the air i breathe

Everything you need to know about The Air I Breathe is really contained in its title: pretentious crap. What does the air or breathing have to do with any of the stories in this movie? I love life now in face of death so much more so this breath I breathe I appreciate more? You want to celebrate that sentiment, meditate. Thrown onto this cinematic mess it's a title that Dave Eggers could have written and added to a McSweeney's and would have ended up causing exactly one young man at a cafe somewhere to feel smug - meaningless, and 'sounds' like art (tho I applaud Eggers' charity work). It more accuratelty could have been titled WANNABE CRASH. Just like after Pulp Fiction you had WANNABE PULP FICTION up the ya-ya for a decade, now all the little freshman Hollywood hussies want to make a movie like Crash. Even the cover art is the same: boxy emo fragments showcasing the fine ensemble cast.

Naturally, TAIB also apes other attributes of Crash: the interweaving stories, the nonlinear narrative, the high incidence of coincidence. However, the coincidences in this movie are so strained it makes Crash look almost coincidence-free. This plus stunningly stupid scenarios: a famous singer with one video on MTV is mobbed outside an LA club at night by fans who obviously recognize her, yet later she stands or walks through two other really busy places in broad daylight and no one notices her once - perhaps because Sarah Michelle Gellar is a black hole of charisma. Kevin Bacon's character defies credulity the most (don't waste the Bacon) and Andy Garcia is a good actor but I am sick of seeing him play a gangster - especially since whenever I see him in that role I think of Godfather 3, which was an implacable piece of shit. I can see him getting into the role again for a special occasion like a Steven Soderbergh movie - because nobody would deny a SS movie - but for this? Maybe it is not his fault and he is typecast, for which I empathize - everyone needs to make a living and I hope he has a long career. But personally, a movie with Andy Garcia as another gangster is a movie I can do without.

Garcia always does well with what he is given, but in this case he was given crap; the gangster scenes are sadly juvenile. In the age of Sopranos, people are well-versed enough in the way these people talk and do business, and none of the criminal shit in this movie was believable. It was like watching a sixteen year old who saw a hundred gangster movies, did a line of coke for the first time ever, and, with the whole house to himself for the weekend, sat down 'to write some sick shit' in his underwear and comes up with, 'His name is Fingers, because he likes to cut them off.' Come on. Jesus Christ, over here. You wanna write like an Italian gangster spend a fucking summer in Jersey, OK?

I am not mistaking believable for magical realism - the major element of the story which is fantasy I didn't mind at all, seemed like an interesting twist. But a twist that ends up as a whimper, like the rest of this tale.

The good: Forest Whitaker is always watchable and Brendan Frasier is a star.

Add to my dream cast:
Forest Whitaker
Brendan Frasier


Final verdict: not recommended

bullitt