Requiem for a Dream: Darren Aronofsky

Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 movie from director Darren Aronofsky, who's knows for such culturally defining films, such as Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan. The movie is based on the novel from Hubert Selby Jr. and its premise is exploring the means by which drug addiction in many ways changes and eventually destroys the lives of the people who meddle in them. 

The movie's protagonist, Harry(Jared Leto), his friend Tyrone(Marlon Wayans), his girlfriend, Marion(Jennifer Connelly) and his mother Sara(Ellen Burstyn) all have somewhat of a problem with substance abuse. The former three are products of the culture of their time, they're brought together by the act of shooting up heroin, although they come from different places. Harry and Tyrone are old friends, and Sarah is the daughter of rich parents who wants to gain her own independence by starting a designer clothes business. The movie starts out with Jared Leto's character 'stealing' his mother's TV in order to pawn it at the local market for some cash to go shoot up. His mother in the meantime's locked herself in her closet, and for an opening scene it's pretty intense in portraying the effects of heroin withdrawal in Harry who at the same time needs the hit bad, but professes a sort of misguided manipulative love for his mom.

Later on the movie tracks the characters through their daily lives, living a life of careless enjoyment from one hit to the next, never knowing where the night will take them. All of us should know better than to think it romantic, but the movie makes a great effort to compel with images of the complete wireless bliss that is reducing ones needs and wants in life to a simple substance addiction.

After some time our character decide it'd be a great idea to score some pure heroin, since there's the local heroin convention coming up, cut and sling it for some hard cash. After all Marion needs the money for her clothes shop, and Harry and Tyrone probably don't want to haul that TV every day for the rest of their lives. For a while it actually works out for them, but then it starts going downhill - and fast. Tyrone gets into trouble with the local drug-lord, Harry's arm is already gangrenous from shooting up so much, and Marion and Sara's fate is probably the most horrifying of them all. Meanwhile Sara has been a drug addict herself in a more socially acceptable way taking amphetamines (which at the time were prescribed along with sleeping pills for weight-loss).

Near the end of the movie we see all of the characters completely broken by the consequences of their choices. Back when Requiem for a Dream movie came out it was universally appraised, as an eye-opening tale of how substance abuse can and will ruin both your life and the lives of the people you love.   

Sunday Mellow Top 23: No Harsh Allowed!

Ok, let me break the fourth wall for you for a minute. I'm a smoker. I smoke about 15-20 cigarettes a day. That's on a happy day. On a not-so-happy day I need my nicotine like Godzilla needs its skyscraper-smash. 


Today is: 
1st: Not a happy day.
2nd: I am out of cigarettes.

So, you may ask yourselves, my fellow readers: Wut nao??? Given that it's a Sunday and every shop in a hundred mile radius is closed, there is no hope of me getting cigarettes, till tomorrow. SO provided that I can barely think about anything without raging to high heavens, today's post will simply be a list of my all time favourite PC Games, ever. The rules are simple: 


1st: If a game comes to mind before another game it DESERVES to be higher in the list.
2nd: If a game is omitted from the list after the list is completed, it DESERVES to be out of the list. 


So without further adieu, here is my Top 'WHATEVER' List of PC Games:


1: Fallout 2
2: Half-Life: Opposing Force
2: NFS: Porsche 2000
3: Arcanum of Steamwork and Magic Obscura
4: Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction
5: World of Warcraft
6: Minecraft
7: Carmageddon 2
8: Diablo
9: Star Craft
10: Age of Empires: Age of Titans
11: Heroes 3: In the Wake of Gods
12: King's Quest: Romancing the Stones (a remake)
13: Revolt
14: Lego Racer
15: CoD: Modern Warfare
16: That One Indie Mario Re-Make That was Genuinely Fun
17: Sven: Bollocks (or whatever the title was - something in German)
18: Half-Life: Counter Strike: 1.6
19: Half-Life 2
20: Heavy Metal: FAKK
21: ONI: Bionic Something or Other 
22: uuuuhmm.... that robot guy.... Deus Ex! Yes, I got it. Does it count if I've only played the first two levels? Nobody cares past number 10 in a Tops list anyway....
23: Minesweeper - Why? Because Hell, when you get your first desk job and your PC has been scrubbed clean of everything that might be considered enjoyable, by IT. When they have removed the clip-art graphics from Microsoft Word, but then some unknown HERO OF THE AGES has left a secret folder stuck up behind fifteen layers of useless outdated memos and training protocols, containing a cracked version of Minesweeper. That's when you'll know why!

That is all.

Melancholia 2011: Trier and the Controversy of Disgust

Lars Von Trier is not Nazi. He's not much of anything as worldly and trivial as that. At that Cannes press-conference he was not quite joking, not entirely serious. In his own words he was trying to 'entertain' people. Isn't that what movies are all about. Through the past several years Trier's been going through a deepening state of depression and Melancholia is his way of expressing that.  

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Melancholia(IMDB) is a movie about a planet, that's been hiding behind the sun, which is now on a collision course for the Earth, and from the opening scene, what Trier calls a prelude, there's no doubt that life on Earth will be over very soon. The movie follows the life of four characters - the bride, her sister and the sister's husband and son, from her wedding day to the point of the collision. In a way the movie's about their coming to terms with their fate, but it's even more so about the psychology behind coming to terms with death. Each of the main characters goes through stages of denial, fear, anger and finally acceptance. What's noteworthy about Trier's work is not so much the plot itself, but the nuances of the interpretation. Like a dream, it's not about the content itself, but the feeling of it, the same images and sounds could feel entirely different under the circumstances. Under Trier's dictation Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde', John Millais's painting of Ophelia are given an entirely different harsher meaning.

As any Trier movie, it starts with an opening scene, in slow motion punctuated by a memorable classical melody, as seen by the bride (starring Kirsten Dunst) in her own half-dream, half-premonition. We see her as she's trying to enjoy herself at her own wedding party, and the longer it goes the more apparent it is she simply can't. Something is stopping her and at one point it becomes painfully obviously that that's how she's been her whole life. When her sister asks her what's wrong there's no surprise in the question, only a frustrated underpinning of a problem that has existed for years and years. And the answer is one of almost childishly stubborn pretense. When Trier talks about his depression, there's the same realisation  the self-awareness that you have to get up in the morning and follow a schedule in order to escape the melancholy. Similarly Kirsten Dunst's character is equally involved in her work to a point of complete denial of the self.
She's in a way an image of Trier, only placed within a situation which requires her to come to terms with it, with herself, her inability to attain enjoyment or satisfaction of life.

Trier himself complained that the movie felt too beautiful, that he had let himself down. If you're familiar with his work, Trier started a group in 1995(Dogma 95) dedicated to preserving cinema as an art-medium, rather than a simple platform for voyeurism. Among the ground points of that movement were that the movie should be shot from a shoulder camera and any static images, be there any at all can be static as much as immobility can be achieved by hand. Another point was that artificial lighting was forbidden, as long as there's enough light to achieve exposure, otherwise a single light source was allowed to be attached to the camera itself. Sets were allowed for inside scenes, but if a prop is required the director should do the best to find that prop in real life. Otherwise it can be constructed in its natural environment. Lastly the movie happens where the camera is and not the reverse. Those was his ideals as an author in 95, and last year in Cannes he apologised, believing with Melancholia he might have broken his own credo.

Trier's press conference in Cannes immediately after the movie screening in early 2011 was a huge scandal that ultimately had him banned from the film festival, although his movies are still eligible to receive rewards. Which they invariably still do. Trier still continues to apologise for it. 

Stalker 1979 - Andrey Tarkovsky and the Eastern Cinema Movement

I was watching Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Before that I was re-watching Antichrist and something caught my attention. A dedication. At the end of the movie, Trier made a dedication that infuriated a lot of film critics. Even before that I was playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for a while. I'm not a dedicated gamer when it comes to games past some imaginary point in time in the early 2000s. I remember, though, a night in let's call it the imaginary city of Erithrea, capital of an imaginary Eastern-European country. Before that I was born, but sometime in between, a few years after I started playing games I was in one of those flashy PC clubs in a newly established mall. The walls covered in posters, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was new back then. Back then, vodka was a new experience for me having just graduated from drinking beer at night at the parks and playgrounds around my school. 

In Erithrea time passes slower, we were out that night, on a whim like always. With my best friend, we went to a bus station to buy some beer and vodka, and then we headed off through the small back-streets of the city towards the mall, passing the vodka from hand to hand. We were supposed to meet a friend at the local mall, top floor, the games room. By the time we were at the parking lot with the tall blue and silver facade of the building, Nebesnii Gorod, written in large glowing letters across, the alcohol had set in nicely, we were careless. From the parking lot, take the service entrance to the right, where all the trucks come in to load and unload, walk past the metal wire fence that separates the mall grounds from a warehouse, take a moment to take in the backdrop of post-Soviet panel flat blocks, twelve to fifteen stories tall, grey and black in the night with only a few windows gleaming with light. It must have been ten or eleven. As you enter take the elevator to the right. Top floor. Gaming room. As we reach our floor our friend is waiting there to tell us a story about how he hit the punching bag so bad he broke his arm. He's younger than us, but that doesn't matter, since he's got enough stories in his lifetime for two or three of us together, so we drink with him regularly. Such is the value of time in Erithrea.

Image courtsey of Wikimedia Commons. 

When we sit down to play the games were both already drunk. Our friend wanders around the rows of computers to set up some sort of make-shift LAN for everyone, the game is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. My nickname is something meant to piss off the kind of losers who rage every time they get killed by a mortar shell, and I can barely walk to and from my PC chair, to get some popcorn from the front desk, but I can play CoD pretty damn decent, nonetheless. On the chat someones raging hard at me, I don't care, I'm too drunk, from across the room and the rows of hundreds of computers, someones raging about someone elses mortar, probably mine. I don't care.

A few hours later nearly everyone has left, but it costs something like 3-4 euro to play through the whole night so me and my friend and our other friend we stay behind. We've moved to sit next to each other and we're playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chernobyl. The game has a particular appeal to us, one could say, you have to drink vodka to avoid radiation poisoning and that sort of rings a bell with us. We laugh but it's not really that funny. When we look at the game's environment, the architecture, abandoned warehouses, old train stations, junkyards, fields littered with dieing patches of grass and pieces of glass and steel and concrete shards, we're looking at Erithrea. We might as well have not been playing a game, we might as well have taken a five minute walk from the mall to one of the old abandoned train stations on the edge of town, and we would have felt the same, seen the same things, except for the anomalies, obviously, but with the stray dogs walking around and the alcohol in us, it wouldn't have been difficult to imagine the missing parts.

I remember a different time, when me and my friend, both armed with a 2 liter bottle of beer are sitting on a broken piece of concrete the size of a small car, feet crossed under us, facing the setting sun, on top of a hill at the old park in the north side of town. He's playing something on his Sony Erickson phone that could have been Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. It doesn't matter. And in between the songs it's quiet, like it's quiet in the Zone. It's beautiful, like the Stalker could see the beauty in the poisoned flora around him, slowly but surely working to re-take the last patches of asphalt and train tracks.

Some years after that I left Erithrea and that imaginary Eastern-European country for Sweden. That was five months ago and five hours ago I watched Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, prompted by the same friend's suggestion over Skype and that dedication in the end of Trier's Antrichrist. The dedication read "Dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky" and it's easy to see why. When you watch Trier and you watch Tarkovsky it's easy to fill in the missing parts with the power of your own imagination. The broken up hydro-electric plant of Stalker. Trier's old Swedish castle from Melancholia. A different kind of old, but the same heaviness of time weighing on the pillars and stones, every dusty window, every tinted glass. And in Eastern Europe time doesn't mean much, except for the faintest memories, dulled down by alcohol vapors.

Stalker is a movie about a Professor and a Writer who travel to the Zone, with the help of a guide to reach a mythical room, where people's deepest wishes come true. But it's not a movie about fame and fortune, it's a movie about broken concrete and steel, and the rusted and long abandoned parts of the human soul. It's a movie about the way to the room, the one that grants wishes, as much as it is a movie about the nature of wishes, the nature of time, space, the most sublime nature of human beings. 


The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.