie Alex Pettyfer), aliens.
John is a conflicted teenage orphan from another world, running from a passel of leather-clad, tattooed testosterone aliens with sawed-off teeth (and shark snouts) who want to kill him. "We are the last of our kind," he's told by his protector, pseudo-uncle Henri (Timothy Olyphant), who has moved them from place to place for years to avoid detection (kinda like Cher constantly moving Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci in Mermaids). Though John revels in regular teen experiences like attending high school, making friends with the science nerd and dating pretty, free-spirited Sarah (Glee's Dianna Agron), those murderous thugs are hot on his trail and time is running out. For now, destiny will trump true loveat least for this and, if the box office proves durable, a batch of sequels.
Familiar, none-too-taxing and featuring a likeable, fetching cast expertly hitting their marks, director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) makes the wait for those inevitable sequels something rather nice to anticipate.
Film notes:
You only have two more days to catch The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis' fascinating, elliptical documentary portrait of the art-driven family of the late Francesa Woodman, whose stunningly evocative black-and-white self-portraits (mostly nudes), influenced by Diane Arbus and Deborah Turbeville, revealed an extraordinary talent but whose suicide at 22 in 1981 came decades before she received recognition from the art world. Questions surrounding the artistic agenda laid down by Francesca's surviving mother Betty, father George and son Chuck play at the edges of the moviealong with the cautiously discussed topic of Francesca's enormous talent trumping all the other family members'. The result seems both a tribute to the artist's way of life and an unspoken cautionary tale. It's at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, through Thursday, Feb. 17. See www.siskelfilmcenter.org .
The late monologist Spalding Gray, an artist of the spoken word is profiled in Steven Soderberg's And Everything Is Going Fine. Constructed from Gray's own monologue films and videotaped performances (which include a vivid and humorous homosexual encounter Gray had as an adult) the film is an illuminating, final monologue performed by a man seemingly haunted all his life by chronic anxiety and depression. Although no mention of Gray's own probable suicide in 2004 is mentioned, the loss of this bitingly funny, insightful storyteller is palpable throughout. It opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Siskel.
Check out my archived reviews at www.windycitymediagroup.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Readers can leave feedback at the latter website.