Spun (2002)

Good job for a "Requiem for a Dream" clone

If it doesn't bother you when a director blatantly rips off another movie, take this one for a spin. It's Requiem for a Dream for the methamphetamine crowd. Not as good, of course, but it's a fun ride. Lots of quick edits, lots of Oliver Stone weird, sweaty, extreme close-ups, and absolutely no substance. It's just a week, or so, in the life of a bunch of speed freaks. Nothing more.

Billy Corgan contributes some good stuff, via Djali Zwan to the soundtrack and gets in a quick cameo. There are lots of cameos alongside the ensemble cast. Leguizamo's a little over the top, and Mena Suvari seemed a little stretched, but all in all not too bad. This is a much better role for Brittany Murphy than Love and Other Disasters. It's a fine line between over-acting and acting like you're freakin' on speed, so I'm not going to complain.

Spun is also surprisingly explicit in a number of ways: Leguizamo's masturbation scene wearing nothing but a sock; the shot of a little turd splashing in the toilet while Sorvino takes a dump; a girl tied to a bed for pretty much the length of the movie, naked and spread eagle with gaffer's tape over her mouth and eyes forced to listen to a skipping CD the whole time.

There is no moral to the story. Heck, there really isn't any story. It's just one big buzz with events. I don't mind that it's a Requiem for a Dream clone in style, not substance. I would imagine this kind of physical film making via power-edits would be difficult to do, and I think this first time director did a credible job. August 15, 2008

amazing

amazing movie, it has to be one of the best drug cinema movies ever made.
the whole movie was intense from start to finish and just leaves you in a daze of amazement.

it's a great movie, if you like movies like Requiem for a Dream, you'll absolutely love Spun. July 20, 2008

You May See Yourself

Every time I watch Spun, I can't help but smile thinking that John Leguizamo was the cute little voice for one of the furry characters in that kids movie Ice Age. In Spun, we find him having phone sex with a lesbian biker (played by Debbie Harry of Blondie) on the other line and he's jumping up and down on the bed working his aparatus thats covered with a sock. It's disturbing and pathetic, but darkly humorous. There is also a spot where Rob Halford of the rock band Judas Priest plays a porn shop clerk. If you are homophobic and one of those macho type males who likes Judas Priest, you may be shocked and may never listen to Priest again. I found the opening theme song, The Number of the Beast, done better than the original creators of that song- Iron Maiden, on any good day! All together, I think the film is a harsh view of a dark reality and what its really like to be on meth and around people who lost all moral ethical values. It speaks of the great apathy of today's youth and so called adults. These are guidless and lost characters, no worse than some people who don't have any drug problems at all and appear to be quite "normal" in society. But there are troubles deep under the facades. A film for the naive and anyone who is curious to see how desparate characters live. You may see yourself. April 26, 2008

crazy

This movie is seriously "SPUN" unless you had a drug addiction to crank you would not understand this particular movie. the people in this video played their roles very well. April 6, 2008

Not as bad as I thought it was.

Spun (Jonas Akerlund, 2002)

The DVD box for Spun has a blurb on it calling it "a classic of drug cinema". Which strikes me as saying "the cutest hemorrhagic fever imaginable" or something like that. When you're in a genre containing such deathless film classics as Half Baked and How High?, it doesn't strike me that you really have to reach all that high to grab the bar, now, do you?

The story revolves around Ross (Rushmore's Jason Schwartzman, whose career has been downhill ever since). Ross is the guy with the car, which makes him very important-- none of the other major characters has one. Ross and his friends (and the series of oddballs he meets on the way), you see, are tweakers-- crystal meth addicts. Most of them, aside from being too stoned to drive, don't have cars because, presumably, they've hocked them to get money to fuel their addictions. But someone's gotta do the driving, and that someone is Ross. As it opens, we meet Ross, his paranoid dealer Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), and Spider Mike's two houseguests, Nikki (Brittany Murphy) and Cookie (Mena Suvari). As things progress, Ross is introduced to Cookie's boyfriend, The Cook (Mickey Rourke), Spider Mike's supplier, who also needs some driving done. The Cook hires Ross to do some driving for him. Which is great, Ross needs the money (and the drugs), except that Ross has his girlfriend (Chloe Hunter, whose body famously appears on the poster for American Beauty) tied to the bed in his apartment. (Why? We don't know.) Along the way, we meet a number of other assorted weirdos, the most interesting of whom is Frisbee (Deadbirds' Patrick Fugit), a black metal devotee who gets involved in a very bizarre love triangle with Spider Mike and Nikki. Plot? Forget plot. This is a slice-of-very-strange-life movie.

When I was watching Spun, I hated it. To some extent, I still do. But a week or so later, I find myself impressed with a number of aspects of the movie. Kudos to both Suvari and Murphy, both of whom have been typecast as glamour girls for years, for taking roles that are unglamorous in the extreme. The number of cameos in the movie is astounding-- Deborah Harry, Ron Jeremy, Billy Corgan, Rob Halford, Peter Stormare, and I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg. And for a plotless movie, it does go by quickly (this could well have to do with the insane editing-- Akerlund normally makes his paycheck as a music video director, and the camerawork here has a great deal in common with his infamous video for The Prodigy's "Smack My [...] Up"). Schwartzman is just kind of pulled along by everything, but a number of the other performances in here range from the competent (Harry, Fugit, Suvari) to the downright wicked (this may well be Rourke's best role since Angel Heart). And while the whole movie doesn't hold up, there are some blisteringly funny scenes (Corgan has one line, but in the greater context of its scene, it's hysterical).

So-- not as awful as I first thought, but I probably won't be sitting through it again any time soon. **
January 3, 2008

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