Aaron's Thoughts
Love the heart being everything Araki is going for here & that he gets two lead performances from Hoffman & Wilde that are all in. I just couldn’t get past the inherent conflict you feel watching the film.
On one hand Araki is going all out creatively with flamboyant visuals and wild artistic choices you’ve never seen before (the most hilarious being Charli XCX taking off her shirt to reveal giant cartoon breasts). But all the goodwill his creative vision buys is almost entirely offset by a screenplay structure that is so conventional it makes you roll your eyes.
The framing device being nothing more than continuous cutting back and forth from the past to Cooper Hoffman being interrogated in the present is not only lazy, but a complete disservice to the rest of the film. The film stops dead in its tracks every time it cuts to the interrogation & you are reminded just how bizarre it is to have this inventive and original creative style trapped in convention so stale you’ve seen it 1000 times.
