10 Movies That Changed Your Mind About Directors You Hated

9. Mysterious Skin - Gregg Araki

Gregg Araki is something of an anomaly as a film-maker: he is so unwaveringly committed to his creative agenda - and apparently to furthering the career of James Duval well past its sell-by date - and so provocatively anti-mainstream that his work is incredibly divisive. If you get Araki, you get him, and you love him. For everyone else, he's another bonkers film-maker who takes pride in seemingly unwatchable films. Such is the case of most of his earliest films, which watch like an anthemic anthology for broken youth - they are a call to arms for disaffected, troubled teens and liminal identities, with strong homosexual themes that seem almost closed off to anyone else from other backgrounds. It was never as if Araki was offering morality tales and compartmentalising characters and his films never felt inclusive, and could be particularly jarring, specifically because of Araki's provocative mix of whimsy and darkness. He's always looking to make a cult classic, and most audiences would count that as an agenda instead to just make bad movies. Mysterious Skin though was a mainstream success, which drew critical and audience acclaim and rightly so, suggesting that Araki could make films for everyone, which still conformed to the ideas he likes to explore most. Did It Last? Araki is a little like Takeshi Miike in many respects: even if he flirts with the mainstream and wider notoriety that extends beyond the cult, he will rail against that and produce something contradictory, and that is precisely why he followed Mysterious Skin up with Smiley Face - a comic oddity - before making the ludicrous, provocatively silly Kaboom! which will surely have turned off all of his mainstream fans again.