Drugged Out Insanity
- Title: Candy
- IMDb: link
I’ll start out with a disclaimer, this is not my genre. Movies about self-absorbed and self-destructive people who destroy the lives, and the lives around them, through their drug addiction usually don’t work for me (though there are exceptions, including this year’s A Scanner Darkly which you can read about here). The flaw I usual find is strong in Candy, these characters bring the destruction on themselves. And you know what? They deserve it. So why should I care?
Dan (Heath Ledger) is an out-of-work slacker who fancies himself a poet. Candy (Abbie Cornish) is a smart and beautiful art student who is seduced by Dan’s smile and bohemian lifestyle which includes heroin. Before long both are hopelessly in love and hopelessly addicted without any way out for either of them.
…
Drugged Out Insanity Read More »
There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that if you make an incomprehensible film that looks pretty and add a twist ending that shocks the audience but doesn’t fulfill the needs of the movie to explain what is happening then you’ve met your obligation to the audience. Stay is an unfathomable mess of a movie that meanders its way through flashbacks, reversals, timestops, and fancy camera tricks. All well and good, but in the end the film has nothing to say. It’s as if we’re watching a film student’s exercise in using different film and storytelling techniques, but the professor forgot to look over his script to see that there is no story there. I went to see Doom on the same day I saw Stay and folks that’s enough to drive most people out of movie theaters for years. I don’t mind taking one for the team now and then, but two in ten hours…well, I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy—maybe Rob Schneider and Carrot Top.
Ever wonder what would happen if you took half the script for Iron Eagle 2 and half the script for Short Circuit and removed anything remotely good, or funny, or interesting? I didn’t either, but obviously the makers of this film needed to solve this philosophical dilemma.