one of the most visually powerfull films ever.

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2001)

When i first saw this film I wasn't at all prepared for its power and impact. I was transfixed by it. it gripped me like few other films have ever done. Its stylistic exuberance,its visual inventiveness, its sheer energy is unbelievable.It mixed despondency with humour,bleakness with wit,bitter realism with surrealistic fantasy. Poignant,hilarious,harrowing,upbeat in turns,it did what no other drug movie has achieved:to present us with believable, rounded characters we can identify with, instead of the one sided caricatures other drug movies portray.These are people like us, they could be us;they laugh,they cry, they suffer,they try to make sense of their lives and the fucked-up world that surrounds them, they analyse their own cosmotheories, they get depressed, they grieve, they try to find a way out of the debris that surround them.OK, they are also addicted to smack, but isn't their addiction a reflection(on a bigger scale) of our own little "domestic, socially acceptable" addictions,be it nicotine,caffeine,reality shows,tv quizzes,mobile phones, designer clothes,carreerism...This film enraged many people,cause it refused to fall back on old clichees and easy answers,namely that "we" are respectable citizens and "they" are freaks and scum. To quote another film,"we are all children in a vast kindergarten,trying to scribble God's name with the wrong alphabet."