I am blown away that people revere this movie!

Rating: 3/10 (24 July 2013)

How this movie ended up with such a high rating is beyond me. I watched this movie with high hopes of being entertained (because of it's high rating). Instead, I found the entire movie to be garbage. It's a recycled story line - and it features highly obnoxious, contrived, "I'm trying too hard to be artsy" cinematography.
So the story line,.......people try to "make it" by pulling off some drug deals, only to end up addicted and ruined by the product they were pushing. Gee, that story has only been told in about 5 dozen movies PRIOR to this one! Girl ends up selling her body for drugs, one guy ends up in jail, and one guy ends up close to death. Gee, that story has only been told on film a hundred times! Way to come up with an original concept!
The only other story in the movie is of the mother. For the first hour of the movie, we focus on her struggle not to eat. Really? An old woman struggling to diet is supposed to entertain me? Then comes the cliché, predictable irony,.....the old lady gets hooked on prescription diet drugs. The mother's story line takes a long winded, boring walk to a point that has been realized for so long that the irony is long gone. Yes, law abiding people get hooked on prescription drugs - we are all well aware of that. A breathing, growling refrigerator doesn't make that well established point any more interesting. For me, the scenes with the mother were embarrassingly cheesy.
Most people that love this movie revere the art student cinematography. I found it to be completely obnoxious. A good portion of the mother's scenes have an almost strobe like effect that literally strained my eyes. The rapid flash clips reminded me of a film student editor that was trying too hard to make a recycled story line into an art film.
Finally, I just didn't buy the acting. The old ladies were all like caricatures of old women. The two male leads were never able to make me forget that I was watching a performance. About the only two actors in the movie to put on a believable performance were the girl that turns to prostitution, and the host in the weird "juice" TV show.
In summary - the story was recycled, the acting was average at best, and the cinematography was trying way to hard to make this movie a piece of "art". I can see why young film students might like this movie. They look past the lame story line, and the unspectacular acting - and instead focus on the cinematographic technicalities. To me, appreciating this film only for it's technical merits would be like appreciating a boring song, performed by average musicians, that was recorded in a unique way. Beyond those subjective cinematographic technicalities, I saw nothing redeeming about this movie.
I enjoyed "Hot Tub Time Machine" and "Sharknado" more than this piece of art garbage. And if you've seen "Hot Tub Time Machine" or "Sharknado" - I am sure that you thought it couldn't get much worse than that.