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:
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.

1.95GB | 1h 19m | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/4C25AD38DDDAD7E/Totally.Fucked.Up.1993.Araki.DVD.AC3.5.1.Commentary.x264.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

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

Quote:
A road-movie about two friends, Peter and Chris, in their late 20′s, one incredibly idealistic and optimistic; the other cynically nihilistic and negative. They pick up a Vespa in South Dakota and travel with it to Los Angeles. As they travel through the northwest to the southwest, they see their country through different eyes. Chris has high expectations and romantic notions of America. Peter sees the emptiness of America with lost ideals and lost people. While they do not discover the identity of America on their road trip, they ultimately find themselves…

	
James Merendino - (2001) Amerikana.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 35mn
Size: 	1.42 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	710x346 ~> 710x383
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 749 Kbps
BPP: 	0.238
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Commentary)

https://nitro.download/view/AE15EC27B383C2C/James_Merendino_-_(2001)_Amerikana.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E0BE5E3BCA4749D/Amerikana_trailer.avi
https://nitro.download/view/CD5027F1FC2A5B4/Amerikana_trailer_2.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post James Merendino – Amerikana [+Extras] (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Described by director Gregg Araki as “A Beverly Hills 90210 episode on acid” (with no suggestions of what it might be cut with), Nowhere is a companion piece with Araki’s previous meditations on youth gone wild in the 1990s, Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation — Araki’s self-described “teen apocalypse trilogy.” Nowhere follows 18-year-old Dark Smith (James Duval) as he goes through a fairly typical day in Los Angeles. Dark needs, but rarely gets, emotional support from his girlfriend Mel (Rachel True). Mel, however, is also involved with a girl named Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson), while Dark moons over hunky Montgomery (Nathan Bexton). Dark’s best friend Cowboy (Guillermo Diaz) has troubles of his own, as his boyfriend and bandmate Bart (Jeremy Jordan) is back on drugs and spending most of his time with his dealer. Mel’s friends include sugar junkie Dingbat (Christina Applegate), doomsday poetess Alyssa (Jordan Ladd), and Egg (Sarah Lassez), who is being unexpectedly wooed by a Famous Teen Idol (Jason Simmons). Egg’s brother Ducky (Scott Caan) has a crush on Alyssa, but she’s keeping company with a biker named Elvis (Thyme Lewis). Alyssa’s assignation with Elvis gets a psychic boost by her twin brother Shad (Ryan Phillippe) and his tryst with Lilith (Heather Graham). The day continues on a roller coaster of kinky sex, hallucinogenic drugs, random violence, romantic misunderstandings, alien abductions, and (of course) a wild party, this time at the home of noted hipster Jujyfruit (Gibby Haynes). Like The Doom Generation, Nowhere features a wealth of pop culture icons in cameo appearances, including John Ritter, Traci Lords, Charlotte Rae, Eve Plumb, and Shannen Doherty. — Mark Deming

“The content, tone, and overall worth of 1997’s Nowhere — the glossiest and final installment in director Gregg Araki’s “teen apocalypse trilogy” — falls somewhere between the lurid existential thrills of 1995’s Doom Generation and the self-indulgent neo-documentary soap opera of 1993’s Totally F***ed Up. The world of Nowhere is as day-glo brilliant as that of Doom Generation, but it’s also typically squalid and painful underneath the neon. Casual viewers will enjoy the numerous starlets and icons who populate Araki’s L.A., from Ryan Phillippe, Christina Applegate, and Mena Suvari to a bevy of sitcom survivors, hipster footnotes, and former porn stars. But for those who take Araki seriously in spite of, or because of, his postmodern gamesmanship, Nowhere is closer in emotional weight to David Lynch’s Lost Highway than to an Aaron Spelling soap or a Hollywood teen sex comedy. As in his earlier films, Araki infests his characters with vacuous youthfulness and glamorous angst, then does terrible things to them once he’s convinced viewers to somehow care. The cast this time is so cluttered, however, that it’s up to a few performers with emotional depth, such as Guillermo Diaz and Sarah Lassez, to lend gravity to the proceedings. Nowhere is the first installment in the trilogy in which the character played by Araki’s muse, James Duval, doesn’t suffer a pointless and hideous death, but that doesn’t mean the director doesn’t masochistically torture his spiritual stand-in. The terrific love quadrangle between the characters played by the bewildered Duval, the wickedly right-on Rachel True, the soulfully stammering Nathan Bexton, and the deliciously tart Kathleen Robertson is a perfect snapshot of Araki’s polymorphously perverse, pervasively nihilistic worldview. And when Duval ends up alone at the film’s end, covered for once in somebody else’s blood, adherents of Araki’s attention-deficit philosophizing will find the scene as devastating as any straightforward tragedy. — Brian J. Dillard”

Nowhere.1997.576p.CC.BR.x264.AC3-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 22 min
Size: 	2.03 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 988 kb/s
BPP: 	0.220
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 320 kb/s (English - 5.1)
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary with director Gregg Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons)

https://nitro.download/view/AE0286CAD13038E/Nowhere.1997.576p.CC.BR.x264.AC3-KG.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Gregg Araki – Nowhere (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.