Michael, Rachel and Sara never really got over the fact that The Revolution sold to them as undergraduates by Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols turned out to be just another pile of media-hype. Stranded as they are in the 80s, they’re more than a little alienated, cynical and just plain bored. They’ve lost touch with one another, with themselves, and are having a hard time connecting with their love partners as well. Needless to say, when this emotionally unstable group spends a weekend together, they most certainly are not going to sit around listening to old Motown Records.

The.Long.Weekend.(O.Despair).1989.576p.NYU.WEBRip.AAC.2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 31 min
Size: 	1.13 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	784x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 633 kb/s
BPP: 	0.121
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC Main @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/3E7A18D85D87891/The.Long.Weekend.(O.Despair).1989.576p.NYU.WEBRip.AAC.2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Gregg Araki – The Long Weekend (O’ Despair) (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
This is a BR rip of Gregg Araki’s latest film, his follow up to the great Mysterious Skin (2004), which was probably the best (and best reviewed) film of Araki’s career, after an uneven run of making strange, campy, low-budget films such as The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997). Now Araki does something completely different, creating the indie answer to mainstream “pot comedies” such as Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and the Cheech and Chong films. As such, Smiley Face is something of an oddity: it is at once a pot comedy, a subversive postmodern satire of pot comedies (the film explicitly references Harold and Kumar), an exercise in cinematic minimalism and absurdism, and also (maybe) a failed bid for mainstream success. There are some truly odd and transcendent moments in this film, but there are an equal number of scenes that just stagnate and don’t seem to work at all. All things considered, this was a strange choice of film for Araki to make, but it is interesting and sometimes funny even amidst all of its flaws.

Smiley.Face.2007.576p.BluRay.H264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 24 min
Size: 	1.99 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.212
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 384 kb/s (DTS-HD Master Audio Surround 5.1)

https://nitro.download/view/4C8E90394935423/Smiley.Face.2007.576p.BluRay.H264-KG.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Gregg Araki – Smiley Face (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Six queer teenagers struggle to get along with each other and with life in the face of varying obstacles.

Fernando F. Croce wrote:
Gregg Araki once described Totally F***ed Up, his follow-up to the 1992 New Queer Cinema staple The Living End, as a “rag-tag story of fag-and-dyke teen underground…a kind of cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” The statement attests not only to Araki’s committed radicalism, but also to his sense of how the politics of pop culture play to alienated youth. He probably loved a rave from a San Francisco paper hailing the film as “a ‘90s version of The Breakfast Club.”

Araki’s Brat Packers, far ruder and more vociferous than Hughes’s, are a rainbow batch of teens muddling through the triple-whammy of adolescence, boredom, and uncloseted homosexuality in an unmellowed Los Angeles. Actually, queer sex is never a problem; rather, it’s the emotional cargo and the homophobic assholes the young characters have to deal with on a regular basis that lead main brooder Andy (James Duval) to conclude that suicide might not be a bad idea after all. Others orbiting around the film’s deliberately deadbeat Beverly Hills, 90210 scenario include aspiring filmmaker Steven (Gilbert Luna) and his boyfriend Deric (Lance May), sexed-up Tommy (Roko Belic), and acidic dyke couple Michele (Susan Behshid) and Patricia (Jenee Gill), all dealing with their personal ecstasies and miseries.

Godard has always been among Araki’s biggest influences, and, indeed, Totally F***ed Up has been called his Masculin Féminin. Vivre Sa Vie is also evoked via the film’s segmented structure, yet the biggest stylistic shadow here may be Katzelmacher, during which Rainer Werner Fassbinder similarly propped a batch of young outsiders against the wall of society and watched the resulting wreckage. The characters try to flee into their own self-contained universes, complete with self-contained slang (jacking off to Randy becomes “shooting tadpoles at the moon”), but the world is always breaking in, inevitably in the form of emotional pain. Randy’s tentative romance with a potential Mr. Right (Alan Boyce) provides the film not only with the closest it has to a narrative, but also with Araki’s sense (also shared with Fassbinder) that coming to terms with your sexuality doesn’t necessarily shield you from the agonies that often come with relationships. After all, this is a film where a bootleg Nine Inch Nails video is reason enough to betray another person’s affections.

“Life is shit,” Andy says in one of his sunniest moments, but the nihilism is never Araki’s. In fact, for all the mumbled rants about AIDS and shitty relationships, much of Totally F***ed Up’s tone is spiky in its compassion and humor, due in no small amount to Behshid and Gill’s funny lesbian duo. The total lack of pity and condescension carries the film over its rough spots and aimless patches. The endings of Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of which Totally F***ed Up is the first part) may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is fucked up, the filmmaker is saying, but it’s worth living.

Totally.Fucked.Up.1993.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 19 min
Size: 	2.13 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	766x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 328 kb/s
BPP: 	0.315
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s
#2:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 48.0 kb/s (Commentary with director Gregg Araki, and actors James Duval and Gilbert Luna)

https://nitro.download/view/2981D2B65EE5F40/Totally.Fucked.Up.1993.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Gregg Araki – Totally F***ed Up (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Gay, alienated Los Angeles teens have a hard time as their parents kick them out of their homes, they don’t have money, their lovers cheat, and they are harassed by gay-bashers.

Quote:
Gregg Araki once described Totally F***ed Up, his follow-up to the 1992 New Queer Cinema staple The Living End, as a “rag-tag story of fag-and-dyke teen underground…a kind of cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” The statement attests not only to Araki’s committed radicalism, but also to his sense of how the politics of pop culture play to alienated youth. He probably loved a rave from a San Francisco paper hailing the film as “a ‘90s version of The Breakfast Club.”

Araki’s Brat Packers, far ruder and more vociferous than Hughes’s, are a rainbow batch of teens muddling through the triple-whammy of adolescence, boredom, and uncloseted homosexuality in an unmellowed Los Angeles. Actually, queer sex is never a problem; rather, it’s the emotional cargo and the homophobic assholes the young characters have to deal with on a regular basis that lead main brooder Andy (James Duval) to conclude that suicide might not be a bad idea after all. Others orbiting around the film’s deliberately deadbeat Beverly Hills, 90210 scenario include aspiring filmmaker Steven (Gilbert Luna) and his boyfriend Deric (Lance May), sexed-up Tommy (Roko Belic), and acidic dyke couple Michele (Susan Behshid) and Patricia (Jenee Gill), all dealing with their personal ecstasies and miseries.

Godard has always been among Araki’s biggest influences, and, indeed, Totally F***ed Up has been called his Masculin Féminin. Vivre Sa Vie is also evoked via the film’s segmented structure, yet the biggest stylistic shadow here may be Katzelmacher, during which Rainer Werner Fassbinder similarly propped a batch of young outsiders against the wall of society and watched the resulting wreckage. The characters try to flee into their own self-contained universes, complete with self-contained slang (jacking off to Randy becomes “shooting tadpoles at the moon”), but the world is always breaking in, inevitably in the form of emotional pain. Randy’s tentative romance with a potential Mr. Right (Alan Boyce) provides the film not only with the closest it has to a narrative, but also with Araki’s sense (also shared with Fassbinder) that coming to terms with your sexuality doesn’t necessarily shield you from the agonies that often come with relationships. After all, this is a film where a bootleg Nine Inch Nails video is reason enough to betray another person’s affections.

“Life is shit,” Andy says in one of his sunniest moments, but the nihilism is never Araki’s. In fact, for all the mumbled rants about AIDS and shitty relationships, much of Totally F***ed Up’s tone is spiky in its compassion and humor, due in no small amount to Behshid and Gill’s funny lesbian duo. The total lack of pity and condescension carries the film over its rough spots and aimless patches. The endings of Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of which Totally F***ed Up is the first part) may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is fucked up, the filmmaker is saying, but it’s worth living.

Totally.Fucked.Up.1993.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 19 min
Size: 	10.2 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	18.0 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.483
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
#2:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 48.0 kb/s ((Commentary with director Gregg Araki, and actors James Duval and Gilbert Luna))

https://nitro.download/view/D033215CA45D654/Totally.Fucked.Up.1993.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Gregg Araki – Totally F***ed Up (1993) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Luke is a gay hustler. Jon is a movie critic. Both are HIV positive. They go on a hedonistic, dangerous journey, their motto “Fuck the world”.

1.51GB | 1h 21m | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/3E3892982FB30B9/The.Living.End.1992.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:French

The post Gregg Araki – The Living End (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Mysterious Skin (2004)
Quote:
A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth.

2.20GB | 1h 45m | 1024×57 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0E2DFAB1154EF07/Mysterious.Skin.2004.576p.BluRay.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English SDH

The post Gregg Araki – Mysterious Skin (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A struggling actress forges an unusual family unit with two separate boyfriends in this romantic comedy from indie auteur Gregg Araki. Veronica (Kathleen Robertson) hasn’t had a decent date for a year, but one Halloween she meets not one but two perfect guys: Zed (Matt Keeslar), a rock drummer who does her on the floor of a club bathroom after his show, and Abel (Johnathon Schaech), an affable rock critic and would-be novelist, who seems more interested in connecting with her soul than her private parts. Unable to lie to either guy about her attraction to both of them, Veronica soon convinces them to share her. Eventually, the unemployed Zed and the underemployed Abel even move in with her, resulting in kinky sex and domestic bliss. Trouble comes calling, however, in the form of an unplanned pregnancy — and in the person of Ernest (Eric Mabius), an aptly named TV director, who gives Veronica her big break and the chance to play house and raise her child in a monied, more normal environment. Its soundtrack filled with the director’s trademarked mixture of shoegazer drone and electronic bliss, Splendor premiered at Sundance in 1999. Araki’s first outing after the completion of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” the film reunited him with two actors who had appeared in that series: Schaech (The Doom Generation) and Robertson (Nowhere). Both of those earlier characters participated in unorthodox romantic tableaux similar to the one documented in Splendor. Robertson, in fact, would return to the world of the ménage à trois with 2002’s XX/XY. Offscreen, the actress raised eyebrows after beginning a romance with her openly gay director.

1.61GB | 1h 32m | 839×454 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/17E9207423605BC/Splendor.(Gregg.Araki.1999).DVDRip.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, English HOH, Spanish, French, Portuguese

The post Gregg Araki – Splendor (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.