Mr Black I usually enjoy most movies, but this was a real hard one to get through. For starters, it's New Years Eve in New York - Yes, December 31, - and yet there's a guy riding a motorcycle, there's no snow at all, and everyone is dressed like it's September. Now to the story. Wow, is this bad. I understand where they were trying to go with this but seriously, huge fail. I'm pretty sure the audition for everyone in this movie went something like "So, can you chain smoke cigarettes, because you'll be puffing on one every two seconds for the entire movie! The characters and lude and crude, with absolutely no redeeming qualities in any of them. The worst part was Gaby Hoffman and Christina Ricci. Seriously? Take the two girls who have already appeared together, dress them in ridiculous costumes and try using cheesy and phony New York accents that are so over the top it's ridiculous. Oh, and also, ,big sideburns were NOT in fashion in 1982. Maybe in 72,, but not ten years later. Wow. What a dog.

Film Watchin Fool What you can expect is a dialogue driven comedy that has really good cast, but it doesn't necessarily make for a great movie. It is very much a predecessor of films like Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve where there are multiple stories going on at once that all eventually intersect and mesh.Acting/Casting: 6* - The cast is full of some big names (Ben Affleck, Paul Rudd, Courtney Love, Cristina Ricci, Casey Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Jay Mohr)and they all play their roles well. No one does a stand out job, but I will admit Paul Rudd is great at being downright aggravating.Directing/Cinematography/Technical: 5.5* - For a dialogue driven comedy it is fairly entertaining, but I don't think it is extremely funny by any means. The film comes together well, but in my opinion never really has a tremendous climax.Plot/Characters: 5* - This is nothing more than a movie that follows multiple characters through their New Year's Eve and the adventures or miseries that the night takes them on. Again, it is marginally entertaining, but nothing special unless this is your thing.Entertainment Value: 5* - Unless you love one of the cast or are really into how people cope with their personal issues, then you will likely get bored with this movie at some point. It was tough for me to get through the first time, so I doubt I will be watching again in the future.My Score: 6+5.5+5+5 = 21.5/4 = 5.375 Email your thoughts to [email protected]

david-sarkies 200 Cigarettes is described as an episodic film. It follows around a number of people on New Years Eve of 1981 and climaxes at one huge party. These people seem to miss each other, yet also go through their own problems to try and understand themselves and their part in life. Some of them realise the truth about themselves, while others of them simply continue to go on as they were. To really understand the movie we have to look at the characters, some of them individually, while others together. The first two are a couple of friends, yet in a way a lot more. The movie opens with them in the "disco cab" (more on this later) and the cynic is simply whining about how his girlfriend left him and that New Years Eve always sucks because it is also his birthday and as such the expectation is doubly high. These two form a major focus of the relationship aspect of the film as they both try to understand what the whole purpose of it is. One simply feels that he cannot hold down a girlfriend because he changes for her only to have her turn against him. The other simply does not care and will sleep with any man she can. It is then that her eyes are opened in a sexual encounter with the guy in a toilet cubicle. She realises that the way she treats sex is really meaningless and that making it a cheap thrill destroys the whole purpose of it. He, on the other hand, has realised that the one girl that is good for him is the girl that knows him. The problem he faces is that the girls he dates really don't know him that well, and as such they end up leaving him after they decide they do not like him. On the other hand, she has been a friend of his for a while and they can both say that they know each other. As such it is inevitable that they end up together. The next couple are a couple of girls who simply want to get laid and end up fighting other the guys that they are with. They dump Eric, the Irish artist, because they decide that he is no good in bed. They then travel the city trying to find dates for the night, but cannot. The only time they find somebody is a single bartender, who they ditch because he is a yuppie. It is when they are told that they way they are behaving will destroy their friendship. To them, having dates should not be important but rather they should focus on their friendship. They end up getting dates, but remain secretive about it because they realise that to do otherwise will undermine their friendship. Eric is a rather pitiable guy as he also can never seem to hold down a girlfriend, but this time it is because he is no good in bed. He is one of the first at Monica's house, the place where they are having the party, and tries to come to terms with what he learns from Monica. His realisation at the end of the movie is that he is bad in bed, and there is really little that he can do about it. Monica is frantic because she is organising a New Years Eve party, even though she hates parties, and finds that nobody turns up. When Eric does, they talk and try to come to terms with their inadequacies, but when her friend arrives, she takes Eric away leaving Monica alone again. Monica is simply very tense and this tenseness means that she drinks so much that she passes out and ends up missing out on the party that she so really wanted to experience. Jack is an interesting character because he believes that he is curse. It appears to be a sweet individual and the girl that he is out with lost her virginity to him the night before. At first it seems that these two are the perfect couple, but this is soon destroyed when we learn that Jack has more than one girlfriend. So we discover that Jack is simply a sleaze who does not want girls attached to him. After his current girlfriend admits that she loves him, he tells her that he is cursed because he simply cannot stop girls from falling in love with him. To this she retorts that he really doesn't understand his fortune for there are many people who spend their entire lives looking for a woman to fall in love with them while Jack simply takes it for granted. He does not grow, for in the end he is still annoyed when Rita throws herself upon him proclaiming her undying love for him. What we know that he doesn't, is that Rita is actually quite fickle. This is the essence of the movie: relationships and the failure to relate to people. This is basically what everybody struggles with in the movie, and by the end some have overcome their struggles, while others are still simply blind to their problems. Jack and Dave are the two that are blind to their faults while Eric is left a broken man when the truth of his sexual inadequacy hits home. He is left with a problem that is simply not as easily solved as the rest. I guess the reason here is that relationships cannot be based on sex, and Eric uses sex as a crutch to support his inadequacy in relating to people, while Jack simply refuses to form a deep relationship and Dave is oblivious to everything. The Cynic throws away his cigarettes symbolising his realisation that he no longer needs a crutch to relate to anybody, while Eric, Dave, and Jack are left with their crutches and are not able to let go of them.

James Hitchcock Most of the film takes place during the evening of December 31st 1981, with the last few scenes set during the morning of January 1st 1982. There is not a great deal of plot other than an account of how a group of young people spend New Year's Eve in New York. The one linking thread is that most of them are on their way to a party being given by a mutual acquaintance named Monica, although we do not see much of the actual party itself. For most of the film, in fact, the neurotic, self-pitying Monica worries that none of her friends will actually turn up- even her best friend Hilary leaves- and that she will be forced to spend the entire evening arguing about her sex life with her equally self-pitying ex-boyfriend Eric, a Scottish artist who specialises in multicoloured close-ups of the female genitalia.A number of reviewers have wondered why it was necessary to set the film in the early eighties rather than the late nineties when it was made, speculating that this may have been a device to market a nostalgic soundtrack album. Certainly, we get to hear a lot of songs from the era by artists such as Blondie, Roxy Music, Kim Carnes and Elvis Costello (who makes a brief cameo appearance)- all of which took me straight back to my own college days- although I suspect that the real reason for choosing 1981/2 was that this represented the end of the carefree, pre-AIDS era.If the film has been set in, say, 1998/9 all the bed-hopping and partner-swapping that goes on would seem a lot less innocent. This is very much a film about sex. Some of the characters are looking for love, but most of them are just looking for sex. Most of them end up with a partner, although not always the one they started the film with. Monica dumped Eric because she found him inadequate in bed, but now worries that she will be unable to find another boyfriend. Val, Monica's young country cousin from Long Island, throws herself at every man she can find, overcome by the excitement of being in the big city. Lucy, a girl even more man-hungry than Val, tries to get off with a handsome young bartender and her (hitherto platonic) flatmate Kevin, who is depressed over the failure of his own relationship. Cindy, a naive and innocent girl, has just lost her virginity to the handsome but obnoxiously conceited Jack, a young man who complains that every girl who goes to bed with him falls in love with him. (He sees that as a major problem).Cindy, in fact, is one of the few attractive characters in the film. She is terminally clumsy and accident-prone (in one of the film's grosser moments she manages to slip over and land in a pile of dog-dirt), but there is at least a certain sincerity and sweetness about the way Kate Hudson plays her. (Justice is done when Cindy ends up with sensitive punk rocker Tom, about the only likable male character on view). Most of the other characters are an unlikeable bunch, whose main vices are self-centredness, arrogance, reckless promiscuity and an even more reckless tobacco addiction. (The early eighties may have been pre-AIDS but they were certainly not pre-lung cancer). The title presumably refers to the number of cigarettes the characters smoke between them. Is this some sort of product placement for Big Tobacco? The film has certain similarities with Barry Levinson's "Diner", another nostalgic film (in that case made in the eighties about the fifties) about a group of young friends in the period leading up to New Year. Both films are episodic in character and concentrate on character rather than action. "Diner", however, is by far the better film, the main reason being that the characters in that film emerge as rounded individuals, whereas the characters in "200 Cigarettes" are little more than one-dimensional ciphers. "Diner" concentrated on only half a dozen characters; the scriptwriter of "200 Cigarettes" made the mistake of trying to interest us in nearly twenty in a film lasting just over an hour and a half. There are really no stars of this film, just a long list of big-name actors in cameo roles.The film's other main weakness is that, although it is meant to be a comedy, the script is not really witty. The running dog-dirt-on-the-back-of- someone's-coat joke may be gross, but it is about the only memorable joke in the film, even if it is memorable for the wrong reasons. It must say something about a scriptwriter's lack of imagination when you are forced to include that corny old gag "how do you like your eggs done in the morning, scrambled or fertilised?" in your list of "Memorable Quotes". The words "scraping the bottom of the barrel" come to mind. 5/10, chiefly for the music.