Kaboom

If Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly indulged his very worst freshman pop-philosophy pickup lines and injected them into a script written by a confused Himalayan sherpa, then commissioned a high school A.V. club to film it during lunchtime over the course of a week, it would look a lot like Kaboom, the inconceivably bad, wholly inorganic latest from Gregg Araki, a lifetime purveyor of similarly ugly films (The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin) that try to speak to a generation that, thankfully, never existed except for in Araki's developmentally stunted head. This embarrassment, running on a split ticket with the held over Blue Valentine this weekend, stars Thomas Dekker - John Connor from TV's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - as a college kid of "undecided" sexuality who wanders through bedroom romps and meaningless dialogue, occasionally popping out of the film's reality to reveal it was just a dream. Or is the dream the dream or is reality an illusion? Araki's in his 50s, so he should be familiar with where the "real" answer can be found: Your parents' tuition receipts.