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Curator’s notes

Gregg Araki's The Living End, which debuted at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, is a buddy movie gone bad; Luke (Mike Dytri) and Jon (Craig Gilmore) are literally on the road to nowhere. Luke is a rootless hustler who's determined to "live fast, die young, and make a beautiful corpse," while Jon is a freelance writer whose life and stability are devastated when he finds out he's HIV positive. They meet by chance (or is it fate?), and when Luke kills a cop, they take to the road. A casual affair leads to mutual dependence and a lasting bond. As Luke tells Jon, "Don't you get it? We're not like them. We don't have as much time, so we have to grab life by the balls and go for it."

Araki traps the characters close to the camera or isolates them against sterile or desolate landscapes, made luminous by Christopher Münch's surreal lighting. Most of the people they meet are alienated or hostile, which only deepens their isolation. The film's title encapsulates the paradox that becomes their lives. – 2008 Sundance Film Festival

The remaster is really like a brand new movie. The Living End has never been properly released on DVD; I’ve heard the existing transfer is a technical atrocity cheaply copied from the VHS transfer (which is rumored to even jump out of the projection gate at a certain point!) Happily, Strand Releasing, Fortissimo Films and I were able to do what we did with Totally F***ed Up a few years ago, but we took it even a few steps further for this particular new, improved "director’s edition." We went back to the original 16mm IP, re-telecined the whole film in pristine and gorgeous HD, re-color-timed, did extensive dirt, hair, scratch and glue stain removal (and in 16mm those glitches are big!), and most importantly completely remixed and re-sound-designed the entire movie from its original stems in awesome 5.1 surround sound. Technology today – especially what’s possible in the ever-evolving world of digital – is light years ahead of where it was when we did The Living End's original 16mm sound mix which was crude and primitive to say the least. Of course, the film itself is essentially the same – it ain't Transformers 2 by any stretch of the imagination – and it has not lost any of its rough-and-tumble $20,000 "guerrilla"-production-made-on-the-run charm. It's just a technically less bumpy and I think much more cinematic and effective ride. I am thrilled to be presenting it in this new version! – Gregg Araki

“Gregg Araki, a puckish and sometime punkish filmmaker… praised for his stylish and moody capture of the Generation X zeitgeist. Born in Santa Barbara in 1963, Araki graduated from USC in film production, and worked as a music critic for the LA Weekly. He jumped into no-budget filmmaking with Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987) and The Long Weekend (O’Despair) (1989) which still reverberate with their threadbare production but richness of reinventing Warhol and Fassbinder for his time. Broke through with HIV+ gay couple movie, The Living End (1992), a key work in the putative “queer new wave.” Teen trilogy began with Totally F***ed Up (1993) in which four gay men and a lesbian couple are filmed wandering around LA, that shows a Godardian bent (Araki considers it his Masculine Feminine). Followed by bigger-budgeted The Doom Generation (1995), a threesome road movie with sexual encounters in hyper-stylized hotel rooms bathed in psychedelic colors, that is reminiscent of Godard’s Weekend… Last in the trilogy is Nowhere (1997) tracing the angst of Los Angeles high school kids. Splendor (1999) brings out the underlying romanticism in Araki’s previous work but jettisons most of the strident bad-boy attitudes and violence if his earlier style… Araki’s parade of alienated characters (many of them take to the road) who kick at the world in frustration, and his sympathy with the weird and lost suggest a singular aesthetic – queer, violent, intellectual, off-beat.” – Veronica Ko Out of the Shadows (Locarno International Film Festival, 2001)

“With Mysterious Skin (2004), Gregg Araki returns, but with a new, more incisive, yet more generous, gaze, to what he likes to do: filming the bodies, gestures, lifestyle, anxieties, stories, imaginaries of adolescent boys. The film gracefully treads a fine line in dealing with a difficult subject (pedophilia) avoiding both homophobia and prurience.” – Senses of Cinema

“Beyond potential laughter, what prevails in Smiley Face (2007) is a fascination for an oddball character stranded in the comedic mode, thanks to Anna Faris’s phenomenal presence. It’s from such a mise en abîme, however, that Smiley Face, a joyous film, at times tickles us into a subtle disquiet.” – Cahiers du cinema

Gregg Araki's films have screened at the world's most prestigious film festivals, including Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto, Deauville, London, and New York.

Filmography
Smiley Face (2007)
Mysterious Skin (2004)
This is How the Word End s (2000) (TV)
Splendor (1999)
Nowhere (1997)
The Doom Generation (1995)
Totally F***ed Up (1993)
The Living End (1992)
The Long Weekend (O’Despair) (1989)
Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987)