Requiem for a Dream (2000): adapted by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky from the book by Hubert Selby Jr.; directed by Darren Aronofsky; starring Ellen Burstyn (Sara Goldfarb), Jared Leto (Harry Goldfarb), Jennifer Connelly (Marion Silver), Marlon Wayans (Tyrone C. Love), and Christopher McDonald (Tappy Tibbons):
Heroin and prescription weight-loss drugs (well, amphetamines) wreak havoc on mother Ellen Burstyn, son Jared Leto, and pretty much every other major character in Darren Aronofsky's critically lauded follow-up to Pi.
Requiem for a Dream still dazzles with its rapid-fire editing, crisp cinematography, and unrelentingly bleak universe. Set some time during the 1970's as heroin became one of America's drugs of choice, it follows Leto and Burstyn through three seasons of increasingly disaster. There is no Spring.
Of course, as many have noted on the Internet, one of the iconic recurring shots (a pupil dilating) represents the exact opposite effect that heroin has on the human eyeball (the pupil should expand). Maybe time is running backwards? It's certainly possible that's what Aronofsky means to imply -- because the forward motion of time brings only horror, decay, and madness.
The scenes that involve an infomercial watched obsessively by Burstyn's despairing widow are some of the few funny things in Aronofsky's generally humourless oeuvre, and feature a dynamite, partially improvised performance by Christopher McDonald that almost seems like something from another movie adapted from a story by Philip K. Dick. No wonder Burstyn's character wants to go into that ad!
So the short version of the message of the movie is Kids, don't do drugs. Adults too! Jennifer Connelly shines as Leto's girlfriend, as does Marlon Wayans as his best friend. And the terrific score, in part by Kronos Quartet, helps.
As in pretty much all of his films, Aronofsky works with dazzlingly unsympathetic characters here -- pitiful, yes, but also dull and stripped of the occasional flashy glamour invested in drug users in movies. No wonder they need to lose themselves inside the warmth of heroin or the glow of amphetamines -- there's no 'there' there in their personalities. Highly recommended.
House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski: Danielewski's ambitious first novel spawned a sort of cult following that is itself metafictional, given that the text within the text spawns a sort of cult following.
And that text is a lengthy examination of a movie that doesn't seem to actually exist within the world of the text, supplemented by lengthy, autobiographical footnotes from the man who found and assembled the examination of the movie after discovering it in the apartment of a recently deceased, blind writer.
Who himself also supplied lengthy footnotes to supplement the text he had spent decades writing. A text about a documentary about the House of Leaves. A documentary that doesn't seem to have ever existed. Got all that?
House of Leaves is postmodern and experimental and avant-garde and All That Jazz. It's a horror novel about a house that grows room upon room within itself, within which lurks, perhaps, a monster. Or perhaps the monster is simply the house itself. It does at times appear to be intelligent. It's a love story about a man and his lost, mentally ill mother. It's a satire of academic writing. It's a satire of epics, epic catalogues, epic odysseys. It's an epic itself.
It even turns into a concrete poem for a few dozen pages.
And oh, those footnotes!
The movie at the heart of the narrative is a documentary about attempts to explore and understand those hidden, ever-shifting rooms. The family who owns the house consists of a revered photojournalist, a former model, and two children. One day, when they return from a holiday, their house has somehow acquired a new hallway. And things get weirder from there.
If there's a flaw here, it's the tendency of the text to draw every woman other than the mentally ill mother and, for the most part, the former model as sexy, sexy sex objects. But all those sexy 'librarians' and strippers are part of the frame narrative, the footnote narrative, written by an increasingly unstable 24-year-old man. Are any of these women real? As the sex scenes involving these women all read like Penthouse Forum wish fulfillment, I'd say a conditional 'No.' Or at least I hope not.
However, House of Leaves is otherwise a fine piece of work. A horror story, a love story, a description of a documentary, a family drama, a mystery, an epic. And a convincing portrait of mental illness, if your interpretation goes that way. If your interpretation goes a long way, that way, the whole text is a delivery from a fictional writer who's suffered a monumental break with reality. Or it really is a cosmic horror piece, and so on, and so forth. It can support a whole bag of overlapping interpretations. It has many mansions.
Set aside time to read it. It's a marvelous piece of work. Highly recommended.
The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings.
There are elements of Arthur Machen's work throughout the novel, as one reviewer points out in a blurb on the back cover. Of course, Lebbon has a character talk about an Arthur Machen story early in the text, so there's a signpost here, brightly illuminated. It's Machen's "The Terror," in which animals launch an attack on humanity, that's referenced in the novel.
However, there are other Machanesque touches as well that recall other works, especially a discussion of what true natural evil would look like ("The White People") and Machen's ideas of reality being perhaps too horrible to contemplate without some mediation ("The White People" and "The Great God Pan," among others).
Lebbon doesn't attempt to write like Machen. The Nature of Balance is more like SplatterMachen, with all the explicit blood and guts and gore and sexual ramifications shown where they were only (strongly) implied in Machen's early 20th-century work. It works because of Lebbon's strong hand at characterization more than anything else.
The litany of horrors can get a bit repetitive after awhile (never have so many things smelled so "rich" and "meaty" -- the line between gross-out and dog-food commercial can be a thin one). But Lebbon also exhibits a great deal of creativity in depicting Nature gone mad at warp-speed. There's actually something Miltonic in some of the descriptions of what is, I suppose, a post-post-lapsarian landscape, a world in which once again everything has changed, changed utterly. But there's also hope, and hopeful characters amidst the rubble and the crawling tentacles of malevolent trees. Recommended.
