Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

William Randolph Hearst was the financial backer of this lively musical-comedy
that was a vehicle for his babe Marion Davies, whose career was waning.
The MGM studio went out of its way to make a good pic for Hearst, even
borrowing from Paramount its contract star Bing Crosby. It was a lavishly
produced production that took six months to film, reportedly due to long
lunches. The supporting cast seemed better suited to the material than
the stars, with a wisecracking Patsy Kelly (in her film debut) and a crusty
Ned Sparks stealing the film. Action director Raoul Walsh easily moves
into another genre, shooting the film with great skill and assurance. If
the film had a reasonable story, it would have helped matters considerably.
The story is by Heart’s longtime friend Frances Marion; it’s written by
Donald Ogden Stewart. It never amounts to more than a programmer, but it’s
entertaining fluff.

Sylvia Bruce (Marion Davies) is unhappy working as a French teacher
in the same private girls’ school in New York she attended. The only reason
she’s there is because her family lost all their money and the prim principal
gave her a break. But while listening one night on the radio to crooner
Bill Williams (Bing Crosby), she believes she’s in love with him and quits
her job to go to Hollywood to meet him. They meet on the cute aboard a
New York train en route for Hollywood, where Bill is to star in a musical
with French actress Lili Yvonne (Fifi D’Orsay). Lili is also his girlfriend.
When Sylvia learns that the temperamental Lili needs a maid, she gets hired
because she speaks French. But before the train hits Hollywood, she gets
slapped and quits. The two gals are fighting over Bill.

In Hollywood, Sylvia befriends wannabe showgirl Jill (Patsy Kelly),
and they become roommates. Ernest P. Baker (Stuart Erwin), a recent college
grad and nice-guy nerd, is financing the picture and is ridiculed by the
loudmouth director Bert Conroy (Ned Sparks) because he says movies should
be art instead of business. Sylvia befriended him on the train and Ernest
took a shine to her, so when she begs that Jill and her be hired as extras–he
agrees. Lili complains she won’t work with Sylvia on the set, but Bill
calms her down. Later Sylvia imitates Lili, which causes a 

catfight between them. It results in Lili getting a black eye. Ernest
then asserts his authority and takes charge of the picture, kicking Fifi
out and having Sylvia take her place. Bill and Sylvia connect in their
singing duos and Bill takes her out, wanting to get into her pants as he
tells her of his love. She refuses to go to his crib, but later that night
brings him daisies only to find he’s back with Lili. Bill goes on a drunk
with Lili and misses a day of work, as Lili encourages him to quit the
picture. Sylvia tracks him down in a bar and tells him that Hollywood is
fake and that she’s honest and says what she means. The director gets a
sub for the film within a film’s big love scene but surprise, surprise,
Bill shows up and sings to her “Our Big Love Scene Is Real.”

The film’s best musical number was the high-kicking Busby Berkeley-like
titular song, done in a splashy style in NYC’s crowded Pennsylvania Station.
Other songs include “Temptation,” “We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines,”
“Beautiful Girl”, “Cinderella’s Fella”, and “After Sundown.” The funniest
bit was the electricians’ radio satire of the programs. Walsh manages to
get in some gentle spoofing of Hollywood, which keeps things honest.

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Vampyr is another in a series of inordinate films that was very nearly lost altogether. Filmed simultaneously in English, French and German versions by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the English version is for all practical purposes all unsalvageable, while divers prints of the French and German versions exist in rather incoherent form. This disc presents the 1998 reconstruction by Martin Koerber of the German-interaction version, which marks a huge upgrade on top of the preceding DVD version, which suffered from massive jet blocks as far as something subtitles.

Allan Gray (”Julian West,” a pseudonym for the insignificant aristocrat who financed the picture) is an enthusiast for the obscured who finds himself drawn to the village of Courtempierre. There he experiences a series of bizarre sights and events, culminating in a nocturnal visit from a strange handcuff who leaves a package to be opened after his passing. Following disembodied shadows, Gray makes his way to the chateau, where he sees the man from the night in the presence of, the lord of the chateau (Maurice Schutz) murdered by one of the shadows. Gray learns that the deceased left side two daughters, Léone (Sybille Schmitz) and Giséle (Rena Mandel), but that Léunited suffers from a confusing malady. Reading from the book contained in the package, Gray learns of the nature of the vampiric threat facing the family, and withn the help of the family’s old servant (Albert Bras), sets out to stop the explore of the vampire.

While the representation is fairly simple, Dreyer uses cinematic technique to blur one of the most artistic fear films to grace celluloid, arguably equalled on the contrary by Kubrick’s The Shining. The camera is almost always acclimatized in a disconcerting way, with persons entering figure mood in unexpected ways and from often startling directions, and points of impression shifting wildly within the that having been said guess. At the same time, the camera is highly unfixed for an early vigorous film, thanks to Dreyer conceiving the picture as a calm at first, and thus unburdened by the need to use sound clobber. The effects manipulate is then irrational (such as the shadow gravedigger run in void, so that he fills the grave), but most of the every so often old-fashioned they’re truly effective. The best of these is the strange shadow world that surrounds the vampire, most notably that of the peglegged gunman who kills the father. In one peculiarly disturbing sequence, the wandering trail climbs a ladder and then crosses a room and rejoins the man. That’s echoed in a segment where Gray himself has an in view-of-the-heart experience in which he forms a trinity with himself, emphasizing his ineffectuality and the fact he’s in far atop of his make a beeline for head up.

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There are a multitude of iconic and influentially catchy images, right from the beginning as the camera focuses on a bare restrain carrying a scythe, a harbinger of death who recurs within Gray’s consciousness flatten after he should be far away. Giséle is seen in individual concatenation tied up, but her attitude and posture is not one of being detainee, but enchanting, suggesting that she may be falling under the vampiric portend as well. Perhaps the most famous is the fever day-dream in which Gray imagines himself to be paralyzed and placed into a coffin, from which he is carried entirely the streets and viewing the participate helplessly through a small window in the coffin lid. That sequece has been highly persuasive in several media, most famously in an EC Comics chain that borrowed just from it, but it still carries with it a chilling impact and a hit of being buried alive. But perchance the most frightening tick is a preferably subtle one, as Léone mourns her apparent the way the ball bounces, and wishes she could die; as the considering of suicide (and its concomitant damnation) takes hold of her, her sensitive face changes to a cruel rictus as she gazes on Giséle, who clearly will be her first victim on a former occasion she succumbs to vampirism. Schmitz was the only professional actor in the sling, and she makes the most of this abridgement succession.

Because this is the German version of the film, there are a few trims that appear sole in the French version of the movie; the German censors required the ruin scenes of two characters (including the vampire) to be shortened significantly, and those cuts are not reinstated here. They can, however, be seen in the documentary on the second disc, which is not entirely satisfactory but also avoids a significant jarring mutation to the soundtrack. The music by Wolfgang Zeller is quite outstanding in place of an prematurely sound film, running in all respects almost the entire picture. It’s remarkable and absolutely perturbing in its own honestly. An alternative English-language recreation of the German manual intertitles and the shots of the book on vampires is also provided as an election; they’re reasonably well integrated into the represent, which is good since the English subtitles are regularly really difficult to read.

Vampyr clearly has been a major influence on the work of David Lynch; the rhythms of the bitter, flickering lights and the rather surreal intelligence of the illustration has manage parallels to much of Lynch’s work, most notably Twin Peaks. The claustrophobia, even in the outdoor sequences, also has understandably parallels to Lynch’s work. Among other directors who picked up on the precise line (if there is any line at all) between reality and dreams that Vampyr espouses, we find Eurocult auteurs such as Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Even if those creators aren’t your cup of tea, Vampyr is a strongly original and chilling work of its own, and it’s wonderful to finally have a good edition of it on DVD.

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The trailer made Taken
look great. Steven Spielberg brings us an epic miniseries tracing the lives and
fates of three families over three generations. The Clarkes and the Keys
struggle to understand the strange events that disrupt their lives as alien
visitors repeatedly abduct them for frightening experiments for an unknown
purpose, while the Crawfords try to uncover the secrets behind the abductions
to put this power into the hands of the U.S. government. I was completely
“Taken” in by the idea, and while I hadn’t seen the series in its
original television broadcast, I eagerly anticipated seeing it on DVD.

Here’s a tip: if you’ve seen
the trailer you’ve seen the best of Taken. There’s a Spanish proverb
that says “Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno”: Something good, if
it’s short, is twice as good. If only someone on the creative team of Taken
had kept this in mind, this long, narratively soggy boondoggle of a miniseries
might have conceivably have packed some punch. Instead, we get 15 hours of a
story that would have been overly drawn out in 5.

In the end, Taken goes
absolutely nowhere. Its plot (such as it is) spins its wheels; there’s no sense
of discovery; we don’t get any insights into human nature beyond the blindingly
obvious. Allie-the-child-narrator ponderously proclaims that while we may not
find any answers, the essential thing is to keep asking questions and waiting
to see what’s over that next hill. How convenient a philosophy for a series
that strings its viewers along and delivers nothing but an airy-fairy moment of
pseudo-enlightenment.

The problem starts right at the
beginning, in the very first episode, which trots out all the old, clichéd,
derivative pieces of sci-fi alien lore: flying saucers, little gray men, alien
abductions and experimentation, lost time, government cover-ups. Nor are these
hoary bits of modern myth given a fresh treatment: no, they’re just shown at
face value, and in the process stripped of any mystique that might actually
have remained. Proud of its CGI, Taken doesn’t hide its little gray
men… it parades them in front of us, forgetting that in film, what’s unseen
is more powerful than what’s seen, that hinting at something rather than
showing it in the broad light of day is what gets the imaginative faculties of
the viewer’s brain working in overdrive. Here, the response is “Oh look,
little gray men. Ho-hum.” One might hope (in desperation) that this
exhibition of clichés is simply a setup for a more intriguing story, one that
reveals a deeper mystery or a new interpretation of these elements. Nope. If
you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind or a few X-Files
episodes, you’ve already delved more profoundly into the “alien
abductees” mythos than Taken ever does, despite its “epic
television event” billing.

If the beginning of Taken
is a ho-hum collection of tired clichés, then the middle is outright soap
opera. Normally I enjoy multi-generational stories, and so I really wanted to
like Taken, with its tale of alien abduction and manipulation in several
families over the course of over fifty years. However, in order for this family
saga to be interesting, we have to actually care about the people concerned,
and the characters are just not compelling. On the one hand we have The Bad
Guys ™, embodied in the Evil Secret Military Agency that (what a surprise!)
is willing to do whatever horrible things are necessary to get the knowledge
and power of the aliens. On the other hand we have The Innocent Victims ™
who struggle to preserve their families in the face of repeated violations from
the aliens and persecution by the government. You’d think that we’d at least
get to see some interesting mental instability, but in the end everyone is very
strong and determined to survive and learn the truth. And of course everyone is
devoted to their children; the series positively drips with gooey sentiment in
this regard. Is the plot flagging a bit? Put a cute kid in danger – that never
fails! Need to wring a tear out of the audience before they become completely
glassy-eyed? How about a good old parent-separated-from child scene?

And then we get to the end, and
whatever hopes I might have had about Taken redeeming itself fall apart
utterly. (If you haven’t watched the series but still want to, I’ll warn you
that there are spoilers in this paragraph.) I suppose I could give credit to Taken
for ending on a note that I didn’t entirely expect: I didn’t really foresee the
whole story taking on heavy religious overtones, making the
we-wrote-ourselves-into-a-corner plot wrap up with a mystical experience. We
get the assemblage of devout followers (the abductees) at the place of the holy
child, who decides to face her destiny rather than fleeing to live out an
ordinary life. We get the obligatory miracle, the speech to the followers (who
are clearly shown as being her disciples, spreading the word about her goodness
and powers), the bodily assumption into heaven, the discovery of the holy book,
and the promise of a return. All this, of course, with sufficient sticky-sweet
family love and tearful partings that I felt like I needed an insulin shot to
deal with it.

Taken purports to explore
profound and meaningful human questions through the story of aliens and alien
abductions; it claims to open up the issue of “what would things have been
like if aliens really had crashed in New Mexico in the 1940s?” That’s a
noble aspiration, and one that’s worthy of an epic miniseries… except that
Taken fumbles the whole thing. What are the profound questions? One seems to be
“Is there other intelligent life in the universe?” Well, the series
answers that with a definitive “Yes” before the first episode is even
over, leaving us with about 14 more hours to explore whatever other questions
Spielberg is interested in. And what exactly are those questions? It’s never
really clear; maybe “what is the meaning of life?” Don’t worry,
though: even though the filmmakers can’t formulate a coherent theme, they makes
sure that Taken packs a very obvious message: There are some things we
just aren’t ready to understand, so we should just smile and accept that and
get back to our little lives, touched by the knowledge that there’s something
out there.

It took us 15 hours of story
time to get to this insipid insight?

What about the final issue, of
what history would have been like if alien abductions were real? Well, Taken
seems to stick with the idea that… nothing would have been different. Yup,
those Evil Military Guys do a great job of covering stuff up, and when that
doesn’t work, the Plot Fairies (uh, I mean the aliens) come in and swipe the
physical evidence and use their stupidity rays on everyone in a 500-mile
radius. It has to be either stupidity rays or something they’re adding to the
drinking water: there’s really no other explanation of how UFOs can be buzzing
around the countryside like commuter flights over JFK International Airport and
sucking people up inside rays of light on a regular basis, and everybody except
the military still thinks that aliens are a crackpot idea. (The real reason
nobody gets a clue is, of course, so that the filmmakers don’t have to cope
with creating an alternate history in which the knowledge of the existence of
aliens affects our society and culture.) No, as a what-if scenario, Taken
falls short as well.

Somehow Taken manages to
take a perfectly good science-fiction idea (are aliens really experimenting on
us? if so, why?) and wring all of the excitement out of it, so that by the end,
we haven’t found out and we don’t really care. It manages to take honest
questions about our place in the universe and give them facile answers:
“Yes, there are beings out there, doing things… and we’ll trust that
everything will work out fine and answers will be revealed when we’re
“ready” for them.” It takes the strength of the human quest to
understand the universe, and turns it back on itself in a glorification of
blind faith.

I’ll admit that I’m perhaps
being excessively hard on the “family drama” portion of the film: if
you’re willing to accept it for what it is, then it has the potential to be
moderately entertaining. But that’s like going to a steak restaurant and
ordering their heavily-advertised steak special, hearing the sizzle on the
grill, and smelling the tempting scent… only to have the waiter bring you a
hamburger. Even if it’s a decent hamburger, you can’t help but feel
disappointed at the bait-and-switch: where’s that fabulous steak you were
anticipating?

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed most of
Spielberg’s work, and I’ve found his recent science fiction work to be quite
solid as well: I enjoyed both A.I. and Minority Report, which
have their flaws but succeed in delivering an interesting narrative coupled
with an intriguing view of a possible future. How can we explain the flatness
and imaginative poverty of Taken, then? Start by looking at the credits:
this is a sharecropped series. Spielberg certainly lends his prestigious name
to the undertaking, but the actual directorial work is handled by ten other
directors, one per episode. The script, as well as the series concept, is credited
to Leslie Bohem, whose short list of writing credits has Dante’s Peak
and Nightmare on Elm Street 5 as the high points. (OK, I liked Dante’s
Peak, but the script isn’t the film’s strong point.) It’s no wonder that Taken
lacks any of the Spielberg magic: he’s too distant from the actual production
to do more than lend his name to the advertising.

It probably takes an intimate knowledge of Iranian social history to understand everything going on in Mohammad Rasoulof's boldly allusive fantasia

Iron Island

. Almost all the action takes place on an oil tanker, and as anyone who read

Moby Dick

in high school knows, boats are never just

boats

.

Iron Island

's floating allegory is adrift in the Persian Gulf, populated by Middle Easterners who couldn't make it on the mainland for one reason or another. The captain, played by Ali Nassirian, governs the ship benevolently, making sure that children get an education and everyone has enough food and a little luxury. But to keep his little world intact, he brokers deals that aren't always on the up-and-up, and he metes out cruel justice to citizens who don't fall in line. Oh, and his ship? It's slowly sinking.

It's easy to get distracted by who

Iron Island

's characters are meant to represent, and Rasoulof seems to get a little distracted himself, as he makes a belated stab at inserting a plot into the movie to give his message some shape. While the unexpected narrative drives

Iron Island

to a haunting finale which examines the true meaning of "sellout," while simultaneously restoring the desert to its rightful place as the nomads' spiritual home, the particulars of what happens to Nassirian and his charges feels too forced. And while Rasoulof's elliptical style gives the film a dry comic tone, it also sucks out a lot of the urgency.

Iron Island

is at its most compelling early, as Rasoulof explores his human-scaled ant farm, detailing how people make lives for themselves in cramped quarters, using cardboard partitions and jerry-rigged appliances. Everyone pitches in to keep the ship running and to earn room and board, while Nassirian maintains a big ledger to record who owes what to whom. Far from utopian,

Iron Island

's makeshift community is rife with cracks and conflict, since nearly every one of its citizens is torn between gratitude to Nassirian and indignation about their rights as paying customers. A more knowledgeable person could explain how Rasoulof's vision of Arabia in miniature reflects the personality of chronically divided people, but

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should also ring true to anyone who's ever attended a committee meeting.

By Matt Pais

Metromix

April 25, 2008

(16 ratings)

Be the first to review

Told her uterus won't be cooperating any at all times soon, Kate (Tina Fey), a career woman pushing 40 and anxious to be a mom, decides to let surrogate Angie (Amy Poehler) secure her sprog. Meanwhile, Kate deals with obstruction from Angie's ex (Dax Shepard) and a fruit smoothie-shop holder (Greg Kinnear). Steve Martin also stars as Kate's hippie boss.

Major suspicion on a under discussion:

Is "Baby Mama" as diverting and sincere as "Juno," despite essentially having the reverse skeleton?

Catch it:

Better than an extended "Saturday Night Live" instalment but not hilarious or agitated ample supply to off as a total movie, "Cosset Mama" is a comedy that remains on the right side of funny barely by not doing anything too wrong. It's a safe assortment of cute scenes like Angie struggling to swallow a monumental pill, and gags just about "Mommy and Me" yoga expiate for the film's pompous middle and bad-mannered backside. Barely.

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Skip it:

If you're a stressed-not allowed redone parent — or by a hair’s breadth judgement wide being one — and don't want to hear jokes about strollers with iPod adapters or kids with unconventional names like "Wingspan" and "Banjo." Here's hoping those kids gratefulness their parents in requital for the extra adversity.

Tuchis goods:

"Indulge Mama" accumulates a lot of lies and asks you to wait patiently for the truth to come to. Too bad the big loses momentum at nearly every tract juncture as if it's inauspicious to turn touched in the head the laughs in fiat to tell a story. Fey and Poehler are heartier comedians than actors, but their appealing bond bumps the big up from "justifiable fine" to "good enough," unruffled if both are solicitous enough to do something that's more than fine.

Largesse:

Angie says that organic food is just for "pungent people who hate themselves." You choose which percentage of that you'd cast to wrangle with, if any.

What do you consider of 'Coddle Mama'?

Email me:

mpais@tribune.com

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Baby Mama

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"Pulse," by the Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for a frightener called "Cure," is probably the quietest end-of-the-world movie ever made. In it, we perish with neither bang nor whimper, but with the faint crackle of interference over a computer speaker.

The Japanese horror film is another example of a now familiar pattern; though it was made back in 2001, it’s getting a theatrical release now — just like "The Grudge" — to anticipate an American remake next year, presumably on a bigger budget with flashier stars and big-studio marketing oomph behind it. In fact, since it predates the original Japanese versions of "Grudge" as well as "The Ring" and "Dark Water," many believe that it set off the wave of J-horror, as the genre is called, and also that its release now — after its imitators — somewhat diminishes its impact, as many of the tropes it invented have become standard in both Japanese and American horror films.

Kumiko Aso, left, and Haruhiko Kato star in the the unsettling horror film “Pulse,” in which people perish from computer interference. (Magnolia Pictures) More in Movies ‘Pulse’: National Showtimes   Movie Trailers   New Movie Releases   DVD and Home Video   More on Movies in Arts & Living   var technorati = new Technorati() ; technorati.setProperty(’url’,'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201932_Technorati.html’) ; technorati.article = new item(’\'Pulse\’: A Quiet Game of Doom’,'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201932.html’,'”Pulse,” by the Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for a frightener called “Cure,” is probably the quietest end-of-the-world movie ever made. In it, we perish with neither bang nor whimper, but with the faint crackle of interference over a computer speaker.’,'Stephen Hunter’) ; document.write( technorati.getDisplaySidebar() );

Still, it works. It conjures up an atmosphere of hopeless dread out of the most banal of elements. You never thought you’d be disoriented by watching someone walk funny with a plastic bag over his head? Guess again. In the end, the ship of state and civilization sails onward quite literally with a crew of one.

The filmmaking is low-tech but weirdly effective, using low-cost techniques (a blurring of faces, a few digital paintings of smoke columns) to unsettle the heck out of you. It’s almost completely without gore (two gun suicides, though bloodless, are difficult to watch) but it builds toward a mood of high creepiness.

At the same time, "Pulse" either makes no sense whatsoever or perfect sense. It never really explains itself — although there is a theory under its madness — and proceeds visually rather than logically. In Western horror, there’s usually an investigator of some sort, who’s trying to get to the bottom of something. In "Pulse" eerie happenings take people down, one by one by 4 billion, and the focus slides from victim to victim. The characters don’t try to figure out what’s going on — as if logic is worthless against the plague it documents — no one consults civil authorities, and by the time the hero notices the world is dying, the world is dead.

Set in today’s smoggy, crowded, gritty Tokyo, it begins with a circle of handsome young people affiliated with a greenhouse or, in a couple of cases, a university. But, again, unlike Western traditions, they’re not characterized morally or even by class; no one’s "fast," or a big drinker or carouser; nobody’s even vaguely interested in sex; nobody’s rich, nobody’s poor. They’re just hard-working kids. One of them commits suicide, quite naturally upsetting the others.

He is gone . . . or is he? Each of them — the camera wanders in its attention — begins to encounter strange happenings, usually via their ubiquitous computers. One of the young people will suddenly realize the one-eyed beast has come on, unsolicited, late at night. They’ll lean close and see what appears to be nothing but fuzz, a growling, pointillist blur of dots, but slowly images emerge from the murk in some short of shaggy, awkward rhythm and it seems their friend is trying to reach them. Is the computer screen a viewing box to some kind of alternate existence? Is there a ghost in the machine?

Dots are a kind of visual motif in the film. A graduate student, of tenuous connection to the main plot, appears to explain a computer program he’s devised in which dots float randomly on the screen. When they get too close, they vaporize; when they get too far, they vaporize. That’s a kind of image for the universe and it carries with it suggestions of the metaphorical energy of the film, which at some level is a meditation on loneliness.

At the same time, people begin disappearing. The disappearances, however, aren’t characterized as acts of violence but more like some kind of crossing over. They leave disturbing traces behind — a vanishing seems affiliated, in some way, with a smear of dark color, almost like a chalked abstraction, that has both depth and resonance. Meanwhile, the music is getting eerier and eerier.

Finally, only Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) and Harue (Koyuki, who was prominent in "The Last Samurai") are left. I mean literally. Otherwise, Tokyo is empty, cars have crashed and burned and those smoke columns fill the sky. There’s an image of apocalypse almost out of a Gustave Dore etching and a final escape to . . . well, to nothing.

"Pulse" is best enjoyed if it’s not questioned too closely. It lives visually in a way it cannot live intellectually. Like the best horror movies, it doesn’t beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.

Pulse (120 minutes at Landmark’s E Street Cinema) is not rated, though it contains very intense themes and images.

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Gregg Araki (”Totally F***ed Up”/”The Doom Generation”) is the one
man dynamo behind this scatalogical romp to nowhere, who zeroes in on teen
nihilism in his attack on anything resembling taste or good sense or parental
values. It’s the gay director’s third installment in his plunge into the
world of “Teen Apocalypse.” A film that is vile and John Waters funny (ugh!)
in a way that a vulgar film can sometimes be that is so dopey and irreverent
and badly made. It’s bound to annoy the average viewer somewhere along
its hyper kaleidoscopic visual way, where maddening random violence, kinky
sex, and irritating dialogue (filled with Valley expressions like “Whatev”)
go together as well as ham and eggs served in a mosque. But then again,
there’s no average viewer (or for that matter, many viewers at all) for
this almost unwatchable flick–whose target audience is most probably the
teen whose brains have been scrambled by drugs. A film gleefully described
by the filmmaker as a ”Beverly Hills 90210” episode on acid. 

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So boring and worthless that if I were offered less than a king’s
ransom to see this film again, I would have doubts if I would want to put
myself through such an ordeal again.

Nowhere opens with this heavy quote “L.A. is like nowhere — everybody
who lives here is lost.” Araki finds his way through L.A.’s pop culture
hedonistic teen landscape of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, where every
teen looks as if they could be a model for a Calvin Klein underwear ad.
The filmmaker is obsessed with doomed youths living on the edge of reality
and functioning just as well as any Neanderthal would if armed with a club
and endowed with a peanut for a brain. It’s a film filled with too many
characters (something like 20) who occupy space for a short time and vanish
before we can get past their weird look and know anything about them that
matters. The only character I could make head or tail out of is the existential
hero, the doe-eyed Dark Smith (James Duval), a bisexual romantic who talks
himself into believing he’s doomed and the world is soon about to come
to an end. He’s a probable UCLA film student whose camcorder is seemingly
a permanent part of his shoulder. 

The plot is to follow a typical day in the life of Dark. This cutie
pie 18-year-old dude just wants to be loved, as he hangs out with his bisexual
African-American girlfriend Mel (Rachel True) and her purple-haired, lebsian
girlfriend Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson). Dark is spaced out over not having
Mel all to himself. But hunky, golden-locked Montgomery (Nathan Bexton)
has eyes for Dark, even though he claims he’s not gay. Ultimately, the
film turns on Dark’s sincere search for true love which he comes close
to finding in the brainless Montgomery, that is until he is transformed
into an insect-like space alien by his alien abductor’s at the film’s end.

It all plays out as some kind of tacky fantasy about the teens being
hooked on the popular culture, which is viewed as something set in the
collective consciousness of all teens. What follows on this typical day
for Dark and friends are a series of episodes involving some of the following
situations: fucking, suicide, doing heavy amounts of drugs, some barfing,
alien abductions, being date raped by a member of the Baywatch cast, TV
evangelism, an Armageddon moment, and the usual teen fist fights and angst
over sex. There are just too many such wacky incidents to list or try and
comprehend. Some might have a taste for such West-coast cool and find it
entertaining, but I found it worse than a bad acid trip or playing a game
of kick-the-can.