Late Stage Films

 Gregg Araki is a pivotal figure in the "Queer Wave" movement, which makes him a key player in the 90s independent film wave as a whole. To a younger person, someone young enough that I could not have possibly watched an Araki film in a theater before, it sure seems that he's never gotten the respect of a major filmmaker. Part of that is due to his edgy content, okay, sure. But what part of that lack of love is due to distribution? One of the topics that fascinates me in the history of film is this idea of functionally "lost" media that's only a few decades old and was reasonably notable when it did come out. "The Doom Generation" premiered at the Sundance festival less than 30 years ago, was nominated for multiple Indie Spirit awards, and then vanished off the face of the earth, its distributor bankrupt and its content as un-mainstream as one can imagine. You cannot stream "The Doom Generation", nor can you buy or rent it from Apple or A...

 Surely Damien Chazelle can be called one of the best filmmakers of the 2010s, I don't think that's a controversial claim. His newest film, "Babylon", is kind of awful and was a monstrous flop for the studio, but it's awful in a very auteur-chic sort of way. Every issue the film has (and it has plenty!) is the result of doing too much, of committing to a bad idea, which in its own way is much better than watching a bad film that has no ideas.  The main hold-up I have here is that Chazelle never quite figures out the balance between "making movies is fun" and "making movies will destroy you". From the outset, nothing about the film feels fun. We are introduced to the world of silent-era Hollywood with a massive cocaine party, where people die and/or get shat on by elephants. The film is happy to show you bodily fluids of all sorts, but none of this feels appealing. I often found myself thinking of two very well known cocaine movies: Scorsese...