Sadism as Film Genre

Rating: 2/10 (16 June 2010)

You don't need to pine for nothing but old MGM musicals to be disgusted by the blatant sadism fueling movies like this. That is to say, I fully accept the tragic decline of characters in keeping with a story, nor do I object to miserable endings when the course dictates that. I'm a grown-up. But. There is something nasty going on with films like this, wherein increasingly grotesque displays of characters undergoing horror are presented as 'reality', or, God help us, art. No good storyteller in any medium actually needs to show us, inch by inch, how low his characters are going. As in this dreadful, pretentious movie. Reviews here sensibly bring out the absurd mistakes, like Burstyn's Etc without anaesthesia or the drug dealer's ridiculous giving away of heroin for a little sex, yet seem to miss that these absurdities are there to serve the director's sadistic purpose: to make everyone suffer really badly, and right in front of us. That is not film-making. That is an adolescent's idea of being shocking and gritty, and it's insulting all around. Give me a story that realistically portrays these very dreams falling apart, with some humanity and not as an exercise in visual cruelty, and I'm on board. This? It's prurient garbage under the guise of serious movie-making.