Movie Reviews

Requiem For A Dream (2000)

In life there are many choices, like any choice you make in life there is always the up or downside to it. For example if you buy a lottery ticket the up side you may win, the down side you may waste a lot of money. If you do drugs the downside you may lose everything you have including your life to get more drugs.

Requiem for a Dream is a dark but straight to the point film about drug addiction and how drugs will change your life and make you do thing to keep getting more. It tells parallel stories that are linked together. One is Harry (Jared Leto) who doesn't have a job but has a place; all he does is get high with his best friend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans).

But it is getting hard for them to get their next fix with no money so they hatch up a plan. They will become major drug dealers but it is harder then they thought because it harder to sell the drugs if you are using the product. Harry goes home to tell the good news about his business to his mother but he sees she has her own drugs problem.

For Sara Goldfurb (Ellen Burstyn) Life is getting bad for her. She is a widow, her son is grown and movie out she lives all alone and all she does is watching TV (only one show on TV). So one day she gets a call from a company that get people to go on games shows.

He tells her she will be on a game show so she goes to the doctor to se about losing

weight. The doctor prescribes her diet pills so takes them and hopes she lose weight the only problem is she get addicted to them and becomes a die-hard addict. Did I mention Harry has a girlfriend named Marion (Jennifer Connelly) who is, you guess it, a drug addict? Over the course, you will see the effects drugs have on their lives until the disturbing end.

Darren Aronofsky adapted by the 1978 novel by author Hubert Selby directs Requiem for a Dream. And I have to say this is one of the darkest yet most powerfully film I have seen so far this year. This is the type of film that after you see it you will never forget it. This film should be play to high school kids to show them what happens when they do drugs.

The story was so hard hitting the way Darren shows it and the way the cast acted they all should be hailed in the movie business. The dept they put them self to play the character is remarkable. They way Darren shows the screen to screen one screen you see Harry and Marion are talk to each other in bed and it is Split screen. The way the drug scenes are shown is a fast paced way, for example, how they prep it from melting to shoot up and how their eyes look afterwards. Also, he shows us how people who are hooked on drugs will do anything they can to get their next fix, no matter what it does to them.

Overall, Requiem for a Dream is a movie not one to miss but not for the faint of heart. But it need to be watch at to show if you are heading down the road with drugs you life could end life the people in this movie go see it and getting ready for filmmaking at it best.

Donnie Darko (2003)

It's October 1988 and Donnie Darko is a troubled teen on medication who sleepwalks right out of his house on some nights. He also suffers from visions of a man in a grotesque rabbit costume, a harbinger of doom who tells him that the world will end in twenty-eight days...

This weird, jigsaw-with-pieces-missing science fiction was the debut of writer/director Richard Kelly. It contorts the template of the typical teen movie into an unsettling enigma; the usual characters are there: the outsider, the new girl who he connects with, the juvenile delinquents, the bullied fat girl, the understanding teacher, the sympathetic but distant parents.

Yet teen alienation is taken so far that we feel no empathy with any of them, only Donnie seems to be on the road to discovery, despite the efforts of the school and their banal self-motivation classes (inspired by the local inspirational speaker). There is something not right with the world of Donnie Darko, it appears to be a typical American small town but it feels off kilter, and there's tragedy hanging over the place.

Teachers are afraid to hold challenging discussions with their pupils for fear of being sacked, an airplane engine falls out of the sky into the absent Donnie's bedroom, and a session of hypnosis with a psychiatrist abruptly ends with Donnie's sexual fantasies taking over. And that's before we consider what is happening with time itself.

Are we predestined to take a set route through life? Is that route dictated by a God? How is it possible to travel through time, anyway? Can we even change time itself? The film offers no obvious answers, and moves slowly to its mysterious conclusion. It's haunting, intriguing and carefully made, but there's a nagging doubt that to work it all out may require more effort than it actually deserves. Moody music by Michael Andrews, along with an amusing use of eighties hits on the soundtrack.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

In the not-too-distant future, Alex and his gang of three droogs (friends) spend every evening rampaging through the streets of London. Dressed in dark derbies and white outfits, the group prepares for each night of ultra violence by sipping moloko (drug-enhanced milk) at a local bar and savagely bickering with one another.

On one occasion, following a harrowing ride through the countryside, the four thugs force their way into the home of a writer and his wife and brutally assault the couple. A few days later they attempt the same sort of break-in at another residence and, although Alex does manage to enter the house and kill the woman living there, his companions turn against him and he's caught by the police.

After two years in prison, Alex is offered the chance to undergo a highly publicized experimental therapy that will eliminate his violent behavior. Following this treatment, the reformed young man is released and returns to his old neighborhood, where he finds that his parents have disowned him and two of his erstwhile buddies have become constables.

After a beating at the hands of these former friends, Alex wanders to a nearby building seeking aid. There he finds the writer, now wheelchair-bound and a widower, that the droogs had attacked years before. Forced to confront the horror of that incident, the author, who personally