Explode Tonight at the Texas Theatre

If you've yet to see a movie at the Texas Theatre, which recently began showing classic and foreign-language films after too long in the dark, tonight would be a good time to check it out. At 7:30 they'll screen Gerardo Naranjo's I'm Gonna Explode, which opened in New York last summer but never got any further west. Here's J. Hoberman's review, for those without plans this evening:

For his third and most fully realized feature, I'm Gonna Explode, thirtysomething Gerardo Naranjo has transposed '60s Godard, and particularly Godard's ultra-romantic Pierrot le fou (1965), to an upper-middle-class exurb of his hometown Guanajuato. I'm Gonna Explode is the tragicomic tale of Roman and Maru, two disaffected high school kids (convincingly played by Juan Pablo de Santiago and Maria Deschamps) on the road to nowhere. Dense, funny, almost underground in its rawness (although shot in glamorous wide-screen), the movie opens with Roman's plaintive cri de coeur, "fucking sons of bitches," and ends -- as it has to -- in teenage obliteration. Kicked out of boarding school for keeping a notebook of Columbine-style homicidal fantasies, Roman introduces himself to his new classmates with a talent-show act called "See You in Hell." The only appreciative audience member is the supremely sullen Maru. It's love, with pretty-boy Roman as the object of Maru's cultivated disaffection. After the two kids team up for a staged abduction, she impulsively cuts her hair to match his. Roman and Maru are less soul mates than accomplices and their escape is actually something of a retreat. For most of the movie, they're hilariously camped out on Roman's parental roof, smoking, boozing, and barbecuing-while their distraught parents drink themselves into a stupor below. They're sulky, sexually skittish, and emotionally infantile. Maru and Roman don't relate to each other so much as riff off each other's moods -- their spontaneity matching the tone of this artfully slapdash film.