thearbiter Reviews

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Stunning

[24 June 2001]

An exquisite American work, a kind of moralized, plot-driven and highly stylized film in the same psychological vein as Mike Leigh's "Naked," to which I thought it paid some homage. While it didn't devastate me to anywhere near the degree that "Naked" did, I found the theme and presentation almost as challenging and thought-provoking, felt much of the same sort of empathy for the characters, and was genuinely creeped-out by several developments. Burnstyn was robbed, absolutely robbed, and if I ever meet Julia Roberts, those are the first words out of my mouth.

This guy's doing the next Batman?" ...Whoa.

Naked (1993)

Devastating

[24 June 2001]

In my adult life, this is the one and only film that has ever moved me to tears with its ending. It was like watching Michelangel applying his final daub to the Sistene Chapel, the incomprehensible achievement of a perfect artistic vision, and the attainment of a transcendent brilliance.

For years, I had fantasized about becoming a writer / director, and actually put forth some appreciable effort to that end. This film, Mike Leigh's incomparable, unprecedented masterwork, cured me of that fantasy. He said, and did, in two hours, all that I could have hoped to achieve in an entire career, and it became gapingly obvious to me that I had no business in this medium.

There is no "story" here, except that of the distilled essence of the hopeless pre-Millenial Western man, robbed of the promised nuclear annihilation he had always consciously feared, but subconsciously hoped for, if only to put the world out of its misery. The naked and the lost, the wandering spectre of the sentient living dead, and the pitiful yet mercifully ignorant companions that cross his path.