Todd Haynes
1991
85 minutes
This weird early Todd Haynes flick is like three movies in one. There's a Dateline NBC style true-crime fake-doc about a kid killing his entire family, there's a cheesy sci-fi Doctor Jekyll and Mister Sex-Leper thing, and there's a very gay section where juvenile delinquents find love in prison which alternates between being gritty and violent and soft and colorful and pastoral, with inmates frolicking in an Arcadian wonderland.
Thankfully you've never been locked up (unless you have--and if you're reading this and you are one of the author's friends, there's a good chance that you may have, in which you can skip a paragraph or two ahead). You have plenty of friends who have been, but their stories are theirs alone to tell, whether they are told to you or not. Some of the ones you've heard from them are strange or funny, but most are dispiriting and humbling and generally not good for the soul. People are often monsters when they feel like they have other people completely at their mercy, which is a situation that happens frequently in those places, both legally and socially.
All of this depresses you, and you search desperately for something else to be reminded of. As demoralized as you feel, you do genuinely enjoy the film, which is like almost nothing else you've seen. You allow yourself to be amused by memories of watching early episodes of Superjail, the ones which end in an over-the-top psychedelic homoerotic freakout bloodbath. Sometimes the darkest or dumbest distractions are the best distraction, and this does the trick.
Time to choose something different: