Get Araki or Get Lost

It didn't exactly take a wall of red strings criss-crossing maps and images to figure out that when a 4K restoration of Gregg Araki's film The Doom Generation screened at Sundance earlier this year that meant a restoration for the rest of us, not at Sundance, wouldn't be too far off. And lo, our non-sleuthing was correct! IndieWire has the announcement (thx Mac) and a trailer (see below) -- the 1995 film will be premiering at BAM in Brooklyn on April 6th and then hitting the IFC Theater here in Manhattan on April 7th; after that it will tour across the seas of grain, shining seas et cetera.

And let's be real, it'll be getting a 4K blu-ray at some point after that. That's the way these things work now, thank goodness. I am just praying it doesn't stop with Doom -- I've been hollering and hooting and honking my maniac-ass off for a Criterion boxed-set of Araki's "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy" for decades now. (The trilogy also includes Totally Fucked Up and Nowhere.) Let's get the whole shebang, baby!

To call these movies "formative" for me doesn't even begin to cut it -- I didn't see them until I got to college but these were my definition of cool once I actually began caring about being cool (in high school I just wanted to survive.) The mixture of hopelessness and hope, cynical and sweet, hard and soft, ridiculousness astride dumb genuine straight sentiment... Araki's movies just got me like nobody else's at that moment when I was straining to realize myself, all while the world seemed to be collapsing around us. Realizing you were gay in the 90s, when all you saw on the news was Dying Gay People, sure was a lot! And I think these movies probably speak to our current moment more than I'd like them to. You think we're stepping forward but Doom keeps snapping back into focus.