Word: araki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Note to aspiring actors: if your idea of movie stardom is a big trailer and a seven-figure salary, consider the career of Parker Posey. At 28, she has ornamented more than a dozen American independent films. Yet to get to the set of Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation, where she played the leading lady's "eternal love slave" in a blond friz wig, Posey had to pay half her airfare. For Party Girl, in which she did a beguiling star turn as a club hopper with the improbable dream of being a librarian, she earned...
...novice was Kevin Smith, with his clever, scratchy comedy Clerks. Now these twentysomething phenoms are flouting the sophomore slump--the Hugheses with the epic-size Dead Presidents, Smith with the loosey-goosey comedy Mallrats. Joining them in the ambition to reach a wider audience is gay cult fave Gregg Araki, who gives his new tragi-comedy, The Doom Generation, the cunning subtitle "a heterosexual movie." The director of the homo-erratic dramas The Living End and Totally F***ed Up is itching to break out, on his own terms. But straight or gay, black or white, these directors are defining...
...Araki is the latest to emerge from the underground of gay filmmakers, after Todd Haynes (Safe) and Gus Van Sant (To Die For). But Hollywood will find it hard to assimilate him. The Doom Generation is Araki's fifth feature, and his way of maturing is to get more ferocious, with a twisted smile on his face. The road-movie plot is similar to The Living End's: a dishy, disturbed guy hitches a ride and raises hell with guns and other toys. The troublemaker is Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech)--call him X, as in sex--and when he hooks...
...three try every available erotic permutation--the movie isn't that heterosexual. But as in all Araki films, the true, unbreakable love match is between sex and death. Signs in discos and delis announce: WELCOME TO HELL, SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE EXECUTED, PREPARE FOR THE APOCALYPSE. And the magic number for everything (the price of a burger meal, the address of a motel, even Amy's cumulative SAT score) is 666, the mark of Satan in Revelation...
...every kid may be as mad and morose as Araki's lost boys--sophomores who can't bear to live till junior year. But a lot are, and in this fevered fantasy of Armageddon, he's got their number...