I just saw this today... and really hated it. Ghostboy is right about the film transfer; it looks pretty bad. HOWEVER, at the top of my list of the many, many things wrong with it: Those horrible voices reading that horrible dialogue. Now, I know the club kids affected a giddy-queen tone in their speech, but Green and Culkin were affecting an affectation, and it was embarrassing how bad they were at it. It didn't help that the dialogue could've been wrapped and sold by the pound, it was so thick, heavy, and static- exactly the opposite of what it needed to be.
I can only think of one thing I liked about film at all: Chloe Sevigny. She was really the only actor in it, though; her talent and ease in front of the camera was an oasis in the midst of some really pretty terrible, stunted performances (Green does slightly better than Culkin; both roles could've been much better played by almost anyone with a little more intuition). It would've been fantastic to see the story told from her point of view; I think that way, it would've been much easier to understand the reckless, wrecked lifestyle these needy people adopted, the appeal of it. There really is a wonderful story and fascinating people somewhere in this mess, but it's as if the filmmakers just took the discarded bits and left out the really interesting parts.
I wasn't disappointed, though. It looked awful from the trailers, and it was no more awful than it looked.
I'd be interested to see the documentary, too. I'd also be interested to know why, since these same filmmakers already made the documentary, they didn't to a better job of mediating the events into a better dramatic film. Cinema verite alternating with splashy music-video was clearly and absolutely NOT the style for this subject, at least not in these hands.
A bad film. Disappointing to see Christine Vachon's name on it as a producer, too; from reading her book and seeing the many really good to great films she's produced, you'd think she would've slapped someone into shape the second the dailies started rolling in.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." -
Morrissey"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that
language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet
it will act on the whole of the child's existence."
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