It's hard to even know where to start with how bad this movie is, and I don't mean in the sense of R rated content bad, but in the sense that this movie was so poorly constructed that it should have never been made.
Before I dive into the details, I would like to say that there was only ONE good thing about the movie, it struck home to showing the viewer that you never want to do drugs - ever. And it was probably my favourite part of the entire movie as well, seeing Alan taking quite the acid trip because honestly it was the most entertaining and action filled sequence of the film.
Right off the bat, the movie opens with multiple frames showing different things at once - never do this in any movie its a fatal flaw and makes the viewer down right confused on where to look at and breaks the perfect illusion of being apart of the story. Then there's the orange tinge that's added to the entire film! Why would anyone do that? Its distracting and makes the movie feel cheap. I think one of the worst parts was the music, it was played over the actors dialogue making it hard to hear them talk and ruining the seriousness of the scene. The audio of the movie was already bad to begin with but adding the music just made it worse. To top that I swear the camera man or the writer has a serious case of ADHD, the camera is constantly moving from one view to the next or zooming in or zooming out. Each scene is cut short as we must quickly move on to the next. There's literally no standing still to enjoy the moment or try and figure out what is going on. I could understand doing this affect once the drugs scenes started but doing it before hand makes the movie feel chalky and far from smooth. But the editor took it one step further, instead of there being smooth scenes he added these little "jumps" to them, like the scene was cut then reshot and poorly pasted back together. Normally you hide this by cutting the scene to a new angle of the camera, but no, this was done in the middle of the scene on the same camera angle making it the oddest thing I have veer seen in a movie when it comes to cinematography and editing. Then of course they added in odd camera angles and the shaken camera movements....
The story was weird and boring because it was extremely simple. It did pick up finally half way through, but before then it was a challenge to keep watching the movie. It honestly didn't make sense why Alan would take as much drugs as he did at one time. I get that he was feeling anxious and everything, but with the battle of not wanting to take it to begin with because he knew how dangerous it can be - why on earth when you finally decid to give in, you take all of it at once and not a little?
One of the oddest things they added was the sex scenes. Normally sex scenes are about the sex as the main focus, it can be passionate or rough or even funny, but instead the actors were having full on conversations at the same time. Or they were listening to the radio or distracted by something else other then just the sex, making it weird and far from intimate. The writers also kept cutting between future scenes and present scenes, the constant back and forth was distracting and hard to keep up with. It seemed this was supposed to be a narrating effect or to speed up the film more, but it really didn't need to be narrated or sped up, instead it made it confusing as to what was going on.
The acting wasn't great, but it is hard to make the acting stand out when everything else in the movie is terrible. Sarah Geller and Joey Adams did a decent job for their roles, but Adrian Grenier was definately cringe worthy as the lead.
Before I dive into the details, I would like to say that there was only ONE good thing about the movie, it struck home to showing the viewer that you never want to do drugs - ever. And it was probably my favourite part of the entire movie as well, seeing Alan taking quite the acid trip because honestly it was the most entertaining and action filled sequence of the film.
Right off the bat, the movie opens with multiple frames showing different things at once - never do this in any movie its a fatal flaw and makes the viewer down right confused on where to look at and breaks the perfect illusion of being apart of the story. Then there's the orange tinge that's added to the entire film! Why would anyone do that? Its distracting and makes the movie feel cheap. I think one of the worst parts was the music, it was played over the actors dialogue making it hard to hear them talk and ruining the seriousness of the scene. The audio of the movie was already bad to begin with but adding the music just made it worse. To top that I swear the camera man or the writer has a serious case of ADHD, the camera is constantly moving from one view to the next or zooming in or zooming out. Each scene is cut short as we must quickly move on to the next. There's literally no standing still to enjoy the moment or try and figure out what is going on. I could understand doing this affect once the drugs scenes started but doing it before hand makes the movie feel chalky and far from smooth. But the editor took it one step further, instead of there being smooth scenes he added these little "jumps" to them, like the scene was cut then reshot and poorly pasted back together. Normally you hide this by cutting the scene to a new angle of the camera, but no, this was done in the middle of the scene on the same camera angle making it the oddest thing I have veer seen in a movie when it comes to cinematography and editing. Then of course they added in odd camera angles and the shaken camera movements....
The story was weird and boring because it was extremely simple. It did pick up finally half way through, but before then it was a challenge to keep watching the movie. It honestly didn't make sense why Alan would take as much drugs as he did at one time. I get that he was feeling anxious and everything, but with the battle of not wanting to take it to begin with because he knew how dangerous it can be - why on earth when you finally decid to give in, you take all of it at once and not a little?
One of the oddest things they added was the sex scenes. Normally sex scenes are about the sex as the main focus, it can be passionate or rough or even funny, but instead the actors were having full on conversations at the same time. Or they were listening to the radio or distracted by something else other then just the sex, making it weird and far from intimate. The writers also kept cutting between future scenes and present scenes, the constant back and forth was distracting and hard to keep up with. It seemed this was supposed to be a narrating effect or to speed up the film more, but it really didn't need to be narrated or sped up, instead it made it confusing as to what was going on.
The acting wasn't great, but it is hard to make the acting stand out when everything else in the movie is terrible. Sarah Geller and Joey Adams did a decent job for their roles, but Adrian Grenier was definately cringe worthy as the lead.