Instead. Instead of a movie about two guys echanging banal witticisms in a convenience store. Instead of three brothers pandering to every cliche surrounding religion, relationships and infidelity. Instead of holier than thou posturing by making a movie about three girls even thouhg you're a guy. Instead of masturbatory musings about your personal problems and LA nightlife. Instead, Greag Araki has committed to himself to the relentless pursuit of a unique style and uncompromising vision that has yielded true gems of Americain Independent filmmaking.
I missed the first installment of the Trilogy that this film concludes, (Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere). However, it is clear from the last two, that Araki is taking leaps and bounds cinematically. Continuing its alarming capacity for ignorance, the popular press gave Nowhere a cold reception. Most complaints centered around accusations of a 'vacuous style'. A bizarre comment considering how accomlished Araki's direction is here.
The first time you see a film by Araki, it looks like the work of a cheap and clumsy wannabe. However, it seems that as his trash aesthtic becomes apparent, along with his ideological position (a gay male in US society) and subsequent psychoanalytic and semiotic concerns, Araki emerges as an interesting and very competent filmmaker. Although his homosexuality has recently come into question Nowhere wrapped in 1995, and so many of these concerns were still brought to bear on the film. As such, Araki's films in general are unappologetic, very loud challenges to virtually every position held in conventional society. Nowhere in particular is a savage critique that is both relevant and convincing of youth in America and their cult-of-slacker-horseshit. On this basis, although rooted in 90210 and other contenporary pop icons, the film also reads as a poignant comment on the 'Kevin Smith set'.
Araki's visual style here is head and ahoulders above his previous work both technically and aesthetically. Despite accusations of excess, I'd much rather see Araki shoot loud murals than Ed Burns incompetently choregraph steady-cam shots. Nowhere's quick off-tempo cutting and surrealism is ample support to Araki's ideological concerns. This film is evidence of heroic bravery in the face of the Americain Independant scene as it exists today. This is best epitomized in the final scene in which Araki shows no mercy in carrying out a complete and total sabotage, thematically as well as visually, of his entire film.
-- -Omar Odeh http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3920
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