Requiem for a Dream

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Requiem for a Dream

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Requiem for a Dream

Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Jared Leto, Christopher McDonald

Sara Goldfarb is a lonely widow who is revitalized by the prospect of appearing on television as a game show contestant, while her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend Tyrone have devised ...( read more  read more... )an illicit shortcut to wealth and ease. Lulled by early successes, Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone convince themselves that unforeseen setbacks are only temporary. They ignore their deteriorating circumstances and focus all their energies on realizing their beautiful visions of the future. Even as the promise of fulfillment disappears to nothingness, they cling to the delusions that are slowly destroying their lives, denying reality until at last they are eye to eye with their worst nightmares.

Id: 1202220

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Requiem for a Dream Recent Reviews
  • AgentLexi2132
    December 28, 2009
    AgentLexi2132
    ''You are my dream.''

    The hopes and dreams of four ambitious people are shattered when their drug addictions begin spiraling out of control.

    Ellen Burstyn: Sara Goldfarb

    From Darren Aronofsky, I found this his most disturbing, most crushingly shocking yet.
    Ellen...( read more) Burstyn is fantastic as the lonely Sara Goldfarb. Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans equally convincing, beautiful desperate acting.
    Sean Gullette and Mark Margolis (from Pi) also had brief cameo roles in this. I really feel that there is a bond between a Director and his actors when they reuse them in films. Shows me there is a good working relationship between everyone working on the project.
    Director Darren Aronofsky also cleverly requested of Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans to avoid sex and sugar for a period of 30 days in order to better understand an overwhelming craving. This obviously boosts and gives their performances a more realistic edge, this is painfully, achingly real.


    The whole film has all the composites of people clinging onto hope yet ultimately spiraling downwards into their worst realizations.
    Beautifully filmed, clever uses of photography and image segments. Split screens of characters talking, drug using/tablet taking, surreal visions of TV show hosts in motion and a mutant fridge coming to life! Complete madness; the effect of pharmaceutical drugs not just illegal ones.
    During one scene in which Ellen Burstyn is hallucinating, her entire apartment is taken apart piece by piece as though it was the set of a television show. Several crewmembers of the mock television show pass Burstyn in her chair, including a man carrying a clip board with the Greek letter/mathematical symbol Pi on the back - a genius reference to Darren Aronofsky's first film.
    This movie is simply masterful work; it's mood beginning vibrant and full of life and gradually the piece becomes full of despair. Advised not for the faint of heart or audiences of a squeamish disposition.

    Requiem For A Dream teaches us to give up our false hopes, quit our obsessive habits, and to lessen our need for drugs, before its too late to do so. Watching this film will put you off drugs for life and rightly so. A film that is so fast paced it makes your heart race, so cringe worthy, so real; an emotional pounder of synaptic shocking proportions.
    Adapted from the book by Hubert Selby Jr. whom also worked on the screenplay, Requiem for a Dream definitely makes me want to go and find this book immediately.
    The Music by Clint Mansell is also a blessing; wait for the revelation emotion breaking ending with the theme song playing.

    Cleverly Requiem meaning essentially death is the story of human nature and how if we let our impulses and desires control everything we do, they can ultimately destroy us. Sex is a drug, acid and narcotics are drugs, prescription pills are drugs, and the biggest drug of all; Life. Brutal, unrelenting and unafraid to take drastic measures to get across it's messages. This is a truthful vision of life and death; of ourselves and the biggest dream of all, is our lives.
  • garyX
    December 16, 2009
    garyX
    Jared Leto stars as a junkie looking for a way onto easy street for himself, his bored upper class girlfriend Jennifer Connelly and partner in crime Marlon Wyans. It's easy to dismiss Requiem For A Dream as a simplistic "drugs are bad" fable, but if you watch it with unbiased eye...( read more)s, it actually is not preachy at all. It is a beautifully shot, visually inventive and extremely well acted tale documenting the modern world's obsession with the quick fix; every character in their own way is dealing with their empty, meaningless lives by avoiding dealing with them with the use of various addicitons; whether it be heroin, chocolate or television which inevitably leads to an unending spiral of degradation. After all, if you spend all of your time avoiding your problems, when they finally catch up with you they will inevitably be infinitely worse. Making Trainspotting look like The Little Mermaid, it's a harrowing, grimly affecting yet hypnotic film that you can feel gnawing at you in the pit of your stomach. This is cinema as an artform, and the best film David Lynch never made.
  • SirPant
    September 4, 2009
    SirPant
    Capitalism has lead to consumerism and consumerism has lead to addiction. We are now all drug addicts and greed is the drug and we must have it at any cost. Hard hitting social commentary from Aronofsky who goes from strength to strength.
  • binky013
    August 10, 2009
    binky013
    If the stunning script -- particularly the clever dialog -- doesn't drive you up the wall, then the brilliantly coached dialect may step up and drive you to drink. A nightmare not to be endured.
  • ohagankieran
    June 15, 2009
    ohagankieran
    If Pi showed that Aronofsky was full of ideas, his follow-up showed we didn?t know the half of it, with the director?s toy-box of technical tricks providing the film?s big buzz amid a gripping pessimism.

    I was tempted to title my summary "Drugs are bad, mm'kay?" because this mov...( read more)ie was so sad I was desperate to inject a little humor. Man, what a sad, scary, excellent, grim, disturbing, well-made movie. The more I read about this movie and learned about it, the more fascinating it seemed. I also am one of those people who, when they hear a movie is extremely shocking and disturbing, get a burning urge to see it as fast as I can to see if it shocks me (especially if it's unrated or 18), since I am pretty jaded. So, I eagerly anticipated seeing it.

    Unfortunately I read SO many reviews and so much about the making of the movie, that I knew a little too much about the plot going in to see it, so there weren't too many surprises. It concerns four addicts. Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly play a young loving couple, Harry and Marion, who dabble in heroin and plan to make a big sale along with their friend Tyrone (Shawn Wayans) so they can be set for life and Marion can open up her own (legal) business. Unfortunately, their recreational drug use turns into day-to-day addiction, and things start to get ugly. REAL ugly. (Watching someone shoot up directly into a gangrene-infected, pus-filled crater in his arm kind of gave me a whole new definition of the word ugly.) Ellen Burstyn plays Harry's mother Sarah, a lonely widow who wants to lose weight to fit into a red dress so she can appear on her favorite TV show. She starts out by being addicted to TV and candy, but has the bad luck to go to a doctor who-in what I thought was the only unrealistic part of the film- gives her an RX for 'diet pills', that turn out to actually be speed. I say unrealistic because, as anyone who has ever worked in the medical profession knows, very few doctors will NOT just write someone who goes to them for the first time to see them for weight loss a huge prescription for extremely powerful and addictive controlled substances without so much as an examination. In this day and age, if you went to 100 doctors and asked for Dexedrine or a similar narcotic diet pill, I doubt even one would prescribe it. If the movie took place any time before the early 80's, this would have been a little easier to swallow.

    Anyway, I found her story thread the most memorable and heartbreaking. Sarah takes pills and starts losing weight, as well as suddenly becoming very energetic and chatty. Like any addictive drug, her happy blue pills stop working after prolonged use so she ups her dose more...and more...and things slowly start getting very weird and scary. In one of the best scenes midway through the film (one of the few that had a tiny bit of comic relief) Harry visits her --the only visit he makes during the movie where he doesn't openly steal her TV to pawn for dope money. He is briefly riding high (in more ways than one) and tells her he bought her a big screen TV-he wanted to do something nice for her and figured out that "TV is her fix". He looks like he's getting a bad feeling when she's babbling happily about how she has a reason to get up in the morning, and then he hears her grinding her teeth, and figures it out. This is the first time in the movie you see real fear in his eyes. Sarah soon starts having very scary strung-out hallucinations-starting out with subtle things like time woozily slowing down and speeding back up, and when her refrigerator suddenly starts moving on its own, the real nightmare begins. An agressive fridge with a mind of its own sounds Monty Python-esque when you first hear about it, but trust me, you won't be laughing by the end of the movie.

    One review I read said that the movie not only pulls the rug out from under you, it drags you and the rug down a long flight of stairs into a very dark basement. Another reviewer compared the experience of watching the film to a drug, and that's not too far off the mark either. Whenever a character gets high, there's a slam-bang fast cut montage of the same images over and over; a sigh, a pupil dilating, cells changing color. The scenes where Sarah hallucinates are pretty close to the real thing. The description I probably agree with most came from Darren Aronofsky himself-he compared the film to a jump from a plane without a parachute, and the movie ends three minutes after you hit the ground. The last few minutes that show the gruesome, depressing, worst-case-scenario fates of all 4 characters are just as intense, hard to watch, and nightmarish as I heard they were. I don't think I will ever forget Harry's mother's transformation from a harmless, plump, friendly older woman to someone so frightening looking that people cringe away in fear and revulsion at the sight of her.

    My only complaints would be that I wish it were longer, with more time for character development. The film is divided up into 3 segments, Summer (things going fine, having fun getting high) Fall (the beginning of the downhill slide)and Winter (end of the line). I would have liked more scenes of what these people and their lives were like before they were addicts, as well as their relationships with each other. The cast is great- Wayans shows that he has the most range and talent of the Wayans bros- I laughed so hard at him in Don't Be A Menace that I ended up buying it, but here...wow. I would have liked to see more of his character. I never liked Leto much before, but he is excellent and also almost unrecognizable (he said he dropped 1/5 of his weight for the role and boy does it show). Connelly I disliked so much before that I would actively avoid seeing movies she was in, but I was very impressed and convinced that she can act. Burstyn gives the performance of a lifetime- not only convincing, but she was dedicated enough to let the filmmakers make her look like absolute and total hell, which many actresses over 50 would probably not be brave enough to do.

    I still am amazed that "Scary Movie" got away with an 18 (WAY more graphic sex than this film-I had to pick my jaw up off the floor at what got by the censors in that one) yet this movie went unrated, reportedly for the flashes of the sex act at the end that, while nasty, was not shown in detail. Well, this wasn't a big budget studio film, so maybe I'm not that amazed, but it bugs me.

    Not recommended if you're easily shocked, squeamish, or upset. If you only like movies that take you to a happy place, stay away. Everyone who left the movie theater looked like they had just been hit over the head with a very large board. And we were all people who knew what we were getting into. Recommended for those who want to see a movie that will completely overtake you and involve you emotionally. In addition, this film should be required viewing for everyone in the fashion industry that supported and glorified that whole 'heroin chic' crap. Also a good movie if you are having some problems in your life and want to put them in perspective VERY fast. I give it 9 out of 10 stars. And even though I keep my weight down the old-fashioned way, I'll probably never look at my fridge quite the same way again...
  • Kandor
    January 7, 2010
    Kandor
    Damn... I really dont know how to feel about this film...

    I didnt had any expectations watching this movie. I could have rate it higher like 4, maybe even 5. The story is very good, the acting is great, but I think its just the feeling that the movie give me, that made me give...( read more) it a lower score, and also some visual effects that was kinda irritating, but in the context of the movie, I think they were not at of place....

    It's a shocking drama, about drugs addiction...
    I felt really bad at moment watching this movie, maybe because I'm putting myself too much in the characters mind.
  • guieduardo
    January 6, 2010
    guieduardo
    I remember feeling, while watching this movie, enraged, provoked, disgusted and a few other strong emotions. But, most important of all, I felt like I could not blink! This is the way to portray tough lives and situations!
  • barbaragpires
    January 6, 2010
    barbaragpires
    É pra entrar em depressão após o filme.
  • Amskay
    January 4, 2010
    Amskay
    Intense and amazing. And messed up.
  • flopaaw
    January 4, 2010
    flopaaw
    Terriblemente realista.
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