Oh please...

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2000)

I've read a lot of reviews of this movie that cite it as"powerful," "visionary" and "unforgettable." Several critics -- including many of the people who post to this site -- have gone so far as to call it the "best movie they have ever seen." To them, I say -- as nicely as I can-- Oh please... On the basis of Pi, I will readily say that Darren Aronofsky is talented, but this movie is nothing that a half-dozen film school wannabes I hang out with couldn't pull off. It doesn't take a great director to alter shutter speeds to create a subjective vision of disorientation. It does take a poor director, though, to elicit wildly over-the-top performances, present scenes that drag and bludgeon his film to death with editorialising violin music. In addition, said director should not win any points for originality by filling his anti-drug manifesto with trippy hallucination sequences that seem designed for midnight viewings at art-house cinemas, leaning back in the front row with a joint in hand. ( And no, that's NOT how I watched the movie.) For all of the sturm and drang and distgusting little details -- "EEWW! Look at his arm!" the camera screams -- this is just another aestheticisation of the junkie lifestyle, and it's shameless how willing Aronofsky is to pull out a horror movie trick or two just to keep us from getting bored. He seems to be daring us to walk out, but the sad fact is that the horrors have no connection to the material: like Dancer in the Dark, this is just an exercise in sadism where the nasty bits serve no purpose in furthering the story. You might as well show someone kicking a puppy for two hours: I bet you could fool people into thinking that's "visionary" also. What I saw in this movie was a facile anti-drug message lost beneath a bunch of "ain't it cool" camera tricks and subverted by a screenplay that suggests the characters might have been happy as junkies if not for a few chance mishaps. "Requiem for a Dream" is bad, but it's also very ordinary. It doesn't leave a lasting enough impression to be considered a spectacular failure. It's just sort of irritating, and sort of pathetic, and ultimately disposable.