I like what Steve McQueen, the filmmaker not the actor, said about his film
Shame. "Shame is my response to being lost." I feel like a lot of my favorite movies explore the topic of being lost, following characters who are trying to find their way in life either through good or bad decisions. My all time favorite film
Requiem For A Dream and a recent favorite of mine
Happiness are similar in that they bring us into the worlds of these people that we would never try to understand otherwise. The reason these films intrigue me is because they are trying to explore and understand the why behind these people. Why does someone fall into drug addiction? Why does someone have countless sex with prostitutes and girls but then can't actually get it up with someone who is interested in him? Even if the movie doesn't exactly answer all the questions it brings up, its creating that discussion with yourself and your friends and helps us realize that there is always more to people than what they present at the surface. That is where
Mysterious Skin comes in as another example of a film trying to explore the why behind it's two main protagonists. Being a Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan I wanted to see him in an indie project before he hit it big and hopefully watch a compelling, honest film at the same time.
Mysterious Skin is a film, written and directed by Gregg Araki, that follows Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) from the young ages of 8 years old and then to when they are young adults. Both boys played on a little league baseball team and were unfortunately sexually abused by their baseball coach. Neil remembers everything about his coach and grows up to be a homosexual prostitute, hanging out on playgrounds to find old men looking for young guys. Brian on the other hand cannot remember anything about his coach and suffers from amnesia because of the trauma he received. Instead he believes he was abducted by aliens and experimented on leading to a minor obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrials. Throughout the film we follow Neil as he dives deeper and deeper into the world of gay prostitution and Brian who tries to find out what happened to himself when he was 8 years old and why he can't remember it.
