By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Sundance Review: Kaboom

Posted Friday, January 21st, 2011 - Comments Off on Sundance Review: Kaboom
Be Sociable, Share!


I’ll say this up front: Gregg Araki’s Kaboom is not for everyone. If, however, you enjoy completely crazy, immensely creative tales (and I mean crazy in the best Donnie Darko sense), and you’re neither homophobic nor averse to graphic sexual scenes (both hetero and homo), and you’re willing to forgive a few plot twists that, in a world where reality prevails, make no sense whatsoever — but that would make perfect sense in a world where, say, Scott Pilgrim having to fight Seven Evil Exes makes perfect sense, then you will likely find Kaboom to be highly enjoyable. I sure as heck did.

The comparison to Scott Pilgrim is apt: Kaboom plays out visually and plot-wise very much like a stylized graphic novel. The highly likable cast is just terrific, particularly Thomas Dekker as Smith, an 18-year-old college kid plagued with sexual fantasies about his studly surfer roommate, Thor, Haley Bennett as Smith’s sassy lesbian BFF Stella, and Juno Temple as London, a very sexual coed with whom Smith, who’s “undecided” in the sexual orientation department, explores his sexual urges.

Smith eats a drug-laced cookie at a rave-ish party (oh, those rowdy college kids and their drugged up cookies!) and before you can say “Wow, maybe that was a bad idea,” Smith is having a hallucinatory, paranoid visions involving men wearing animal masks, a murder in a park, and a torso in a dumpster. Meanwhile, Stella’s having issues ending a bad relationship with a scary-stalker sexy lesbian who might or might not be a witch, and worst of all for Smith, all of these things seem to have started when he had a weird dream. What’s real? What’s not?

Araki elicits some fantastic performances from his talented cast, and visually the film is a vivid, trippy, technicolor acid trip (although Araki does tend to be very fond of the orange-blue color palette, which for me is way overused, but given the graphic novel look of the film, it works here). And there are many shots in the film that are just stunningly lovely in their composition (see the still above for one example). Music is used to good effect when needed, but isn’t anymore overbearing than it should be for the emotional tenor of any given moment or for the type of film this is.

I do want to take a moment here to say an additional word about Juno Temple here. She was just outstanding in Dirty Girl, which played at Toronto, and here she is again with another terrific performance (the Brit accent’s a bit dicey, but that’s forgivable). There’s an energy about her that reminds me a bit of Parker Posey; she is definitely one to watch on the indie scene.

Maybe it’s the end of the world as we know it, maybe it’s all crazy apocalypse fantasy as a metaphor for coming-of-age sexual urges. I’m not sure it matters, when it’s all put together in such a fun and compelling manner. Probably some critic will write some thoughtful, deeply compelling pieces explaining to you in detail why this is so, but whatever. With a movie this fun and flat-out crazy, why over think it?

Araki is a compelling, original, creative director, and I like his style and sensibility ever so much more than the overused mumblecore, “let’s turn a camera on some solipsistic 20-somethings while they ponder the utter boringness of their existence” thing. Kaboom is exactly the kind of film I hope to luck into at Sundance: it’s fresh, it’s bold, it’s different, and it’s likely to offend at least a good percentage of the people who wander into it not knowing what their getting.

But hey, even if it’s not for you, it’s not the end of the world.

Be Sociable, Share!

Posted in 10 Days of Sundance, Festivals, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Originals | Comments Off on Sundance Review: Kaboom

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon