Surprisingly incoherent and boring

It is a performances centric movie

I'll tell you why so serious

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

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.

If you don't have a main character the audience can sympathize with, if you handle the photography as if you were rushing through a cheap television show, then having a great cast is irrelevant. About three quarters of the way through, I lost interest and turned it off. Requiem for a Dream this is not. Requiem, though very painful to watch, was quite creatively put together, with gut wrenching performances, and characters we could hope for, even though we knew all too well just where they were going. Permanent Midnight is boring and flat, more from technique than material. Too bad. I really like Ben Stiller but a good performance on his part just wasn't enough.

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

Permanent Midnight,First-Viewing, owned pirated DVD,(David Veloz)- Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Hurley, Maria Bello, Janeane Garafalo, Owen WilsonAn interesting true story of a TV writer (Stiller) who's heroin addiction causes him to go from a successful TV writer to working at McDonald's. This is David Veloz's directorial debut, and only film for that matter (watch this film and you will know why). The directing is not professional, and the transition between past and present is almost impossible to recognize, (is he telling us its not important?). Stiller gives a relatively good performance, didn't think he could handle a serious role like this, he wasn't bad, atlhough not great, as the script was pretty boring. The rest of the cast are OK, Owen Wilson is probably the stand-out, as Stiller's best friend. Overall, the screenplay was boring, the direction was not good, and the cast was convincing but not that great since the roles were pretty dull. It could have been much better, had someone like Charlie Kaufman wrote it (he wrote the amazing script for the story of Chuck Barris, a game show host in George Clooney's 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind'. 7/10