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Kaboom (2010)
Gregg Araki, why did you make this awful movie? How did this movie turn out so bad? To be fair Haley Bennett and Juno Temple were pretty good in it, but Thomas Dekker didn't thrive in the lead role, and some of the other actors were terrible. The cinematography was cliche to amateurish, and the script was boring to cringey. Sit back, relax, and get ready for the bizarre.
I was enjoying the movie at first. Thomas Dekker and Haley Bennett had similar chemistry to Lost in the White City, though this movie came out four years prior. Juno Temple was a pleasant surprise and delivered an intense performance. But, gradually I started to get a little bored. I started noticing little things that bugged me here and there. Bad dialogue, wooden lines, boring sets and shots, and things that made little sense. Still, for the most part it was enjoyable up until the third act. All of a sudden it was like a switch was flipped and I found myself shaking my head while cringing. I had a weird sensation like I was kind of bored and the movie wasn't very good, but I just hadn't noticed until that moment. It was kind of like realising you're cold or hungry. The first red flag I noticed was that there were quite a few scenes of someone with a plain black background and a backlight. I particularly noticed because Lost in the White City had a line where Dekker's character commented on the backlight technique he used. Anyway, Kaboom started to feel like an amateur production. There were some really tacky scene transitions, like the kind of gimmicky effects of the screen shattering or flipping that you might see in some cheap video editing software but never actually use. I might expect that stuff in a kid’s youtube video, but not in a feature film.
The major shift in the third act was that the mysterious occurrences that had been building up were starting to get uncovered, but rather than simply reveal things they also had the characters spell everything out to each other in really boring car interior scenes. It’s been said in many film classes and books that you shouldn’t shoot scenes of people sitting in a diner talking because it’s really boring. You should try to have something interesting going on while the characters are talking. This movie seemed to have missed that class because a third to a quarter of the movie consisted of 2 to 3 people sitting in some boring location, like a cafeteria or a car, talking, only it got worse in the third act because instead of actual conversation it was just exposition. It wouldn’t have been as bad if they were explaining things I didn’t already deduce. On top of that, the big mystery that was revealed was pretty retarded, and at this point I actually started laughing at some of the things going on. A huge chunk of the movie's dialogue, maybe half or even more, consisted of characters either talking about what they were going to do or what had just happened.
Other than that what was making me cringe was the acting. I started to notice the delivery of lines sounded a bit wooden, and I noticed some dialogue trends. People kept saying things like, “Just trust me,” or, “Just get ready and meet me there in half an hour.” These were in response to reasonable questions in the face of panic and alarm, questions like, “What’s going on?” Or, “Why?” I noticed weird hand gestures, like a flattened palm with fingers extended and together and the thumb protruding at a 90 degrees angle while saying, “No, stop! There’s no time to explain, okay? We have to hurry, please I really need you to just trust me on this.” And other generic jargon. And when someone was about to leave, someone else would say, “Something really strange is going on, please be careful,” Or something like that. In response the person’s eyes would do this little shifty dance as if they were just trying to convey some sense of nervousness and had Harry Potter's acting coach. I don’t really get it because the movie was directed and written by Gregg Araki, and he seems like a decent director. I liked White Bird in a Blizzard which he also wrote and directed four years after making Kaboom. It could be that he’s inconsistent, or that the quality of his work largely depends on the other people he’s working with. I can only speculate, but when the acting, dialogue, cinematography, and plot are all terrible, I tend to blame the director.
A couple of other cringe-worthy things to note: They showed this map of the world while one character explained that every major city in the world was rigged with nuclear bombs for a doomsday scenario. The map only had 21 red dots. And then there’s a shot of a guy using psychic powers with a blue flare. At one point a guy in the back of a van gets maced and so the van starts swerving all over the road. Why would the van swerve as if the driver had been maced? It made no sense. The ending left me feeling the empty void and confusion of having just wasted my time on something pointless and nonsensical.
The only thing weirder to me than this movie is listening to people talk about it at Cannes as if it's an artistic and creative movie.
Last edited by Zotis; 07-07-20 at 06:39 AM.
