SPUN

A young, downwardly mobile dude whose only goal in life is to be really, really stoned gets a little too close for comfort to his deranged dealer.

CAST: Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Brittany Murphy, Mickey Rourke, Patrick Fugit, Peter Stormare, Alexis Arquette, Chloe Hunter, Eric Roberts

DIRECTOR: Jonas Akerlund

"Each time one of the speed freaks who scuttle around ‘Spun’ like cockroaches on a hot stove snorts another line of crystal methedrine, the soundtrack erupts with a jolt and the camera zeroes in on an eyeball spinning like a pinwheel in a wind storm. When the person doing the snorting is Ross (Jason Schwartzman), a meth addict whose life has spiraled out of control, his fantasies spill across the screen in jerky cartoon images, many of them pornographic. That's one of the movie's rancid observations: speed and pornography (with bondage and anal sex the preferred modes) go together like bacon and eggs. (Or should I say rats and garbage?)…If ‘Spun’ doesn't glamorize the world it surveys, its parade of reeling potty-mouthed clowns (especially Mr. Rourke's cowboy chemist) still exudes a kind of doomy charisma. Think of them as denizens of a demonic sideshow." --Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"Want to know exactly what it's like to be young, feckless and strung-out? ‘Spun,’ a jittery black comedy that races at warp speed through three sleepless days in the life of a banged-up band of speed freaks, has the answer--and it's not pretty…‘Spun’ is quickly exposed as being all flash, no substance…Spurts of pornographic animation and Billy Corgan's soundtrack increase the cool quotient, but the story, by screenwriters Will De Los Santos and Creighton Vero, is wobbly at best…Akerlund never succeeds in building empathy for any of the characters, making ‘Spun’ a highly stylized, deliberately provocative but ultimately cold skim across the surface of wasted lives." --Megan Lehmann, The New York Post

"This is a bad-trip movie in which the more spectacularly ugly everything looks, the more we're supposed to get off on it. For drug addicts, pleasure deadens through repetition, and that's true of ‘Spun,’ too, which uses stroboscopic cuts, shock sound, and triple-X animated imagery to deposit us inside the experience of a crank high…‘Spun’ is accomplished, but it's also numbing…The cast, all slumming for cred by acting as wasted as possible, includes Mena Suvari in scummy teeth, Brittany Murphy in dirty-doll outfits, a naked John Leguizamo hyperkinetically masturbating into a sock, and Jason Schwartzman as the lank-haired ‘normal'’ hero, who handcuffs a stripper to a bed and leaves her there with her eyes and mouth covered in duct tape. Please don't try this at home." --Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"You should know about the bug-eyed, sewer-mouthed freak known as The Cook. Played with poignant solemnity by Mickey Rourke, The Cook is about to accidentally blow his funky methamphetamine factory to smithereens. Hey, are we winning the war on drugs, or what? That’s a question this dopey, psycho-delic, morally challenged mess manages to ignore. Just as you’ll manage to ignore 'Spun.'" --Guy Flatley, Moviecrazed

"The traumatized critic must struggle to avoid capital letters in urging patrons to steer clear of the colorfully cast but unbearable ‘Spun,’ which beds down in merciless close-up with a band of L.A. tweakers for three sleepless days and nights...The film's main offense lies not in its fetid fetishes, however, but in asking us to sympathize with oleaginous schmo Ross (Jason Schwartzman), who pines for his ex while another lass is tied to his bed and Billy Corgan's acoustic warblings commiserate on the soundtrack." --Jessica Winter, The Village Voice

"‘Spun’ feels like a project all these sub-stars did for fun. We hope they had some…The most amusing thing for the actual viewer, who seems to have been an afterthought for Akerlund and his without-a-clue screenwriters, Creighton Vero and Will De Los Santos, is Mickey Rourke, who plays the Cook. While the Cook's methamphetamine keeps the rest of the cast grinding its collective teeth, we will be grinding ours, thinking of how those stitch lines under Rourke's jaw must have hurt - and may still, considering the payoff…‘Spun’ may have its ambitions (and a score by Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan), but its adolescent eagerness to offend is what lingers." --John Anderson, Newsday