Masterpiece? Realistic? Are we watching the same movie?

Rating: 1/10 (26 October 2003)

This review is for those of you who have not seen this movie yet. Please, please, read it all! You may thank me, you may not. I'm not here to change the minds of those who think this is "the" gospel of movie telling. I made the mistake of buying the dvd before I had seen the movie because (A) the movie had amazing reviews on here and (B) it was only $12 brand new!
After watching Requiem for a Dream, Spun, Traffic, and The Basketball Diaries, I can safely say that this was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I will first review this by comparing it to the latter films.
I acknowledge that alot of the techniques/effects in Spun were ripped-off from this movie, however after viewing both I find Spun to be [oddly] more disturbing than this movie [even though Spun is supposed to be somewhat satirical], and thus Spun does what it set out to do: show you 3 days in the life of a driver of a meth cook. Neither films are really worth seeing but I give Spun credit for making me cringe at the thought of drugs.
Traffic doesn't quite belong in this review, although in the drug genre and a great movie, it's more crime-drama and has a documentary-style-feel.
OK, now people seem to act like Requiem for a Dream, a movie about New York heroin addicts, has never been done before. Ha!!! Guess again, it has been done and 1,000,000 times better! If all the Leonardo DiCaprio haters can get over that hate for just 102 minutes, you'll see what Requiem should have been, plus it's based on a novel, which is based on the true life of Jim Carroll. It's one of my favorite movies of all time.
As for Requiem...
[Possible spoilers coming]
It is hard to comment on the plot itself. What's the point of the movie? To tell you drugs are bad... but with unbelievable outcomes? It's a film that's more concerned with artful direction than content. Is Ellen Burstyn a good actor? Yes, but her character is too dimwitted to be believable. Secondly the mother starts using drugs after the son does. My guess from the movie trailer was: mom's a speed freak and her son picks up this behavior from exposure to it. Like a child raised in a bad environment is likely to pick up the same bad habits. Or monkey-see monkey-do, as is the case often in real life... Not so in this plot.
The <>fictional<> plot is mostly about 2 friends and a girlfriend running around trying to get a fix during a time when smack in New York is in shortage...haha ya right! Except its choppy and 90% of the footage is just scenes of people laying around in their apartment strung out, complaining and scheming.
The most coherently told story is that of the dimwitted mother, who receives a call out of the blue that she's going to be a contestant on a game show even though she never applied to be one. So she starts using speed to fit into a red dress to look good on the show, which was a prank call or something?
What's the final result? Mom ends up in a mental ward having shock therapy, son ends up in a hospital, having his arm amputated by doctors [in the most blood-splattering fashion, the likes we haven't seen since the chainsaw scene in Scarface] from an infection stemming from needle injections, friend ends up in jail, and girlfriend ends up doing dirty deeds in a gentlemen's' club. So this is reality? This movie is realistic? I think not.
If you want to see realistic and you are mature enough that you can do without jumping refrigerators with mouths, dildos, and blood-splattering amputations folks, Requiem has it all!], please watch The Basketball Diaries.
The end.