Totally F***ed Up. F***ed up Edition [DVD]

Friendship, Sex, drugs and love....a real, unfiltered look at Gay youth in the 90's. This absolutely killed me it was just so amazing. If you've never seen a Gregg Arakki film this might be a new experience for you but his movies are just art. This tells a real story. The ups and downs of being Gay in the 90's. Gregg is able to portray Gay life and youth so brilliantly. If you've ever felt like an outsider or you grew up in that decade this might appeal to you. It just felt real...raw. It didn't try to be something that it wasn't. Literally following teens around, exploring the ups and downs of growing up Gay/Lesbian...dealing with sex, love, heartbreak and of course friendships. The initimate scenes felt very real, they didn't seem forced. James Duval and Alan Boyce had amazing chemistry in their scenes together. I loved it. This movie felt like a real story and according to the commentary, some of it was.

great film mockumentery of lgbt issues of the 90s

Sheer rubbish. Give your money to charity.and save time and energy.

the title says it all really

This does what it claims, it is fifteen sort of linked films, set in LA in the eighties. It is amongst the first groundbreaking, `tell it like it is,' real life, gay pieces of cinema. It chooses as its subjects a mixed bag of troubled teens, and starts off with them talking about the high rate of suicide in teenage gays and it is being encouraged by the likes of music by `The Cure' and more worryingly - `The Smiths'!There are a number of pieces to camera using a variety of different cameras and therefore the quality jumps around even more than the narrative. The sound quality leaves a fair bit to be desired too and requires your full attention to ensure not missing anything.It is quite dated in a really good way, for those that lived through the eighties, there will be so much here that you had forgotten, like the huge brick mobiles and dial up sex lines - excellent! There are loads of comic or even comi-tragic moments; lets face it a scene based around two lesbians in a room full of `donor' gay guys and a turkey baster is fairly hard to categorize. Then there is teenage `street wisdom', like "love lasts as long as a squirt in the dark"..There is a great piece where they discuss who is a fanciable screen god/star and their top three are Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise and Michael Stipe. In a very Bruce La Bruce way there are lots of questions or statement flashed up on the screen, and this film does ask far more questions than it ever set out to answer - that really is part of its hidden charm. That I feel was the intention of Director Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin  Mysterious Skin [DVD] [2005 ]and Kaboom  Kaboom [DVD ]being two more well known later works) who shows as much of the film making process as what it results in.This is a montage of films and that can be distracting as it acts as an alienation device from getting too close to the characters or the action. This is still an essential piece of cinema in the ever growing panoply of gay cinema and should be lauded for that. It will not be to everybody's taste and can be (rightly) accused of being too long, but there is enough here to keep you entertained. One of my favourites is going to a gig by the `legendary' `Kamikaze D*ldo's'. It is also a massive trip down eighties memory lane, with AIDS as a spectre of doom hanging over seventies hedonism culture. If original and groundbreaking gay cinema is one of your things then you really ought to check out the fantastic `Taxi zum Klo'  Taxi Zum Klo [DVD ]and /or `Nighthawks', Nighthawks/Strip Jack Naked - Nighthawks 2 [DVD] [1978 ] I am sure you will enjoy them too.

Although Gregg Araki is a film director and producer whose work in alternative (mostly gay-related) cinema I cherish, I really cannot say that "Totally F(uck)ed up", from 1993, is among my favourite films of his, whether as the first part of his "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy", or amidst his wider body of work, or among the works of other directors and producers, either. The DVD edition viewed was a North American one (Peccadillo Pictures PPD-227). For all my quibbles, "Totally F(uck)ed up" does have its charms and a certain magic to it, if one be patient enough to untangle the strands, or at least some of them, that comprise the tangle of gay relationships unfurling within the film. They seem pretty much pell-mell, leaping back and forth from one thing to another.For me, the most arresting to one's attention among the pairs of gay boyfriends and "hook-ups" in the film is that of Andy and Ian, played, respectively, by James Duval (looking quite different here as than he had as sweet but dopey character, Jordan White, in "The Doom Generation", part 2 of Araki's trilogy) and Alan Boyce. They are surely the best-looking young dudes in the movie, as well, and their gay relationship generates a lot of romantic and sexual heat, although there is little bare skin visible in their scenes together (and only two quick glimpses of full frontal male nudity in the entire film, so far as I noticed). Their love gives some temporary meaning to Andy's life. When Ian disappoints him and the two fail to connect by telephone at a critical moment when Andy, who has found little worth in living apart from this relationship, goes into deep anguish and commits suicide, the viewer really cares (or should do so) about the fate of these two young men. Fixing one's attention on their scenes (the most enjoyable and sexy in the film, anyway) can make some narrative sense of at least their parts of the movie, then, on reviewing, the rest, the action and the other characters, falls more easily into place.I purchased "Totally F(uck)ed up" in order to complete the trilogy, of which this film is the least satisfactory segment. However, once I got my bearings in the confusing mish-mash of "Totally F(uck)ed up", I really did come to enjoy it.

Quickly delivered and in a perfect condition BUT the film was just not my thing (I blame myself for my dislike rather than the director or actors who all did a good job (though the film was deliberately difficult to watch or view)). Seeing drug and over-drink taking inevitably breeds no education or understanding of WHY people do such things BUT it does show that we are meant to tread on the right side of the line that distinguihshes what is good and bad for the human being.