Confucius say . . . a Chinese proverb is not a good starting point for a star-studded gangster flick
Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Air I Breathe, which fails to reach true emotional depths
From May 15, 2008
Movies love symbols. They are the building blocks of the medium, and are to films what sentences are to novels. Sometimes they are literal, like the shark’s fin in Jaws. And sometimes they are metaphorical – the snowglobe in Citizen Kane. Sometimes, however, they are just dumb.
The starry urban ensemble The Air I Breathe is full of dumb symbols – meaningless shots of irrelevant objects that strain for significance in a movie completely devoid of the same. Here a long, lingering shot of a silken scarf floating in the breeze means, like, freedom and stuff, while an incongruous close-up of a butterfly means that, you know, change is afoot.
The characters too – and this is the best bit – have symbolic names. They are Happiness (Forest Whitaker), Pleasure (Brendan Fraser), Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Love (Kevin Bacon). Yes, really. But again, the symbolism is meaningless and hides poorly drawn pulp figures plucked from the pages of modern noir. Thus, in metropolitan USA (actual location: Mexico City), the neurotic stockbroker Happiness is wildly in debt to a local mobster, Fingers (Andy Garcia, shouting Pacino-style throughout)... [article continues]
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