Waste of time

Absolutely Fantastic

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I find it _extremely difficult to watch a movie or TV program filmed in false color.The 'sepia' tint of 'journey to the end of the night' _immediately convinced me I wasn't interested in the plot. When I walk out into my backyard every morning I see 'roy g. biv' colors provided by the Sun and expect to see those same natural colors in everything I view.I think its a toss-up between CSI and the 'Matrix' movies for the advent of 'green' tinted filming which apparently provided the 'idea' for the red-shifted 'sepia' distraction in 'journey'.It doesn't matter which filters directors and film editors use, its _still not real.Raise your hand if you wondered why CSI's in Las Vegas walked out of _broad daylight into a house (crime scene) and _immediately turned on their _ever available hand-held flashlights rather than turn on the lights in a room ,or even _better, raise the shades.Trying to set 'mood' with false color and 'shading' should have criminal charges attached.

Journey to the End of the Night is garbage.I picked out this stinker in a hurry. The synopsis on the DVD cover seemed interesting at first glance. Scott Glenn was in it. But most of all it was set in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Exotic locations fascinate me. Big mistake! The plot revolves around the owner of a brothel (Glenn) and his degenerate son (Brendan Fraser). The clueless pair stumble across a suitcase full of heroin, plot to sell it and divide the loot. We soon find out the coke-head son plans to double-cross his father. The tale is complicated by the sudden, unexpected death of their co-conspirator, a cocaine-launderer whom the father replaces with a dishwasher he hastily recruits from his brothel's kitchen. The story goes downhill from there.The plot is shot full of holes. As a consequence, I was tempted to pull the DVD and watch cable news. Instead I stuck it out. Another big mistake.Virtually every character in the movie is brain-dead and morally twisted. Fraser and his cronies are about as stupid and believable as the Keystone Cops or the Three Stooges. There is no character development, possibly because characters drop in and out of the story for no apparent reason (destiny?). Consequently, the action is contrived. Predictably, a bunch of characters are destined to be bullet-ridden, but by the end of the film, who really cares?To make matters worse, the script is a poorly written piece of junk. Characters repeat themselves time and time again, either because the writer thinks we're as dumb as his characters or he wanted the film to last more than five minutes. As a result, the actors either sleepwalk (Glenn) through their role or play it so over the top (Fraser) as to be farcical. All the other actors similarly struggle with the poor script and weak plot.What is the point of this pretentious tripe? It's hidden, no doubt, somewhere in the taglines ("You can escape anything but your destiny," and "Where life is cheap... and hope is priceless."). If you can make something out of that nonsense, you're wiser than I. This movie is pure fluff.Oh, and since all the action takes place at night, Sao Paulo, Brazil is nothing but a dark, yellow-orange blur. They could have filmed this crap under sodium vapor lights in the streets of East LA and you couldn't tell the difference.I rate it one star because this dreary journey is thankfully short and finally does end.

This is an interesting work in the film noir/gangster genre. The story has to do with the bad blood between father and son, played out over one night in Sao Paulo. The tone and mood of the movie seem to reference many more famous, high profile films that deal with the same topic matter. This one seems very interested in stylization over telling a completely coherent story. And its this stylization that sets it above regular crime dramas. Bredan Fraser plays the loser, coke addicted son without any fear of looking bad. HIs performance is very emotional and wild. Not easy for any actor to pull off. His character is a villain without any morals. Made that way by his father, Scott Glenn, an initially likable, sympathetic sort, who, as the tale unravels, is not so nice a guy after all.By far, the film's hero, Mos Def (the only hero because everyone else is evil or not big enough to really know) gives a winning, career defining performance as a Nigerian immigrant who, out of loyalty to his employer, agrees to partake in a drug deal. The "raptor" gives a nuanced, thoroughly believable performance as wemba in maybe his best role as a film actor.The other big star of the film are the colors. The nighttime images and camera. It appears to be heavily saturated and grainy and apparently enhanced through the DI process. Cinematographer aficionados will surely want to see this for the interesting lighting.If the film has a flaw, I would cite an overall bleak and hateful tone of the script. Very anti- human being. The violence feels almost gratuitous with some shots of face slashing feeling too long or ultimately unnecessary. The squeamish will look away! But nothing very troublesome compared to the gore in the horror genre.Recommended to those who like dark material.

I also watched the film at Tribeca and found it as a whole work to be interesting and entertaining. Sure there were flaws in the film itself but in total I enjoyed the camera work, the colors and the actors. I didn't have a problem with any of the actors on the screen. I thought Brandon Fraser was cast in a role that he normally doesn't play but that didn't take away from the movie if anything it added to it. He definitely had a presence on the screen as did Scott. The characters were also justified in their actions. Don't get me wrong there were flaws in the film I just felt that they were minimal. I went in expecting to watch a film that wasn't going to be very good and I ended up seeing something that I though was entertaining and interesting. The main character was not Brazil, there are movies where the city is the main character and the actors are there to move it along. This was very much character based film.