The Criterion Collection Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Take the conventions of the American teen movie, transpose them to Los Angeles’s freaky fringes, anchor them in an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity, and top it all off with heavy doses of Gen X disillusionment, gonzo violence, and hallucinogenic surrealism, and you’ll end up with something like these audacious transgressions from New Queer Cinema renegade Gregg Araki. Gleefully mixing slacker irony with raw sincerity, Godardian cool with punk scuzz, the savagely subversive, hormone-fueled films that make up the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire. DIRECTOR-APPROVED TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 2K digital restoration of Totally F***ed Up and new 4K digital restorations of The Doom Generation and Nowhere, supervised and approved by director Gregg Araki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks New conversation between director Gregg Araki and filmmaker Richard Linklater New audio commentary on Nowhere with Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons Audio commentary on Totally F***ed Up with Araki, Duval, and actor Gilbert Luna Audio commentary on The Doom Generation with Araki, Duval, and actors Rose McGowan and Johnathon Schaech New documentary on the trilogy’s visual style featuring Araki, Duval, producer Andrea Sperling, cinematographer Jim Fealy, costume designers Cathy Cooper and SaraJane Slotnick, production designer Patti Podesta, art director Michael Krantz, and hair and makeup artist Jason Rail James Duval’s Teen Apocalypse Archive, a new conversation between Araki and Duval Q&As with Araki, moderated by filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Andrew Ahn The Doom Generation video comic book Trailers English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee TOTALLY F***ED UP A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin féminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsiderhood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still bruises. THE DOOM GENERATION Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foulmouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky, and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Working with a significant budget for the first time, Araki employs boldly stylized lighting and art direction to create a heightened sense of unreality in a shocking, shoegaze-soundtracked chronicle of young lives careening toward oblivion. NOWHERE You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death, and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can—Araki folds it all into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively caustic close.