That soundtrack has never sounded better, and Araki's 16-mm cinematography has never looked clearer than on
The Living End: Remixed and Remastered, coming to DVD April 29 (Strand Releasing Home Video, $27.99).
The Living End lives again: Gregg Araki's sexy and angry AIDS road movie hits DVD in a revamped new edition
Green Day and
the Living End will continue to tour together through early August and then spend two weeks separately in Europe.
GREEN DAY; LIVING END
In fact, the last third is taken up with the most dubious of the classical formulae (already resurrected for The Graduate) wherein the heroine, rather than being allowed to make up her own mind, is "rescued" at the very altar by the two men (with the enthusiastic encouragement of the sidekick, another in the parade of Araki's noisily aggressive, stereotypical, grotesquely caricatured lesbians (see
The Living End and The Doom Generation).
Splendor
NOFX's Fat Mike and
The Living End's Chris Cheney also join the party, on the defiant title track.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
In fact, it's so well-crafted--with the kind of rich characterizations and mature storytelling that Araki's nervy early films (
The Living End, The Doom Generation) mocked rather than aspired to--that it should open up a world of opportunities for its auteur.
Skin tight
If 1992's
The Living End - a talky, gloomy road movie in which HIV-positive lovers unleash their outsider rage on society a la Thelma and Louise - was Araki's breakthrough, it also marked a certain gentrification within his work.
Nowhere
In the early 1990s, independent cinema was electrified by a bumper crop of gay-themed films--including Todd Haynes's Poison, Gregg Araki's
The Living End, Tom Kalin's Swoon, and Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's Go Fish, to name just a few--so artistically bold and brimming with urgency that they were considered a full-fledged movement, dubbed the "new queer cinema" by renowned film critic and feminist academic B.
Here comes the new new queer cinema: the first wave of queer cinema slowed to a trickle years ago. Now a flood of smart, fun new movies is washing into theaters
They've done it with Rose Tattoo, Midnight Oil, Men At Work and more recently
The Living End.
JIMMY'S BARNES STORMER; JIMMY BARNES Birmingham Academy 2
After that I offered to work on Gregg Araki's
The Living End for free.
Bringing up Indie
He also said, after he entertained that thought for a moment, that, if one could really achieve remote control over the transference, it would be the most terrifying prospect of all--it would be
the living end.
Digging Freud: from California to Germany
Hu, who arranged Barters acting cameos in
The Living End (1992), Grief (1993), and Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998), remembers, "You could always say, `Paul, I need help, I need you to be there at a certain time,' and he'd groan and say, `...
End of the reel
On a more tender note, here's the revolver that Mike Dytri cocked in his mouth in
The Living End as he f***ed Craig Gilmore.
Araki and a hard place
And since this cheeky film comes from sexually ambidextrous director Gregg Araki (
The Living End, Nowhere), you can rest assured that the two male dreamboats will share one hot kiss--on a dare from Robinson, of course.
Odd couples
In 1991 he completed Gregg Araki's controversial HIV-positive lust stow
The Living End after raising the movie's scrawny $23,000 budget himself (his mom anted up $10,000 in seed money).
Strand and deliver
Two returning indie stars are
The Living End's Gregg Araki and Swingers' Doug Liman, each of whom has Los Angeles on the brain.
The next gay wave