Overrated

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Michael T. WIESS has doggy style sex with Rosanna ARQUETTE. Michael WIESS of "PRETENDER" fame has back-door hate-sex with MILFy Rosanna ARQUETTE. And in like the first 30 seconds of the film. That should be more than enough to give this film a good watching. Anyhow a guy gets out of jail or something comes home and finds out his old place is now a burned out METH- LAB. He starts sampling some of the left over's telling his girl "You're hot and young, of course you should be doing meth." He goes to visit mom who's in cahoots with the local parole officer to have her son killed for the insurance money. Mind you his girl friend happens to be the daughter of the local sad-sack Sheriff. So the young couple goes from doing meth, getting addicted to meth, and then making their own meth. Then they get the bright idea to sell it, which adds fuel to the fire. Because now they have to associate with characters outside they're comfort zone. They also have to stay up three days partying until you run out; they're staying up for weeks on end cooking the never-ending supply, to meet demand. The never-ending demand.

Although I wouldn't say this is the best movie I've seen, I thought that it did drive home the addicting and devastating effects of meth production, sale and use. The acting, for the most part, was captivating. I've lived in Iowa for almost a year now, and some folks have been worried about the perspective this gives of the state. I think that the movie really could have been placed in any rural community and still drive home the point. Quite honestly, I think that without the sex scenes, if this movie was shown to junior high school and high school students, it would quell any curiosity to try meth (particularly, I think, the tweaking scene and its aftermath). I still think "Requiem for a Dream" is a better movie that talks about the effects of dreams and the use of drugs to attain those dreams, but I have recommended this movie to many friends as a must-see movie.

Tasteless. I can't even write intelligently about the movie. I laughed the entire movie. It wasn't supposed to be funny. Matt Farnsworth has no clue what he is doing. His story is written, it seems, without any knowledge of Iowa culture and the meth problem. I know Farnsworth is from Iowa, which makes his movie even more puzzling to me. Why do the two main characters have accents? It doesn't make any sense. The acting was mediocre at best and at times hard to watch. Gratituous violence and sex filled the movie. I am guessing that the violence and sex were supposed to make the movie edgy, but it came across as unbelievable and offensive. The ending of the movie is so brilliantly bad that all I could do was laugh and look at the rolling credits with disbelief. As I walked out of the theatre everyone else who was leaving was laughing along with me. The ending of the movie was meant to evoke tears, but it did the exact opposite. Do not waste your time on this horrible movie, unless you want to see ignorant, sappy, overacted, clichéd drivel.

"Iowa" wants to be "Requiem for a Dream" for Midwest meth, but it comes across as a hard R rated "Reefer Madness". Yes, drugs are bad, and meth is horribly pernicious, as an addiction and how it destroys people, families and communities. But these characters who are either dumb or ridiculous and the eye-rolling plot won't teach that lesson to anyone. While writer/director/star Matt Farnsworth has some charisma on screen, his partner Diane Foster plays a wincibly silly wide-eyed innocent corrupted by drugsas was already satirized by Susan Sarandon in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". I really felt sorry for her for all the totally unnecessary nudity she was put through. It wasn't until the end of the film that I realized I was supposed to think these two were recent high-school graduates to explain some of their naiveté, as we are bombarded by their school photos, but if so, they even looked older than the folks on "The O.C.". While they have good chemistry on screen, they are a pale imitation of a "Badlands"-type couple. The guest stars are badly used. Michael T. Weiss, who was so good in TV's "The Pretender", is completely ludicrous as a corrupt parole officer and his brutal violence is just plain crazy, as his character pretty much ruins any social significance for the film. Rosanna Arquette has to be even sleazier than she rolled around for David Cronenberg as a very low rent Livia Soprano. John Savage even has to mouth the old baby boomer excuses about I did pot but this is worse. A Goth chick shows up, with the odd explanation that she's a stripper from Des Moines. The obligatory Latino drug dealer appears - in Iowa? With a limited budget, the interior view of meth use is portrayed quite vividly, with quite scary hallucinations. We certainly see them go crazy. While the Iowa locations are used very well (including an amusing scene of a propane gas robbery), the accents and church references are confusingly Southern Baptist. Guns seem to be used by law abiding and law breaking citizens here more than in any inner-city drug-dealing movie.The songs of Iowa's best known bard Greg Brown are used throughout, but oddly are not listed in the credits. I hope they were used with permission.I caught this at its commercial run in NYC because I missed it at the Tribeca Film Festival where it got considerable-- and inexplicable-- buzz.