"Drugs are bad, mmkay?"

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2004)

Darren Aronofsky, as a director, is the Michael Bay for the arthouse crowd and this movie is the "Reefer Madness" of its generation. I mean, this is a movie that takes itself way, WAY too seriously, is so hysterically bad and over-the-top that, in future (and assumedly more perceptive) generations it will be looked back upon the way that we now watch a film like "The Valley of the Dolls". This is a film for self-pitying, mopey college students who sit around in their dorm rooms listening to Sonic Youth, talking about what they think are "deep" subjects and strumming acoustic guitars. Grow up, you infantile navel-gazers! The only 'real' performance in this film is Ellen Burstyn's (its only major award nomination, by the way - guess why?); everyone else in it plays obnoxious cyphers and rabid caricatures. How it is that anyone who watches this film would get sucked in by its 'heaviness', by its overweening and obnoxious sense of self-importance is astonishing to me. I guess it just goes to show that, like Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."