If you want image and attitude this can be fun. If depth of vision, on the other hand, it will seem small.I'll have you imagine this as a guy with a bunch of comic-books and magazines on his floor, he cuts up strips and glues them together, now something about sex and college relationships, then a strip off Scooby- Do, another resembles Lynch, a third is about life on campus, then back to sex, more sex and obsession. He is from that 90s crop of makers (Tarantino, Smith) who thought that life had no business being seen as deeper than the way stuff just hang together, the fun in having so much stuff to pick from: movies, comic- books, TV. He briefly tried something more coherent in Mysterious Skin, here he's back to a collage.Two main thrusts here. One is the college journey of discovery, here he tries to paint a picture of sexual life, the confusion and reluctance - Nowhere was angsty, this is more relaxed in its skin, there's a sweetness around discovery. The second thrust is about mysterious happenings around campus, there are figures in animal masks who come out at night, a witch, a girl found dead. This is the more endearing part, all about how confusion in his mind around sexual identity manifests around campus as some inscrutable power of rearrange. It's all in the opening scene, a recurring dream where he walks down a corridor lined with girls and comes up against a mysterious door marked 18, his age: sex, dreams, locked mystery.It's fun for a while to see him do it, the fun all in the imaginative jumps from one strip to the next, in that it all loosely hangs together around a dream. But then it's as if he gets bored or can't see any point to it so he just keeps throwing stuff. A cult, the end of the world, a discovery about the father, more trysts, a car chase. None of it sticks, too much paper weight so it all just tumbles down in a heap of scraps. This is its own insight then on craft, if the patching doesn't begin to rise up into shape that guides the eye from forms to the possible thing they give rise to, it remains artless patchwork.Lynch also takes a lot of care in picking out cinematic wallpaper so it's seductive when you enter, but that's after he has mulled long and hard about where the walls are going to be and what kind of space they will define.

Smith's everyday life in the dorm -- hanging out with his arty, sarcastic best friend Stella, hooking up with a beautiful free spirit named London, lusting for his gorgeous but dim surfer roommate Thor -- all gets turned upside-down after one fateful, terrifying night.I watched this because it had James Duval, although his role is very small (he plays a pro-legalization Rastafarian). But it is also a Gregg Araki film ,so it was worth watching just for that.Araki made some of the great nihilistic films of the 1990s, including "Doom Generation" and "Nowhere". They may not be critical successes and may be a bit tarnished in retrospect, but they influenced me as a 90s teenager. With this film, it seems I have grown up but Araki has not.He is still focused on the sexuality of young people, particularly the line between homosexuality and heterosexuality... a line he likes to blur. This is very much a return to the sexual politics of "Doom Generation", though without the nihilism. Still the weirdness, without the despair. Worth a peek but hardly a winner.

OMG this is what i call bad movie. I can't believe that it actually have solid rate at 5.8. Acting is very lame, screenplay is awful. I planned to watch some Gregg Araki movies soon, but now i think i won't. Thomas Dekker and Haley Bennet had some solid acting in this movie, but rest of cast is very very bad. Well at least i was watching Haley, she is so beautifu. Only good thing about movie. In first 20 minutes story was solid and interesting. Rest of film is simply rubbish. I don't know, maybe they didn't had enough money to film it like they wanted. Anyway this film is definitely the worst of my life, so guys if you wanna lose 80 minutes of your life this is right film to do such a thing.

This is Gregg Araki's best film since his 1997 "Nowhere" and the kind of gay comedy I can show to people who hate gay comedies.Why? Because, while the cast is gorgeous, they are also fantastic actors - and Araki knows how to direct and edit comedy. The gags are timed to perfection and character's tongues are kept firmly in cheek (in other words, you don't find witless muscle boys mugging the camera in a Gregg Araki film).Silly and goofy? Yes. But so what? It is like a great big gay version of "Escape to Witch Mountain" with a little flesh thrown in for good measure.Great fun!