Requiem for a Dream (Director's Cut)

Requiem for a Dream (Director's Cut)
by Darren Aronofsky

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DVD details

Actor: Christopher McDonald, Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Brand: Lions Gate
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Producer: Ann Ruark
Producer: Beau Flynn
Producer: Ben Barenholtz
Producer: Eric Watson
Producer: Jonah Smith
Writer: Hubert Selby Jr.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 102 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-08-14
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Artisan

DVD Reviews of Requiem for a Dream (Director's Cut)

DVD Review: A sigh of pleasure can turn into a life of misery
Summary: 5 Stars

This movie is very powerful. It is almost a sure fire way to make sure that you never do drugs, it's that good. It also has phenomanal acting and directing. Seriously see this.

DVD Review: Not for the squeamish.
Summary: 3 Stars

This is the response to Alex Proyas's "Dark City." What if you go from a small patch of light into hell? Darren Aronofsky repeats his seven-rapid-repeated shots technique from Pi in this painful film, "Requiem for a Dream" adapted from a story by Hubert Selby Jr. by Selby and Aronofsky. He also plays tribute to the shot of Jennifer Connelly at the end of a pier from Proyas's "Dark City" (it is even the same pier).

The film is painful to watch, but difficult to call "beautiful," for it fails to say anything new. Its soul message: drug addiction dehumanizes you and kills relationships. This film documents four character's abandonment of hope, and ends at the twilight of their despair.

The four principal actors do excellent jobs, and in a better world Ellen Burstyn's performance would have been carved out of this film's context and awarded an Oscar. Jennifer Connelly also delivers an excellent understated performance of how drug addiction can affect the shallow.

Sara Goldfarb (Burstyn) is a lonely widow who has invested all her dreams in the success of her worthless son Harry (Jared Leto), and passes her days fixed on television. In a dream of some self-fulfillment, she hopes to go on television herself, and begins a prescription drug diet plan at the hands of an unscrupulous doctor. Hell follows, and Burstyn's performance is so realistic you will weep real tears.

Harry is a wastrel crack fiend with his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) (her attraction to the colorless Harry is never explained, and to me is unlikely). Harry has a moment of limited insight and becomes an entrepreneur on the crack scene, with predictable results. But his intentions are good: he is trying to finance a store to feature clothes designed by Marion.

The setting is Brooklyn Beach and the collection of lower middle class second generation Jewish immigrants and their widows clinging to the old neighborhood (look for Louise Lasser in a cameo role). This neighborhood and residents was made famous by Victor Niederhoffer's "Education of a Speculator" and it was nice to see many details of his reminiscences captured on film.

DVD Review: Should Be Required Viewing
Summary: 4 Stars

After watching this for first time, I thought to myself, "Wow, with some appropriate editing, this ought to be required viewing for high school students as it's probably one of the best "anti-drug" presentations one could ever see.

Young filmmaker Darren Aronofsky takes a depressing subject and makes "entertaining," if that's possible. Aronofsky uses stop- action/fast forward techniques, sound effects, hallucination scenes, etc. all to make this a good movie for the senses. A warning, though - a couple of scenes are anything but fun to view. It can get rough.

Ellen Burstyn is outstanding in this film and many people who viewed this thought she should have won an Academy Award for her performance. Boy, if she doesn't scare you away from taking diet pills, nobody can. She's the only one in this film that is actually fun to watch. Jennifer Connelly can be one easily ogled by us guys but she plays so many sleazy, unlikeble roles, it's tough to warm up to her.

Jared Leto, meanwhile, does his best to show us the horrors of what could happen when you hooked on junk which involves needles. In the last 30 minutes there are a few horrifying scenes with him. It is grim, very grim but maybe that's what all of us need to see once in awhile.

DVD Review: A Gut-Wreching Piece of Artwork
Summary: 5 Stars

I recently watched "Requiem for a Dream" and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. For an hour and forty minutes, I was glued to my television and could not look away. When it was over, I just sat there, dazed. This film is truly amazing. Almost everything about it was incredible. First off, Darren Aronofsky is an AMAZING director. The brilliant camera work helped create the frantic mood of the climax of the film. The acting was also very very good. Ellen Burstyn's performance was fantastic as a hopeless widow who has very little reason to live until her life becomes consumed by drugs. Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Waylans, and Jared Leto also had powerful performances as addicts who just wanted to find true happiness. This film is graphic, disturbing, emotional, violent....and brilliant. Warning: this film is NOT for casual movie fans who want a Hollywood film. Anyone who watches this film will probably feel depressed, shocked, or like me, blown away. If you can accept all this, then please, do yourself a favor and watch this work of art. It may be graphic, disturbing, and emotional...but most of all, it's real.

DVD Review: Horrible!!
Summary: 1 Stars

This is by far the worst movie I've ever seen! Jared Leto, though an excellent musician in the groundbreaking band 30 Seconds To Mars, is a horrible actor! Ellen Burstyn, or whatever her name is, is a terrible old hack of an actress. She should be in a freaking retirement home. Jennifer Connelly is pretty awful too. The plot is boring, generic and full of Hollywood cliches. The only redeeming qualities are that Jared Leto looked totally hot and luckily realized how horrible of an actor he is so he moved on to music and made great albums.

Description of Requiem for a Dream (Director's Cut)

Studio: Lions Gate Home Ent. Release Date: 02/18/2003 Rating: Ur

Employing shock techniques and sound design in a relentless sensory assault, Requiem for a Dream is about nothing less than the systematic destruction of hope. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr., and adapted by Selby and director Darren Aronofsky, this is undoubtedly one of the most effective films ever made about the experience of drug addiction (both euphoric and nightmarish), and few would deny that Aronofsky, in following his breakthrough film Pi, has pushed the medium to a disturbing extreme, thrusting conventional narrative into a panic zone of traumatized psyches and bodies pushed to the furthest boundaries of chemical tolerance. It's too easy to call this a cautionary tale; it's a guided tour through hell, with Aronofsky as our bold and ruthless host.

The film focuses on a quartet of doomed souls, but it's Ellen Burstyn--in a raw and bravely triumphant performance--who most desperately embodies the downward spiral of drug abuse. As lonely widow Sara Goldfarb, she invests all of her dreams in an absurd self-help TV game show, jolting her bloodstream with diet pills and coffee while her son Harry (Jared Leto) shoots heroin with his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and slumming girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly). They're careening toward madness at varying speeds, and Aronofsky tracks this gloomy process by endlessly repeating the imagery of their deadly routines. Tormented by her dietary regime, Sara even imagines a carnivorous refrigerator in one of the film's most memorable scenes. And yet... does any of this have a point? Is Aronofsky telling us anything that any sane person doesn't already know? Requiem for a Dream is a noteworthy film, but watching it twice would qualify as masochistic behavior. --Jeff Shannon

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