Requiem for a Heavyweight was 20 times bettter

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2002)

I'll give it this much; it wasn't boring. But.. This movie told me absolutely nothing that I didn't already know. If you get addicted to dangerous drugs, you will end up in a bad way. Thanks for the tip, McGruff. It is a grim, gross depressing film about a pack of losers WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN LOSERS EVEN IF THEY HAD NEVER DONE DRUGS. You might have made it more appetizing if drugs had ruined the lives of some people who had a single good quality in the first place. The directing is really artsy and conceited and my brethren, I saw all this avant-garde cinemo-crap in the late 60's, when many a good movie was ruined by the hippie wannabe directors using multiple screens, slow-mo audio, fuzzy hallucination sequences, rapid fire splicing, weird angles, keystone cops speed-ups and many, many other tricks. But since this film is geared to a young audience (the young characters are H-addicts who are also supposed to be somewhat hip and cool, but the old one addicted to diet pills is a total pathetic mundane ditz in the first place, and the other older characters are patently despicable) the public thinks its seeing directing innovations. The TV ad for the film called it `the most controversial film of the year?' Controversial? Like someone is out there arguing that heroin addiction is a good thing and it never ruined anyone's life.
I'm sad to dislike this because some people I really respect recommended it so highly. They insisted that I had to see it, that it was the best. REQUIEM is just another downer, a cold front blown in from Canada. My wife asked me at the end of it, `So what did you think?' `What did you think,' I countered. `Well it was kind of arty.' `Yeah, I said, `That was the whole point, not the story itself. My life would have been better off if I had never seen it.'