Cheap Mysterious Skin (Original Theatrical Director's Cut) (DVD) (Gregg Araki) Price

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Customer Reviews of Mysterious Skin (Original Theatrical Director's Cut)

A beautifully crafted and honest film
This film follows the very different but mysteriously connected lives of two boys,one of whom becomes a teenage male hustler and the other looks for keys to the missing moments of his life believing he was kidnapped by aliens.Mysterious Skin features subjects many films won't even touch and is filmed mostly in closeups leaving you unable to avoid sevral uncomfortable moments.Director Gregg Araki has made plenty of stylish cartoonish films like The Doom Generation but in this film he oviously respects the book he's adapting so much he tones down his excesses letting the actors shine.Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a starmaking performance is great in the difficult part of the hustler looking for love in all the wrong places.Some of the sexual encounters are harrowing but they are never trashy.A beautiful score by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie give the movie an often dreamlike feel so it never gets too harsh.Mysterious Skin eventually brings the two very different characters together in the end leading to a haunting finish.Brokeback Mountain got a lot of press for breaking boundaries but the little seen Mysterious Skin is just as daring and emotional.

Spectacular redemption of Araki
Before taking a chance on 'Mysterious Skin' I HATED Gregg Araki. (Hated his movies, anyway.) That was on the basis of 'The Living End' and maybe half of 'The Doom Generation.' Let me tell you how much I hated those movies. Araki was on a short (black)list of directors like Henry Jaglom and Gary Marshall who I thought needed to be nailed up in a smallish coffin and buried alive together before spending the rest of eternity in a special circle of Cinema Hell. Some adjectives: trite, glib, affected, shallow, obnoxious... I felt that Araki had more feeling for the indie rock that conspicuously soaked his soundtracks than for any of the human feelings that must inform even an effectively nihilistic movie. It was more than just a style over substance issue. (I can forgive that, actually.) The style seemed smug and self-important as well as empty. And with all of that shock value on the screen, I couldn't imagine how those movies managed to be boring. I felt that Araki should have stuck to making mix tapes for his callow clubber buddies - as a filmmaker he was strictly a poseur. I certainly never expected him to mature into an artist of even small worth. <
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>Okay. While I still don't care to revisit those early films, I am now happily prepared to eat a big mouthful of words. 'Mysterious Skin' contains signs of intelligent human life that are not only surprising coming from Gregg Araki, but rare in current American cinema period. This movie was a lot more emotionally honest than 'Crash.' And it moved me on a much deeper level. <
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>My complaints with this film are minor - small choices that I didn't agree with. Too small to go into, really. Perhaps it's partly attributable to the fact that he was working from the structure of someone else's story - but the emotions are there because Araki had the skill to find them and bring them across on film. (He got excellent help from his actors. Even a lot of the smaller roles are beautifully realized.) Honestly, I didn't expect to be so deeply impressed. <
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>I had heard that this was shocking and disturbing. While others will no doubt find it so, I, surprisingly, didn't. Emotional, yes. Not nearly as explicit as some of the things I'd read would have had me believe - and better for it. This time I didn't feel that Araki was trying (and failing) to merely shock. I think that just having a sense of what was going on inside the characters overode any sense of shock - which is not to say that I didn't find what I was seeing to be deeply, tragically affecting. This is a painful little movie. <
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>And I think that that's the difference between this and those earlier films. For all of the onscreen mayhem, there was no real pain, or any other feeling. This is the genuine article. <
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>And I never thought I'd say it, but so is Gregg Araki. I hope he keeps up the good work, because we are very short on quality these days. <
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>Again, wow. <
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>I am less impressed with TLA Releasing's DVD. Like the 'Suicide Club' DVD I saw (with burned on subs), TLA has used a theatrical print that is somewhat less than pristine. Its passable, but on a new film like this I don't expect to see dirt and specks. Also, the layer change could have been more judiciously placed. The DVD Beaver review of the Tartan UK DVD says that it has "a flawless and stunning transfer" and gushes on to label it "impressive." Does that mean that they got a different transfer? (The Tartan DVD also has nearly an hour and a quarter of interviews, but not the book reading.)