UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Harry Waterman Sensitive and unflinching, a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt is on early peak-form as a victim of the advances of a paedophile and later on becomes a prostitute. Brady Corbet plays a UFO enthusiast and paranoid youngster, also a former victim to the same sex offender. This indie adaptation of Scott Heim's hard-hitting novel is quite brilliant in its approach to tender issues, however the film does fall short at times as the tone is often inconsistent and the film appears plot less at times. It annoys me how this film is often categorised as an LGBT film, when its really not.. It draws no attention to any LGBT issues, except a brief reference to the AIDS virus but apart from that its a film about child-molestation and the affects it can have on a fragile child.

tieman64 A sad and disturbing film by Gregg Araki, "Mysterious Skin" stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet as Neil and Brian, a pair of boys who are sexually abused by a football coach. This abuse psychologically affects both kids in vastly different ways.A frail kid, Brian's early life is shaped by a father who deems him "pathetic" and "effeminate". When he is finally abused by his football coach, Brian thus finds himself unable to reconcile the "love" of his distant father with the supposedly "loving" acts of a paedophile coach. He responds by erasing all memories of his abuse and eventually becoming an asexual teenager.Neil, however, progresses differently. A homosexual boy, Neil is confident in his sexuality precisely because his own potentially judgemental father is absent. When he is sexually abused, Neil thus idolises his abuser and views his abuser as the epitome of traditional, Western masculinity. Believing abuse to be "true love", and seeking more of it, Neil then descends into a life of increasingly violent prostitution.Fittingly, "Skin's" aesthetic veers from the innocence of childhood to the nightmarish world of sex crimes and paedophilia. Both worlds are constantly clawing at one another, Araki's leads frequently resorting to fantasy in an effort to restore lost innocence. Strange coming from a homosexual director like Araki, "Mysterious Skin" reinforces the myth that child abuse "causes" homosexuality. Anticipating these misreadings, Araki stresses that Neil was "proudly homosexual" long before being sexually abused. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent as Neil, a kid who perversely pines for love, his attractive brand of doomed romanticism drawing others toward him like a vortex. Elisabeth Shue co-stars.7.9/10 – See "Capturing the Friedmans".

d_m_s I couldn't find any fault in this film at all. The acting, characters, storyline, directing, cinematography, soundtrack etc. were all fantastic. I was surprised to be so convinced by Gordon-Levitt's performance as he is not someone I am very keen on.It's very engaging, interesting, though-provoking and (despite the tragic subject matter) enjoyable.It reminded me a bit of Bully in the sense that it has very realistic and meaty characters in desperate situations and suffering from inner turmoil.It's been a while since a film has engaged me enough to score it a 10 and I am very pleased to have discovered this one.

chaos-rampant Here we have two boys, both narrating their memory of that childhood night that changed the universe.The film is about child molestation but it's not a 'message movie' up front, the hurt wrapped in something more weird about the hole it leaves in the soul.One boy goes on a teenage life of cheap sex that makes him feel desired, the other tries to piece detective-like the puzzle of what he's sure happened to him: alien abduction one night.It is more deeply about a hole in the memory of who you are, about missing time, wonderful stuff. The catch? We implicitly value ambiguity in films but it's not always clear why. My definition of ambiguity is of a simultaneous view, of things being both so and in some other way, this and not this. This means temporarily suspending judgement, to resist saying things are only one thing. Here we have it clearly, two stories that we're called to figure. So to get the full effect, the catch is that you have to be able to quickly juggle a whole cloud of mirrored story, to ambiguously hold how the two stories are about the same boy, that it's neither just this nor unlike it.In short, simultaneously hold how one narration may have splintered off in the other and both mirror the same pathway to mind, and whole sequences will open up as you watch, like the Halloween night that goes through masks and bullying in a 'scary house' and ends with a blurry passing-out.Suspending judgement extends in another way. We see stuff we could easily be judgmental of, a boy who prostitutes himself, a mother who's reckless of his pain, but see past just this without denying it and you'll see a soul in the same need of affection as the rest of us.You have to quickly get in that space because the filmmaker makes it gradually more clear until a protracted (literal) explanation in the end of one boy to the other of what actually happened that night that clears the air of confusion and restores painful clarity.So here's a film that takes after Lynch of his mid-period (that is until Mulholland), the sunny picture of middle-America that hides something, for a while attempts the same ambiguous blur of submerging cause to bring to the front images of its having been lived; the dreamlike opening shot of colorful cheerios raining on the smiling boy and we soon find out what that was a part of.In the end it falls back to the logic of explanations, clearly separating real and not. No mistake, it's the most difficult narrative challenge to pose on oneself, one that Lynch has been perfecting his whole career, so all told I'd rather celebrate here the imaginative attempt.I saw this with a previous film by the same guy, that one a critique as superficial as the TV walls it projected on. Here I'm happy to see him grow.