 | |
List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Lions Gate
Salesrank: 41353
Released: August 7, 2007 |
| Our Price: $8.48 |
| Used Price: $8.19 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embark on a sex and violence-filled journey through an America of psychos and quickie marts.
Description of The Doom Generation:
Superior to both Kids and Natural Born Killers, Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation is a snarling satire that has the emotional range to prompt rage, fear, laughter, and grief in a viewer. Three L.A.-based, almost-twentysomethings--an incredibly foul-mouthed Valley Girl (Rose McGowan), her puppyish boyfriend (James Duval), and a sexy bad boy (Johnathon Schaech)--take to the road after a series of comic collisions with skinheads and gun-toting convenience-store clerks. While secret lawmen and voyeuristic TV cameras follow their movements, the fugitives gradually warm up to a three-way sexual relationship that wraps them in a profound, renewing innocence--an innocence then stolen by a wrathful America. Araki skewers the usual villains: the media, homophobes, gun nuts, Gen-X stereotypes. But there is so much more at stake here than meets the eye, an extraordinary anger and fear about predatory intolerance and purposelessness about the young. The DVD release includes the original theatrical trailer and production notes. --Tom Keogh
The Doom Generation Reviews:
It is so GLAMOROUS 
2009-11-09 - Had i seen this movie when i was maybe 12 or 13, it could have saved my life. There is no way to discribe the twisted madness of this film. Imagine Blue Velvet meets Jawbreaker, with a 1980's pornographic movie from Germany thrown it just for the hell of it. It is in fact one of the most essential and dire movies ever created....
Dystopia for the cluttered mind 
2009-06-11 - Rose McGowan is Amy, a rebellious young woman who is no-nonsense & tough-as-nails. She is looking for some excitement & on this night she has found it. (Or, maybe it has found her?). Boy, has it ever; her excitement comes in the form of a string of bad luck where ex lovers remember her (mistake her?) and determine that they want to kill her. Even the "men in suits" in the government want to whack her!
This is what you would call a dystopia movie where the characters exhibit very few traits which would be associated with sanity. It's quite a dark movie, and the scenes seem to be a sort-of revolving door between violence & sex. The story is full of adrenaline and never really lets up; it's a flick that's prone to overwhelming your senses if you're not careful.
Ultimately, this struck me as a cross between the Twilight Zone and a Rob Zombie movie. Perhaps I'm just warped in the head, but I love movies like this! It should be noted that there is a great deal that's strange here, and the macabre humor, incessant religious imagery and the way everything is so directionless sets an unusual tone. 3 people are driving somewhere in a car; we never get any sense of what their master plan is. It's almost like a twisted version of The Wizard of Oz where the Yellow Brick Road doesn't lead anywhere.
So, if you're not squeamish about dudes getting castrated, blood everywhere and Rose McGowan naked (2nd thought, who would be squeamish about THAT?), then this one just might be for you. It's a wild journey, so be sure to fasten your safety belt for this dark post-modern existential nihilistic joyride!
Wow!
2009-05-06 - The Doom Generation is a stunning, gripping, gut-wrenching movie. It's easy to see why reactions are so strongly polarized, with almost everybody either loving it or hating it. It's scary to imagine what kind of mind would react with genuine indifference.
I admit I didn't read all the hundreds of reviews already posted for it, but in the ones I did read I was surprised to find so few that mentioned how funny and how charming this movie is. Like it or not, it's primarily a romantic comedy, and if you miss that you've missed what holds it all together. It's extremely intelligent, very dark, very sweet, profoundly erotic, and shockingly bloody. But most of all it's very, very funny. If I'd missed the humor, I'd still like the freewheeling sexiness, but I'd be appalled by the violence. But I didn't miss the humor, so I loved it all.
Everything about it is brilliant: the writing, the direction, even the gory special effects, and every single member of the large cast is perfect, especially the three leads. For a "heterosexual" movie, as Araki labeled it (with some irony, I have to think), with plenty of sex between the girl and both guys, the most powerfully erotic scenes are between the two men alone. There's no sex acted out between them at all, not even a kiss, but the heat is intense and stunning, much more powerful than the explicit sex between either of them and the girl. It's the best proof I've ever seen that eroticism and sex are completely different, and in a movie eroticism is much more entertaining. The sex acts in this movie may be all hetero, but the real heat is as gay as it gets. That's quite a coup.
I for one am glad it's not in widescreen on the DVD. If a movie that's filmed widescreen is shown at 4:3, you do lose information. But a lot of independent movies from that period were filmed at 4:3, so that a "widescreen" version just crops off the top and bottom of the picture, and you actually get less information. (The widescreen version of Gus Van Sant's brilliant Elephant is like that, but fortunately that DVD includes both versions.)
DON'T WATCH THIS 
2008-09-14 - This is on my short list of movies never to see. It is not only horrible; it is disturbing. It will bother you. You will wish you never saw it. Also on the list: U Turn
I understand it, but still can't find a way to like it. 
2008-02-19 - The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995)
There are two types of people who have seen The Doom Generation: those who loved it and those who hated it. (Interestingly, the two groups, according to IMDB, who rate it highest? Males under 18 and females 18-29. Figure that one out, armchair Freudians.) While I definitely come down on the "hated it" side of the line, I can at least understand what it was Araki was trying to do with this movie. I just can't tell whether he utterly failed to do what he set out to, whether he succeeded in such an incompetent way that it doesn't matter, or whether he succeeded so brilliantly that my reaction to the film was exactly what he was going for. To make matters even more confusing, I'm leaning towards the third possibility. Why? Hindsight.
While Araki isn't all that hot a director (cf. the failed, if valiant, attempt to adapt Mysterious Skin), the folks he plunked down in front of the screen are all that hot actors, as we have seen in the twelve-years-and-change since The Doom Generation was released; James Duval (basically discovered by Araki; his second film role was in Araki's first movie) has gone on to do some excellent work, Jonathon Schaech has gotten a decent amount of big-screen work in the past few years after an extensive television career, and, of courser, Rose McGowan went from being a Pauly Shore movie staple to an It Girl after Scream. Perhaps even more telling is the number of high-profile folks (actors and non-) who were drawn to Araki's script: Skinny Puppy, Perry Farrell, Amanda Bearse (of Married... with Children), Nicky Katt (soon to become famous on Boston Public), Parker Posey, Christopher Knight (yes, Peter Brady), even Heidi Fleiss. All pop up in minor roles. They had to have seen something to get involved.
The something, of course, is the whole alienation-angst thing that runs through the script. I mean, this is basically Ian Hunter's "The Outsider" brought to the big screen, with a really awful love story thrown into the mix and some really bad acting to propel it. But I don't think the acting was bad by accident. With these three actors? Oh, no, bub. I think Araki planned it that way. I think he told them to overact. Why? That's a bit more complicated. "To get the teen audience" is an easy, expendable, and probably oversimplified answer, though both Duval and McGowan certainly act like characters out of any number of awful teen goth poems I've read over the years. I think there's more to it-- the artificiality of the acting corresponding to the artificiality (or innocence, if you'd rather see it that way) of these characters; note that the two of them get better as the movie goes on (cf. Lindsay Crouse in Mamet's House of Games, who goes through the same transformation in much the same way). Similarly, the cheap special effects and set decoration. Simply covering a bar in tinfoil? Genius, if you want to go for a cheap look.
All that said, it doesn't diminish my visceral reaction to the film in any way. I still don't like it. If Araki didn't want me to like it, I can certainly respect that, and it's a valid enough reaction for a director to expect from a film; Hideshi Hino certainly isn't looking for legions of screaming fans when he directs movies. It just doesn't quite ring right, because man, if this film does have a target audience, I'm it. The cheap, dumb sets? I loved them in Carpenter's They Live. The bad acting? See my previous note on House of Games, which I think of as one of the hundred best movies ever made. And Skinny Puppy fans don't come much harder-core than me. Somehow, though, while I can appreciate the film on an intellectual level, I just don't feel it. Go figure. **
