ew

i feel dirty. not sexy, spank-me dirty. not need-a-shower dirty. dirty on the inside. i feel dirty from seeing the movie mysterious skin last night.

ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration (what? me? i won't believe it.). but seriously, the movie creeped me out so much that every time i think of a few of the scenes a little shiver runs down my spine.

it's directed by a guy named greg araki--you might remember him from such early-90's queer cult classics as the living end, heralded as "one of the first important openly gay films along with go fish" [that's not a real quote because i just made it up.]. like go fish, i thought that the living end was pretty terrible. michael doesn't agree with me on that one, and he knows a lot more about film than i do. which basically means that if you "appreciate" "film" then you'll be nuts for greg araki. if you're like me and your favorite movies include steel magnolias and the birdcage then you might not get as much out of it.

mysterious skin had a lot more polish than the living end. you know when you see an indie film (think beverly kills, those of you who were at NCGLFF) and it just seems so...how do i say this politely...sloppy and amateurish? like the director picked the actors up by hanging out outside a dunkin donuts bathroom in rural iowa. like it was shot using a plastic, handheld microphone that the director held out from behind the camera. myseterious skin wasn't like that. it looked like a movie. and the guy from third rock from the sun was really good.

the problem is the movie's subject matter: dual child molestation. we go from child molestation to small-town hustling to big-city-aids hustling to big-city-aids-getting-your-ass-kicked-while-being-raped hustling. oh, and then at the end of the movie we find out that not only have these two guys been molested by their baseball coach, but the molestation went on for like a few months with one kid--who claims to have loved the older man (he was 8 at the time)--and that at some point during the coach's summer of love he engaged in an orgiastic 3-way with two eight-year-olds who "fisted him up to their elbow."

that's right. eight-year-olds fisting someone up to their elbow.

i need my brain scrubbed.