I'm in two minds about it - it's an undeniably brilliant movie, and I think it deserves cult status, but I think it's bad art - Hubert Selby Jr's writing's never taken me anywhere useful - to me it's just a druggy cocktail of surreal misanthropy and mishmashed Freud - and Aronofsky's take really doesn't lift any higher than the fairly banal level of pharmaceutical critique once you've filtered out the surface effects (hey kids, look what drugs and the absence of effective parenting has done to our generation!) - but thank god for a total absence of any hollywood gloss at all. relentless high-gloss dystopianism good / featherweight moral redemption bad. but in the end I think I'm really a very old-fashioned kinda arts-consumer - I need my art to replace the bad it excoriates with something healing, not just expose and cauterise.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Requiem for a Dream
I'm in two minds about it - it's an undeniably brilliant movie, and I think it deserves cult status, but I think it's bad art - Hubert Selby Jr's writing's never taken me anywhere useful - to me it's just a druggy cocktail of surreal misanthropy and mishmashed Freud - and Aronofsky's take really doesn't lift any higher than the fairly banal level of pharmaceutical critique once you've filtered out the surface effects (hey kids, look what drugs and the absence of effective parenting has done to our generation!) - but thank god for a total absence of any hollywood gloss at all. relentless high-gloss dystopianism good / featherweight moral redemption bad. but in the end I think I'm really a very old-fashioned kinda arts-consumer - I need my art to replace the bad it excoriates with something healing, not just expose and cauterise.
I'm in two minds about it - it's an undeniably brilliant movie, and I think it deserves cult status, but I think it's bad art - Hubert Selby Jr's writing's never taken me anywhere useful - to me it's just a druggy cocktail of surreal misanthropy and mishmashed Freud - and Aronofsky's take really doesn't lift any higher than the fairly banal level of pharmaceutical critique once you've filtered out the surface effects (hey kids, look what drugs and the absence of effective parenting has done to our generation!) - but thank god for a total absence of any hollywood gloss at all. relentless high-gloss dystopianism good / featherweight moral redemption bad. but in the end I think I'm really a very old-fashioned kinda arts-consumer - I need my art to replace the bad it excoriates with something healing, not just expose and cauterise.
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