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Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Permanent Midnight seems at first like another film you will love. It's the story of a drug- addicted real-life semi-celebrity, it's directed with slick style and a fast pace, and it provokes emotion with its increasingly gloomy atmosphere and R-rated subject matter. The "but" or the "however" is hard to place, because there is no real reason why it can't live up to the expectations based on what I just described. The only real way to say why it isn't the contemporary classic or young moviegoer's classic that it should be is to say that it doesn't have as much intensity that one would expect from it. It allows itself to indulge in the formula elements of a movie like this.There are formula elements to every genre and subgenre, even the fast-paced stylized biopic and the drug film, even though they don't seem like they would. Why would they? They're usually based on true stories and real lives, or they go in directions most other films don't take. Still, a real life and a true story can still either turn out the way so many similar ones do, or their adaptations do. Permanent Midnight is a formula film of its subgenre.That doesn't stop it from being enjoyable and powerful on a substantial level. It's directed well and Stiller's performance is fantastic. It's loaded with dark humor, Scorsesian music placement and jump cuts disguised as techno music and fade outs, and attention-grabbing supporting players like Owen Wilson and Maria Bello. If only its storytelling took another avenue, or if only it were tighter and more extensive.

Permanent Midnight is a good film all things considered. Though when watching Stiller as the Stahl character one may regret that this movie isn't incredible. Ben Stiller has proven himself to be one of the top comedic actors in the game (zoolander, meet the parents) but according to Permanent Midnight Stiller's weakness may be the people that he works with. David Veloz let a brilliant and emotional performance and auto-biography do way less than it should've. Throughout the film Stiller's performance gets more and more intense but the direction goes nowhere. The cinematography is flat and the editing is dull and inconsistent. It's a classic case of an actor being more involved in a film than his director. Would i recommend this movie? If you like Stiller you need to see it but just keep in mind that once the end credits roll and a song by none other than Everclear wraps up what's a nice little emotional ending it's time to press mute and put on ANY OTHER BAND. I'll tell ya there's nothing quite like the belting emotional vocal stylings of Art Alexakis to ruin a nice little film about heroin addiction. "Yeah-ah! No-oh! Everything is wonderful now!!!" .....kill me

Poor little rich kid, Jerry Stahl, an actual TV screenwriter in 1980s Hollywood, p***es all his good fortune away through a hefty heroin habit. Jerry then hits bottom, recovers, and writes his autobiography. "Permanent Midnight" chronicles Jerry's fall from Hollywood hotshot to junkie bum. Besides such an unpleasant subject, and an equally unsympathetic main character, "Permanent Midnight" still entertains, in a morbid sort of way. It's told in flashback (at the beginning of the movie Jerry's just finished rehab and is about to return to his old LA haunts), so we kind of know where the movie will take us. There's no mystery, we're going to watch Jerry's self-destructive crash and burn in close-up. We're a little in the dark about what will happen after the movie catches up with itself, but there's really not a lot of tension. It's like watching a car wreck in very slow motion.Ben Stiller does an excellent job portraying Jerry, with his craving for the drug rising above, and then destroying, all that's good in his life. It's quite a frightening portrayal. Elizabeth Hurley, as his girlfriend, is a bit of a stretch for both her acting talent and in the casting. But the rest of the cast does fine work. I think the major detriment to this movie is that the audience knows beforehand how it will all end. This is a very dramatic subject, but with no drama in the screenplay. And that is a drag.

The story seems to start in midway, and it seems like the movie is over before you really know about the characters other than Stillers' drug addiction. Love, hate, rage, and fear seem to arise from the characters without enough background on why they feel that way. It wasn't bad, and the acting was pretty good (Stiller was quite good as the drug addicted T.V. writer). Good to take a look at, but not something you'll want to see more than once,