A beautiful quirky film with only a few flaws.

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2003)

The executive producer (Drew Barrymoore) lends the only completely flat out bad note in this otherwise fabulous emotional and intellectual symphony of a film.
Jake Gyllenhaal's character is fabulous. He's a melancholy intellectual high-school kid. He sleep-walks, and he can see and talk to a six foot tall man in a demonic looking bunny suit, that nobody else can see.
The less you know about the plot, the better.
The movie presents a skewered and lonely private reality, reminiscent of a Lynch movie, but it actually reminded me most of Memento and Magnolia, two other films in which things unravel, and sometimes come back together, in ways you cannot begin to imagine until the film is nearly over. What makes this movie unlike anything else I have ever seen is the way it spikes what could have been a merely bittersweet 80s mix of nostalgia and satire, by putting a clever and gifted protagonist into an existential predicament worthy of Satre himself.
The art direction and the 80s music contribute to both a feeling of nostalgia, and a sharp reminder of the quiet despair that comes from being an outsider in high-school. The soundtrack is fabulous, lyrically rich, and finely tuned to the film, with turns of beauty and ringing loneliness that you just have to experience to understand. An understated cover of Tears for Fear's single "Mad World" transformed the 80s classic into a quiet personal musical epiphany, at a key moment in the film.
"and i find it kind of funny i find it kind of sad the dreams in which i'm dying are the best i've ever had"
I rented this film because it's one of my very good friend's favourite movies. I usually know that any movie he like is going to have some kind of non-linearity to it, and some kind of way of getting, in a round-about way, to deal honestly with some aspect of the human condition, after much belaboured and stylish postmodern melodrama. But none of these trappings get in the way of just enjoying the film. In fact, this is a movie you could watch many times, and enjoy it for some different thing, each time you watch it.
As I said in the beginning, I think everyone in this film succeeds nobly, except Drew Barrymoore, who plays an English Teacher who seems a shallow and profane copy of all the truly memorable English Teachers I have on film before. Maybe they should have cast Laura Dern, who played a teacher in October Sky, the movie I first saw Jake Gyllenhaal in.
Here's hoping that this writer/director is this successful next time. I hope he doesn't end up straightjacketed by this early success, a-la M. Night Shyamalan.