• 10 Reasons to Remember…
  • A Brief Word About…
  • About
  • For One Week Only
  • Happy Birthday
  • Monthly Roundup
  • Old-Time Crime
  • Other Posts
  • Poster of the Week
  • Question of the Week
  • Reviews
  • Trailers

thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Drug addiction

Beautiful Boy (2018)

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amy Ryan, Drama, Drug addiction, Father/son relationship, Felix van Groeningen, Literary adaptation, Maura Tierney, Review, Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, True story

D: Felix van Groeningen / 120m

Cast: Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Kaitlyn Dever, LisaGay Hamilton, Andre Royo, Christian Convery, Oakley Bull, Timothy Hutton

After his teenage son, Nic (Chalamet), goes missing for a couple of days, freelance writer David Sheff (Carell) discovers that Nic has a drug habit. David arranges treatment for Nic at a rehab clinic and the teenager makes significant progress, however it’s not long before he goes missing again and his habit becomes an addiction. With the support of his father, and his stepmother, Karen (Tierney), Nic makes a full recovery and goes off to college to focus on writing. Nic relapses, though, and soon he’s back to taking drugs, particularly crystal meth, while insisting that he has everything under control. When an overdose puts Nic in the hospital, David and his ex-wife, Nic’s mother, Vicki (Ryan), decide that he should live with her while he attends rehab sessions. Again, Nic makes significant progress, and is sober for over a year before anxieties about relapsing cause the very thing he’s afraid of to happen. Reconnecting with an old girlfriend, Lauren (Dever), Nic’s addiction spirals even further out of control, which leaves David with a tough decision to make: whether to continue trying to help his son, or admit that he can’t help him at all…

From the synopsis above, it’s easy to guess just how much Beautiful Boy is going to be a movie based around a succession of terrible lows and tantalising highs, and though it’s based on a true story, this is exactly how the movie plays out: Nic takes drugs, Nic gets better, Nic relapses, and so on. Unfortunately, while the quality of the central performances isn’t in doubt – Carell and Chalamet are superb – and van Groeningen’s direction ensures the viewer remains interested throughout, the repetitive nature of the material leads to an emotional distancing that becomes more pronounced as the movie progresses. Though the effects of Nic’s drug addiction clearly take their toll on him and everyone around him, once he’s relapsed the first time (and so early on), you know that it’s going to happen again, and again. The script – by van Groeningen and Luke Davies – does its best to offset this by focusing on David’s efforts to understand his son’s addiction, though strangely, it’s on a more physiological and intellectual level; when Nic explains how drugs make him feel, David doesn’t get it at all. So, while Nic experiences feelings and sensations that make drug addiction, to him, more desirable, David remains somewhat aloof. Even after he’s taken cocaine himself, David is unchanged, and any effect the drug may have had isn’t revealed.

With both father and son unable to connect anymore in a meaningful way, the movie seeks to remind its audience of the tragedy that’s occurring by resorting to flashbacks that show the bond David and Nic shared when he was much younger. These are placed at key points in the narrative and serve as leavening moments against the grim nature of Nic’s addiction. But these too lose their impact through over-use, and by the time Nic reaches rock bottom, the idea of one more poignant remembrance is one too many. But though the structure and the content of the movie hampers its effectiveness, it’s the performances that stand out. Carell has rarely been better, using David’s anger and shame at not being able to help his son, to paint a portrait of a man coming up against the hard fact of his own limitations. As Nic, Chalamet continues to impress, imbuing the character with a desperate, anguished fatalism that is heart-wrenching to watch. The father/son relationship is the heart of the movie, and van Groeningen pays close attention to it, letting it dominate the movie accordingly, while leaving Tierney and Ryan with little to do as a result. At least it doesn’t seek to be profound, or to provide any glib answers to the issues it explores, and that at least is something to be thankful for.

Rating: 7/10 – adapted from books written by both David and Nic, and which allow for a powerful yet emotionally subdued movie, Beautiful Boy is bolstered by two stand out performances, and its refusal to compromise on the dispiriting nature of its storyline; while it doesn’t work as well as it should, and it might not be everyone’s idea of a “good time”, there’s still more than enough on offer to keep the average, or even casual viewer hoping that, by the movie’s end, Nic finds some semblance of peace.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014)

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alcohol addiction, Biography, Bob Ezrin, Dennis Dunaway, Documentary, Drug addiction, Glen Buxton, I'm Eighteen, Michael Bruce, Neal Smith, Reginald Harkema, Review, Rock music, Sam Dunn, School's Out, Scot McFadyen, The Earwigs, The Spiders

ENT-0040 SDAC 1SHT.indd

D: Reginald Harkema, Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn / 98m

Alice Cooper, Shep Gordon, Dennis Dunaway, Bob Ezrin, Sheryl Cooper, Neal Smith, Bernie Taupin, Elton John, Dee Snider, Iggy Pop, John Lydon, Ella Furnier

Charting the life of Alice Cooper from his pre-teen days growing up in Detroit to his comeback gig on October 31st 1986 – after five years of dealing with drug and alcohol addictions – Super Duper Alice Cooper is a respectful, non-critical look back over the early successes and later disasters of a career spanning nearly fifty years (although the movie doesn’t venture beyond Alice’s comeback gig).

As a child, Cooper – then known by his real name of Vincent Furnier – suffered from asthma and often needed an inhaler. On his doctor’s advice, he and his family moved to Phoenix. (The change of scenery, though, didn’t prevent a bad case of appendicitis that nearly killed him.) In high school, Cooper met Dennis Dunaway; they had a shared interest in art, and soon became best friends. When their high school put on a talent show they decided to form a band called the Earwigs and play songs by the Beatles. They enlisted Glen Buxton to play guitar and they were a surprise success (even though Cooper and Dunaway didn’t really know what they were doing).

Landing a regular gig at a local “rock ‘n’ roll teenage dance club”, the band changed its name to the Spiders, and began expanding their repertoire to include songs by the Yardbirds and others (at one point they even opened for the Yardbirds). Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 in an attempt to make it big, the band fell in with the GTO’s, über-groupies who lived in the basement of a log cabin owned by Frank Zappa. Through the GTO’s, they created a new look for themselves and changed the band’s name to Alice Cooper. They enlisted Shep Gordon as their manager and Zappa produced what was to be their first album.

Unable to make much headway in L.A., the band landed a festival gig in Detroit that saw them finally find their audience. At another festival in Toronto a now infamous incident involving a chicken saw their stock rise that much higher. But without any hit records, they were unable to capitalise on their new-found fame, until Gordon met with, and persuaded, Bob Ezrin to work with them. Soon, they had a big hit with a song called I’m Eighteen, and the band was on its way to super-stardom. A string of hit albums and ever more outrageous stage shows followed, but with it came a dissatisfaction amongst the rest of the band that led to Cooper going solo in 1975.

At the same time, Cooper’s drinking was beginning to get out of hand. As he pursued his solo career, a spell in rehab led to a brief resurgence in his career – which wasn’t proving as successful as when Alice Cooper was a band – but he soon swapped alcohol for drugs. From the late Seventies through to the early Eighties, Cooper’s deteriorating health and appearance led to a series of albums that Cooper can’t even remember recording. Finally, he went back into rehab, and in 1986 made a successful return to the music scene with a new album, Constrictor, and a concert tour that reminded everyone of what a prodigious talent he was (and continues to be).

Super Duper Alice Cooper - scene

Flirting with hagiography at times, Super Duper Alice Cooper is a biography that has the full support of Alice Cooper and pretty much everyone he wants the viewer to hear from (except, of course, Michael Bruce). While Cooper is open about his drug and alcohol addictions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise as he’s gone on the record about them on several occasions – and in more ways than one: listen to From the Inside if you need to know more. What’s left is a collection of nostalgic reminiscences about the early days of Cooper’s career when he was still more Vincent Furnier than Alice Cooper.

The inevitable transformation from tee-total pastor’s son to booze-addled rock star is shown as an unavoidable side effect of rock and roll, and while we all might buy into that on some level, the movie’s real focus is on the good times had by all; even the infamous concert in Toronto when Alice threw a live chicken into the audience is treated like it was an awesome moment, though not one that was “healthy for the chicken”. The band’s on-stage antics, some of which look very bizarre and unrelated to the music being played, appear to have been thought up (or more likely improvised) more for effect than any real “let’s-put-on-a-show-and-wow-the-audience” approach. It does make the viewer wonder how on earth the band became such a success.

But while the very early days are treated with a detailed and cheerily nostalgic air, as the band becomes famous the movie moves away from anecdotes about the group and, as happened in real life back in the early Seventies, the focus becomes Cooper himself: his fame, his solo career, and his eventual bouts of alcohol and drug dependency. The break up of the band is glossed over for the most part, and while Dunaway gets to express his disappointment at the end of his friendship with Cooper, it’s a rare moment where criticism is allowed to be heard. Otherwise, unless it comes from Cooper himself – and even he isn’t that self-critical – there’s not a dissenting voice to be heard to provide some balance.

It’s a shame as Cooper’s career has always been varied, both professionally and personally, with as many ups as downs, but throughout there has been a commitment to the music that has kept him going. The movie touches on this on occasion, but seems determined to spend more time relaying as many showbiz anecdotes or celebrity encounters as it can possibly squeeze in.

The look of the movie is very stylised with an impressive amount of archival and contemporary footage mixed together with a great deal of pizzazz, along with attention-grabbing graphics, overlays and 3D effects. Images are tweaked and adjusted and manipulated in so many different ways it becomes distracting, and the decision to employ voice overs rather than talking heads is a mistake as it makes it difficult sometimes to work out who’s saying what. And then there’s the inclusion – the very repetitive and oversold inclusion – of scenes from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), which are there to highlight the fact that off-stage, Cooper is a million miles from the twisted, macabre dilettante he plays on-stage (after the umpteenth clip you’ll want to raise your fist and yell, “Enough already! I get it!”).

Rating: 5/10 – visually engaging, and with a predictably great soundtrack, Super Duper Alice Cooper peeks under the lid of Cooper’s career but only tells the viewer half of what it sees; there’s a lot more to Cooper’s career than is revealed here, and the lack of balance leaves it feeling more like a Cooper-sanctioned vanity project than the warts ‘n’ all documentary some viewers might be expecting.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Mini-Review: Filth (2013)

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Black comedy, Drama, Drug addiction, Eddie Marsan, Homophobia, Irvine Welsh, James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, John Sessions, Jon S. Baird, Racism, Review, Sex addiction, Sexism

Filth

D: Jon S. Baird / 97m

Cast: James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Martin Compston, Imogen Poots, John Sessions, Shirley Henderson, Gary Lewis, Kate Dickie, Joanne Froggatt, Jim Broadbent, Emun Elliott

Freewheeling, offensive, scabrous adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel that pushes so many boundaries it’s hard to keep track of them all. No politically incorrect aspect is ignored: homophobia, sexism, racism, substance abuse – all indulged in to within an inch of the script’s life. McAvoy is Detective-Sergeant Bruce Robertson, angling for promotion to Detective-Inspector, but saddled with the small matter of the murder of a Japanese tourist to deal with first. Add to that the manoeuvrings of his fellow Detecive-Sergeants – Poots, Lewis, Bell and Elliott – as well as a subplot involving his wife (Shauna Macdonald), and the mystery of who is making obscene phone calls to fellow lodge member Bladesey’s wife (a panting Henderson), and Bruce has got his work cut out for him. It’s a shame then he has such a dependency for drugs, booze and illicit sex. As the pressure on him builds and he becomes ever more desperate to secure his promotion, Bruce’s world slowly but surely falls apart, and in the process, he starts to see things that aren’t there: from his younger brother Davey, killed in a childhood accident, to increasingly bizarre sequences involving his doctor (Broadbent).

Filth - scene

This is a potent adaptation, with plenty of energy and ‘they-didn’t-did-they?” moments of humour. McAvoy continues to cement his reputation as one of our finest young actors (okay, so he is 34), while amongst the supporting cast, both Marsan (as Bladesey) and Sessions (as Robertson’s boss) shine in their respective roles (it’s particularly good to see Sessions back on the big screen, and in a comic role as well). Baird directs with confidence and integrates the fantasy sequences with aplomb; he also manages the cast effectively and with a firm eye for avoiding caricature. There are times when the movie isn’t for the faint-hearted (“Have you started yet, baby cock?”), but anyone with a fondness for the novel or a penchant for politically incorrect humour will have a ball, especially when it comes to the photocopier game. Much better than you might expect and driven by a powerhouse performance by McAvoy, Filth is a breath of often rancid air that is all the better for not pulling its punches.

Rating: 8/10 – with a title that is far from ironic, Filth lives up to its name but is often searingly funny; a descent into one man’s nightmare that isn’t afraid to look into the abyss and then tell it to f**k off.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Blog Stats

  • 311,606 hits

Recent Posts

  • 10 Reasons to Remember Bibi Andersson (1935-2019)
  • Fantasia (1940)
  • Dances With Wolves (1990) – The Special Edition
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
  • The Three Musketeers (1973)

Top Posts & Pages

  • Oh! the Horror! - Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) and Arsenal (2017)
    Oh! the Horror! - Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) and Arsenal (2017)
  • The White Orchid (2018)
    The White Orchid (2018)
  • Come and Find Me (2016)
    Come and Find Me (2016)
  • Unexpected (2015)
    Unexpected (2015)
  • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    12 Years a Slave (2013)
  • Floating! (2015)
    Floating! (2015)
  • The Night of the Wild Boar (2016)
    The Night of the Wild Boar (2016)
  • Notes on a Scandal (2006)
    Notes on a Scandal (2006)
  • Lost and Delirious (2001)
    Lost and Delirious (2001)
  • Swerve (2011)
    Swerve (2011)
Follow thedullwoodexperiment on WordPress.com

Blogs I Follow

  • Rubbish Talk
  • Film 4 Fan
  • Fast Film Reviews
  • The Film Blog
  • All Things Movies UK
  • Police Entertainment Network
  • movieblort
  • Interpreting the Stars
  • Let's Go To The Movies
  • Movie Reviews 101
  • That Moment In
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

Archives

  • April 2019 (13)
  • March 2019 (28)
  • February 2019 (28)
  • January 2019 (32)
  • December 2018 (28)
  • November 2018 (30)
  • October 2018 (29)
  • September 2018 (29)
  • August 2018 (29)
  • July 2018 (30)
  • June 2018 (28)
  • May 2018 (24)
  • April 2018 (21)
  • March 2018 (31)
  • February 2018 (25)
  • January 2018 (30)
  • December 2017 (30)
  • November 2017 (27)
  • October 2017 (27)
  • September 2017 (26)
  • August 2017 (32)
  • July 2017 (32)
  • June 2017 (30)
  • May 2017 (29)
  • April 2017 (29)
  • March 2017 (30)
  • February 2017 (27)
  • January 2017 (32)
  • December 2016 (30)
  • November 2016 (28)
  • October 2016 (30)
  • September 2016 (27)
  • August 2016 (30)
  • July 2016 (30)
  • June 2016 (31)
  • May 2016 (34)
  • April 2016 (30)
  • March 2016 (30)
  • February 2016 (28)
  • January 2016 (35)
  • December 2015 (34)
  • November 2015 (31)
  • October 2015 (31)
  • September 2015 (34)
  • August 2015 (31)
  • July 2015 (33)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (31)
  • April 2015 (32)
  • March 2015 (30)
  • February 2015 (37)
  • January 2015 (39)
  • December 2014 (34)
  • November 2014 (34)
  • October 2014 (36)
  • September 2014 (25)
  • August 2014 (29)
  • July 2014 (29)
  • June 2014 (28)
  • May 2014 (23)
  • April 2014 (21)
  • March 2014 (42)
  • February 2014 (38)
  • January 2014 (29)
  • December 2013 (28)
  • November 2013 (34)
  • October 2013 (4)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Rubbish Talk

I read, I write, and I sketch. For fun.

Film 4 Fan

A Movie Blog

Fast Film Reviews

for those who like their movie reviews short and sweet

The Film Blog

The official blog of everything in film

All Things Movies UK

Movie Reviews and Original Articles

Police Entertainment Network

From Patrol Cars to Movie Theaters, Real cops share real opinions

movieblort

No-nonsense, unqualified, uneducated & spoiler free movie reviews.

Interpreting the Stars

Dave Examines Movies

Let's Go To The Movies

Film and Theatre Lover!

Movie Reviews 101

Daily Movie Reviews & ABC Film Challenge

That Moment In

Movie Moments & More

Dan the Man's Movie Reviews

All my aimless thoughts, ideas, and ramblings, all packed into one site!

Sunset Boulevard

Writings of a Cinephile

Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

Australian movie blog - like Margaret and David, just a little younger

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: