The MovieDirected by: Abel Ferrara Starring: Lili Taylor with:
Edie Falco, Annabella Sciorra, Christopher Walken, Paul Calderon, Fredro Starr,
Kathryne Erbe, Michael Imperioli Written by: Nicholas St. John ReviewsLili
Taylor, a philosophy grad student at New York University, gets bitten in the neck
and turned into a kind of supernatural drug addict, hooked on blood. Ferrara,
whose scabrously powerful Bad Lieutenant is one of the rare unblinking excursions
into the addictive psyche, would seem to be the perfect filmmaker to convert the
notion of vampire as junkie into queasy, gory psychodrama. But The Addiction
is a Ferrara dud. Instead of spinning out a modern horror story, he turns the
film into a crackpot lecture, making vague herky jerky ''connections'' between
vampirism, the Holocaust, and the history of modern philosophy. The usually impish
Taylor is reduced to prowling the streets in wraparound shades as she drops fashionably
affectless assessments of Kierkegaard.
From a review by Owen Gleiberman It
really is a pretentious movie; no philosophiocal debate, just a selection of cheap
shots claiming to demonstrate that men do evil things because they are inherently
evil (rather than men become evil because they do evil things). As Sartre (bless
him!) would have said, this is just bad faith, denying that man has any choices;
life is predetermined. If it 'proves' anything (it doesn't), it is that man is,
at times, is no more than an animal; a fox in the hen house. But we all knew that.
And thousands of years of human history does prove that man has free will, and
can rise above base desires. If he wants to. In his desire to show how clever
he is, Ferrara never bothers to expore or explain what the vampirism is all about;
for him, it's just a metaphore for evil. Another cheap shot? Despite all
this, the movie is very watchable; filmed in delicious monochrome, you feel the
need to follow the spiral of addiction to the end - and the end is quite satisfying,
even though you could see it coming. The DVD82 Minutes At
this time (Nov 2008), there is no mass-market US release; only imports. | 
