The Air I Breathe
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Movie Reviews of The Air I Breathe
Movie Review: I can live with that
Summary: 4 Stars
Pros! Delivery was prompt and ahead of delivery time and the movie same in good condition.
Cons! There was a little glitch in the first quarter of the picture but i can live with that.
C.Ruben Rep of Trinidad and Tobago W.I.
Movie Review: Good Movie--Somtimes
Summary: 4 Stars
The Movie sometimes doesnt make sense, it comes at you in Bits and Pieces, At the End a Bag full of Money hits Sarah M.Gellar's car--does she go out and get the Money? We don't know. To many unansered questions.Movie Review: A romanic-tragic story
Summary: 4 Stars
I liked this movie. It was romantic, sad, violent, but yet it had a good ending that is hard to find these days.Movie Review: Ambitious but messy and undisciplined, redeemed by fine cast
Summary: 3 Stars
I've read a little bit about this, and it seems to draw a lot of comparisons to CRASH and BABEL - I guess just because each of them offers multiple stories that interesect in not-entirely-predictable ways. It's really not all that similar to those earlier (and much more high-profile) films apart from that element - there's not much of anything in the way of politics or racial content in this film, for one thing; this is not a film about "society" but about individuals and how they interact. For another, though one might call the central thesis of the film - an examination of the four "emotional cornerstones" ( happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love) of human life as described in an old Chinese proverb, here literally invested in the four main characters - "pretentious", the film itself is certainly working on a lower-key and a simpler method than the earlier films, which allows many of the actors to come off as a bit less self-conscious, and the film in the end to seem "modest" in a way. Which is all to the good, as the screenplay and some of the secondary characters definitely get in the way of real success.
Each main character has a storyline, and though there are connections they basically move from one to the next in a relatively linear (certainly easy to follow) fashion, with each taking up roughly the same amount of screentime. None of the four principals are named, though "Sorrow" (Sara Michelle Gellar), a pop singer, does have a stage name. "Happiness" begins with Forest Whitaker as an apparently frustrated office robot betting a ton of money on a hot tip he got, and then being indebted heavily to a completely and totally evil gangster, Fingers (Andy Garcia); "Pleasure" (Brendan Fraser) shows him a way out. Then we segue into Pleasure's story - he's Fingers' chief enforcer, gifted with a particular extranormal power; tonight he's got the job of showing the boss's punk kid nephew (Emile Hirsch) around the town - and finding that his life has changed in a special way. "Sorrow" is Trista (Gellar), an aspiring singer whose indebted manager is forced to sell her contract to - you guessed it - Fingers. Her life is pretty much unending and awful misery, including a flashback to the terrible (but ludicrous and frankly hilarious in the way it's shown) death of her father. Well, at least it gives Gellar a chance to cry, something she's exceptionally good at. And finally, her sorrow somehow becomes the saving grace for "Love" (Kevin Bacon), a doctor who's had a mad unrequited love for a herpatologist (Julie Delpy) who gets bitten by a rare snake and...well, I'm not going to spoil it. Suffice it to say that as usual for these kinds of things, many of the stories come together in the end and the audience is left...
Unfulfilled - at least in my case. One of the big problems I have with this kind of set-up is that it is essentially asking us to see life as a big, cosmic game, a series of Dickensian coincidences and bizarre occurences that somehow at the end add up to peoples' lives being changed irrevocably. This kind of thing CAN work if done in a fantasy milieu or a magical-realist type of setting, but when a film tries for the most part to offer "realistic" portrayals of semi-real people, it just ends up seeming stupid and laughable. THE AIR I BREATHE tries to do it both ways - most of the characters are living with real-life (if very dramatic) problems, but Brendan Fraser's special ability invests the whole thing with a veneer of the supernatural - which just doesn't add up to anything more that a convenient way out of many plot holes, from what I can see. The number of car crashes and near-crashes in the film is enough to make you start to wonder when the next one is going to happen just at the right moment, and there are lots of other coincidental things like that. We have one of the most poorly-staged and unbelievable bank robberies I've ever seen; several completely idiotic mistakes by characters that result in massive storyline shifts; and a couple of secondary characters (Garcia and Hirsch) who are so cartoonish that we can't care about them or what they do for a moment. Ultimately it just feels like writer-director Lee came up with a bunch of events and characters he wanted to put in a movie, and then tried to create a thin and fairly obvious story so he could to fit them all together.
It is, as I mentioned, redeemed a fair amount by the acting. I'm typically a guy who follows directors and genres, rather than actors, but Bacon, Whitaker and Delpy are a few of my favorite current actors that I'll make an effort to see in anything, and they're all their usual excellent selves, though Delpy's role is pretty minimal. Fraser is probably the best I've ever seen him be - I'm not typically a fan, and don't think much of him in his "Indiana Jones"-type adventure roles; perhaps he's best off in the contemporary urban drama/thriller setting. I'm a huge fan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" but I haven't always been a fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar's work outside of the show, so it's nice to be able to say that she holds her own here as well, giving the best film performance I've seen from her. So I guess if you're a fan of any or all the principals here, it's worth catching; as many problems as I have with the film, it never bored me, and the leads kept it watchable for me.
The responses vary quite a bit with this one, and I'm not sure I could predict how most people would react - if you've read this far in my review I hope it's helpful, but I'd suggest reading several others as well.
Movie Review: Beautiful Story, Fair Execution
Summary: 3 Stars
Just like Crash, Babel, and other films before it, The Air I Breathe attempts to weave the lives of different people all into one story. Crash and Babel are two of my top films and I'm a big supporter of Sarah Michelle Gellar so I was definitely interested in seeing The Air I Breathe.
Another initial draw was that the story was based on a Chinese proverb where happiness, sorrow, pleasure, and love all interact with each other for a greater purpose. The interwoven stories and the initial purpose they serve for one character was executed fairly well. The last few frames make the 90-something minute film worth it, but the build up to it just wasn't what I expected. There was something a little flat about the film that I can't really get a hold on.
It wasn't the performances. They were all amazing. Forest Whitaker is a gem, and I really enjoyed seeing Kevin Bacon being emotional. Sarah Michelle Gellar has the acting chops, and she gets to showcase just a small amount of what does she have. Brendan Fraser portrayed a very low-key character, and I enjoyed him. I will admit that Andy Garcia and Emile Hirsch irritated me a bit.
Visually, the film was on and off. There were certain moments where things could have taken one or two steps up, and the impact the scene was meant to have would have generated something more. I will exclude Forest Whitaker's character's disposition and the final few frames from that for they hit where they were supposed to, as well as Sarah Michelle Gellar's scene on top of the hospital and Kevin Bacon's reaction.
I also believe that - for me - the emotional notes the film was supposed to hit didn't hit hard enough because the majority of the characters weren't really fleshed out as much as they should have been.
At the end of viewing, The Air I Breathe did not reach the status that I give Crash and Babel. The emotion and character development was just shy of giving me the feeling that I garnered from those two films. I definitely think if Jeiho Lee is given another film that he would surpass the effect The Air I Breathe was given.