Requiem for a Dream

Saw it once, when it was first released. The arm! Double dildo! Give that nice Ellen Burstyn an Oscar.

Will never watch it again.

You summed it up beautifully, R2.

Depressing.

I meant R1!

Amazing, but one time viewing only. The ending was brutal.

I actually like this movie because of how broken the characters are. Much more watchable than Pi, but like Midnight Cowboy leaves me a little mentally exhausted and in need for something light to counter it.

I recently re-watched the movie and enjoyed it. Still as tragic and bleak as before. Thankfully, the acting and cinematography and musical score really held up. Marlon Wayans impressed as much as Ellen Burystn. Darren Aronofsky's best film, in my humble opinion.

Ellen Burstyn was robbed of the Oscar. Losing to Julia Roberts -- ugh!

What R7 said.

Nobody does misery like Ellen Burstyn. I love her!

Impressive. I’ve revisited it a few times.

I remember seeing it at The London Film Festival with a sold out audience in the huge Odeon cinema in Leicester Square. I was in the 2nd to last row in back, in a balcony I think, but the screen was so HUGE and the sound so amazing it didn’t matter. Didn’t know anything about it. Everything the season changed and that black title card slammed down on the screen it was brutal. The final act was...extreme, in every sense.

It’s a remarkable film, ingenious even, but it’s never had the exact same impact on me as the first time, in those screenings conditions of course. Smaller screens reveal its slight tonal flaws but seeing it on a huge screen was one of the most arresting cinematic experiences of my life.

I liked The Wrestler better. I felt more for the characters.

Ellen losing to Julia Roberts was a travesty. The dildo scene still haunts me.

R13, ass to ass!

I never understood how diet pills made Burstyn's character psychotic.

Never saw it. I didn't like the wrestler.

It always bothered me that the diet pills made Ellen go off the rails like that. They don’t work like that. Her whole experience was pretty fake. Good movie though.

[quote]I never understood how diet pills made Burstyn's character psychotic.

[quote]It always bothered me that the diet pills made Ellen go off the rails like that. They don’t work like that. Her whole experience was pretty fake.

Although it's never disclosed what the pills contain, we can make a few rational assumptions based on their effects: they send Sarah into a frenzy of activity, increase her body temperature, triggers jaw-clenching, and kills her appetite.

First introduced in the 1950s, amphetamines quickly gained popularity for their strong appetite suppression effects. Obetrol, a pill popular in the 1960s and later reformulated as Adderall, contained a toxic mix of amphetamine (speed), methamphetamine (meth) and dextroamphetamine(dex) salts. Amphetamines generated considerable interest among physicians eager to capitalize on their actions. There was only one problem: people didn’t like being “tweaked out” at the end of the day.

The solution was simple, and terrifying. Drug companies began formulating combination diet pills, which included amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives and thyroid hormones to send the body into weight-loss overdrive, as well as benzodiazepines, barbiturates, corticosteroids and antidepressants to deal with nuances like insomnia and anxiety. These uppers and downers came in brightly colored capsules and tablets, and the regime was given the innocuous, hopeful-sounding name “rainbow diet pills”.

It's been so long since I've seen this movie, I forget -- was it supposed to take place in the [then] current era?

The music. The pacing. The sadness. The eyes. All of the eyes. The itchiness. The dead center focus if the camera. The inevitability of every action, every character. That creepy Southern doctor. Ass to ass! The old crones outside the apartment building. That fucking festering arm.

It's a fairly perfect film that unfolds the way you recall a nightmare, and you can't not look. It doesn't have many peers

Ha! Pop a bunch of Dexatrim from back in the day.

Depressing but well done. Not my fav of Aronofsky.

Same R22. I remember how every film critic and their mother at the time called that double dildo "brave" and "risky" for Jennifer Connelly and some even worried that it might get her subtly blacklisted for higher profile roles. It is quite the scene.

Darren, when you shoot up heroin, or take any opiate really, your pupil does not dilate, it constricts. It doesn't go into mydriasis, it goes into myosis. See? What was so complicated about that?

Did it feature Jared Leto? This film must have fucked him up really bad.

Didn't that annoying song that's been used in 99% of all the film trailers in the last two decades originate in this film?

Drugs Are Bad. Ultimatel, that's all the movie has to say. Drugs Are Bad. I liked the style of it when I first saw it but Trainspotting had just as much style or more and it also had more going on in it than just Drugs Are Bad; it had humor and characters and relationships that were fresh and interesting and it wasn't such a monotone, relentless downer the way Requiem is.

*Ultimately

Gratuitous “slumming” nonsense.

It made me want to kill myself.

Haaaated it!

20th anniversary oral history here:

Recent 20th anniversary TIFF reunion here:

R8 & R13, the fact that Burstyn was Requem's only Oscar nomination suggests that it was not widely seen by most Academy members. I don't think Burstyn was ever going to wrest the Oscar away from Julia Roberts that year - not with Soderbergh's directorial double punch with Erin Brockovich & Traffic - but surely Requiem would've garnered additional nominations if members had actually watched it, specifically for Jennifer Connelly's performance as Marion, Clint Mansell's now iconic score and Matthew Libatique's incredible and influential cinematography. If the Academy was feeling at all charitable towards the film, they would've honoured Aronofsky and Hubert Selby, Jr. with a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination.

Clearly, the reputation of the film grew as Connelly won the Oscar for a comparatively tepid performance in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, which was clearly acknowledging her emergence as a dramatic actress of some force in Aronofsky's film, where she delivered a soulful and devastating performance with Aronofsky using her beauty as a curse, almost like an auto-immune disease against the character. She was far less arresting in her Oscar winning role where Howard dressed her up as 1950s housewife without a strand of hair out of place.

Former addict here- it’s a great movie that showed just how easy it is to slip from prescribed/casual user to a full on addict. Also, that with the death of the nuclear family and lack of friendships or relationships, it’s easier to slip down the slippery slope of addiction because no one cares.

Being an addict was incredibly lonely and the drugs only affirm addiction because they do indeed WORK to release pain and despair of rejection or not getting what you want out of life. I would think it’s harder nowadays to get sober (I got sober a decade ago) because the drugs are much more potent and there’s a slyness , and permissible allowances for using drugs that didn’t exist when I got sober.

You can’t shame a drug addict to get sober anymore.

Laughable. Ham from start to finish.

Well done, getting sober, R35.

The film wasn't just about drug addiction but also addiction to all substances as a way of filling the void of loneliness, which is what Burstyn's character, Sarah Goldfarb is going through. She wasn't just using over the counter diet pills but prescription strength amphetamines. But the film is also about dreams deferred and a lack of opportunity; it's all there in Selby Jr.'s cautionary text.

The mother character reminds me of brainwashed Fox News watchers

Went to the theater with a film buff friend. We gripped our seats it was so horrifying to watch the characters erode because of their addictions. The sex show was majorly disturbing.

Even more disturbing than that? Horsefaced Julia Roberts winning the Oscar over Ellen Burstyn, who was heartbreakingly good.

And it was better than BLACK SWAN.

Couldn't PAY me to watch this thing.

[Quote]Ass to ass!

I’ve repeated that famous line the same way every time I’ve introduced a double-sided into the game. Always gets a knowing chuckle.

Saw it with a friend at a matinee. Couldn't imagine watching it at night. Burstyn's scenes were wrenching.

There are certain names in culture that make me say nooooo, not watching/looking at/reading that. Hubert Selby Jr. is a big one.

Seeing the movie made me look up Hubert Selby, Jr. The book was more perverse than the movie.

Very strange guy. "Last Exit to Brooklyn" was another one based on one of his books.

I never want to see either movie again.

Horrifying and depressing. I do hope it put some kids off drugs, though.

Saw it on TV and had to go sit by myself in another room for a while. Very depressing but well done.

I enjoy it. It should've been Burstyn's second Oscar win. NO FUCKING WAY should Roberts have won over that performance. To this day, when I hear the phrase "Academy Award winner Julia Roberts" it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's truly cringe-inducing.

Ellen would have won if she'd submitted for Best Supporting Actress.

I agree with R1. I will never watch it again. It was a great film though

In the movie, I think that Ellen Burstyn went into a psychotic state due to lack of sleep caused by the prescription diet pills. She was hardly sleeping or it seemed her sleep wasn't exactly restful. That's how I perceived it, though it was certainly an over the top reaction... The refrigerator coming to life and so forth.

The movie is chilling. As I wrote above, excellent acting from the entire cast. The casting was impeccable. I'd like to see Marlon Wayans play a dramatic role again, as he more than proved his range beyond comedy.

Between Requiem for a Dream and Dancer in the Dark, the year 2000 certainly had no lack of dark, 'slit your wrists' films. Y2K must have affected some directors' psyche in a dark way.

Reefer Madness for Generation X.

I loved it.

One of my favorites.

It's a testament to the waste Marlon Wayans has made to his career.

This was my entry on the "Most fucked up movie" thread. There are about half a dozen scenes that haunt me to this day. My sister had a friend who was visiting my town and we went out, had a few drinks, came home and watched this. It will be our bond forever, even though she is my sister's friend.

And God, yes, was Burstyn robbed of that Oscar!

R45, I agree. Last Exit to Brooklyn was a terrible, choppy mess of a film. Jennifer Jason Leigh overplayed the hooker to the point where it was irritating and obnoxious, made it difficult to feel any sympathy for her character. I'm not sure who did her wardrobe and hair but she reminded me of that toothless grandma meme. The raped-by-a-dozen-sailors-scene was the worst part of the movie; ridiculously over the top. And of course the gay character is randomly killed and the other supposed closeted gay character turns into a child predator because he's rejected by his lover??! Seriously lol what the hell was that?

I haven't read the book so I don't know if the characters in film were an accurate portrayal of the novel, the only thing I found satisfying was David Arquette as Georgette by far the best part of the film, also Stephen Baldwin looked pretty damn hot even though he was playing a dumbass.