Was this written by a child?

When I say child, I mean young adolescent. It's like something I might have written when I thought sex and drugs and needless profanity was something to strive for. It's quite hard to explain the exact feeling I got from it, but it's also really obvious. It's the same feeling I get from watching Skins, which suffers from a similar problem.

And this isn't to say that I'm prudish, easily offended or not "used" to indie films. To shamelessly plug my credentials, I list films by Jodorowsky, Lynch, Bunuel and (on occasion) Von Trier among my favourites and Bret Easton Ellis among my favourite authors. What this film seemed like to me was as if someone had skim-read "The Rules Of Attraction" or "The Informers" and tried far too hard to make a film along those lines, but in the process missed everything which made the book so great and just settled for the superficialities coupled with some painfully pretentious pseudo-philosophical dialogue (which, funnily enough, was the same thing which happened when Hollywood decided to adapt The Informers, with disastrous results).

I understand that Mr. Araki's grasp on English may not be great, but that can't account for everything that's wrong with this film. And I'm somewhat surprised, since I remember liking Mysterious Skin quite a lot when I saw it (although this was, admittedly, about five years ago), but this? It came off like a slightly thick art student trying far too hard to impress his professors and contemporaries by being "edgy" for the sake of it, haphazardly tying it together with some vague, poorly-explored social themes.

And that's just the writing, don't even get me started on the acting, direction, editing etc.

Yeah. "To each their own" and all that, but this one just genuinely annoyed me.

These bastards!