Universal Tooth

Debating the details of someone’s  core beliefs is an entertaining yet usually pointless endeavour; but let slip the dogs of war, I say.  I once argued with a girl for what felt like two hours about the existence of Universal Truth, she on the, “it obviously exists,” side and me on the, “you can never prove it,” side.  Arguing about Universal Truth is like trying to prove that the world is round; sure, there’s a lot of reliable hearsay on the issue, but personal experience is not among most people’s presentable evidence.  It requires faith to a certain extent.  But that wasn’t a detriment to her strategy of poking holes in my arguments, while I kept coming up with new hurdles, and, of course, eventually Hitler came up.  I once read that whomever brings up Hitler in a philosophical argument is the automatic loser.  I think it is a funny rule, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but either way he came up.  So she talked about the trees having “treeness” and I just didn’t agree that every being in the universe would agree with her definition of treeness.  She tried to get me to agree to Universals like, “The sun is hot.”  And I would say, “To a Lava Monster, or to another larger hotter star, it’s not that hot.”  We went in circles like this for hours and I eventually conceded just so we could move on with our lives.

But today I must reverse myself.  How could this be?  How could my entrenched beliefs have been exposed and destroyed?  Through the erosion of introspection?  No.  I saw the movie, “Requiem For A Dream.”  This movie was horrible.  It wasn’t as bad and pointless as Hannibal, but it was pretty close.  I think I might slot it in behind Hannibal as the second worst movie ever made, right in front of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Showgirls.  I read a review that said it was, “difficult to watch,” and that’s putting it mildly.  I should have known it was going to be bad from the unclear description on the back of the Blu-Ray.

“A hypnotic tale of four human beings each pursuing a different vision of happiness.  Even as everything begins to fall apart, they refuse to leg go, plummeting with their dreams into a  nightmarish, gut-wrenching free fall.”

But really, the gut-wrenching was being felt by me as cheap scares and shock-imagery were thrown at the viewer for 102 minutes in an attempt to make up for the absence of plot and motivating dialog.  It was like having a tooth pulled by someone who was just messing with you.  I try to think back on my innocent youth before it was victimized by movies like this and somewhere a distant child is crying.  Maybe if this movie strove to elicit a larger truth about the human condition, some of the stupidity could be excused.  But as far as I can tell, the only intended conclusion was that drugs are bad.  I already knew that.

So my Universal Truth is that this movie sucks.  No one can like this movie, and if they do, they must be insane.  The soundtrack was good though.