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Directed by Darren Aronofsky Written by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky Starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans Classification: R Rating: **½

Written and directed by Richard Dutcher Starring Matthew Brown, Richard Dutcher Classification: PG Rating: **

Two years ago, Darren Aronofsky introduced Pi, a bizarre, audacious, black-and-white movie, at the Sundance Film Festival. A paranoid thriller about a brilliant Jewish mathematician in an obsessive religious pursuit, it wasn't your ordinary night at the multiplex. His second film, Requiem For a Dream, proves he hasn't lost his edge.

The problem is that Requiem For a Dream is all edge: There's a pounding score by the Kronos Quartet; hallucinogenic fantasy sequences; stroboscopic montages of crystals, needles, bloodstreams and dilating pupils; and a soundtrack that's a hip-hop barrage of growls, squelches, scratches and shrieks. There are even moments when the entire screen appears to be going into convulsions. For all its aggressive novelty, Requiem For a Dream often seems oddly old-fashioned, combining a naive fifties' hysteria about drugs and mental illness ( The Snake Pit, The Lost Weekend) with a late-sixties fondness for trippy expressionist filmmaking.

At the centre of the cinematic maelstrom is an operatic performance by Ellen Burstyn as Sara, a lonely, overweight, Brighton Beach widow, who spends her days sunning in front of her apartment with the other old Jewish women. Then, she gets a chance to be on a television show and becomes strung out on diet pills in her desperation to lose 50 pounds so she can fit into her favourite red dress. At the same time, her son, Harry (a skeletal Jared Leto), is a junkie who spends his time between his girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connolly), an aspiring designer, and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), who helps Harry pawn his mother's television so they can buy drugs.

Based on a novel by Hubert Selby Jr. ( Last Exit to Brooklyn), who co-wrote the screenplay, the film is an exercise in sustained hysteria that quickly becomes numbing. The characters' "dreams" (all echoes of the big American Dream) set the cataclysmic plot in motion. Sara, strung out on speed and with her hair dyed to match her dream dress, bounces around her apartment like Bozo the clown on a pogo stick. Harry and Tyrone, in their attempts to transform themselves from users to dealers, turn into hollow-eyed dope fiends. Characters are shot from above to suggest their smallness, or through a fisheye lens to look grotesque.

Soon, Sara's amphetamine addiction leads to a psychotic breakdown. The refrigerator is roaring at her and braying TV hosts have stepped out of the screen into her shabby apartment to laugh at her. Harry and Tyrone get ripped off, causing Marion to sleep with her dweeby former therapist for quick cash. Then things start to get really out of control.

In the final sequence, with enough crosscutting between four storylines to impress D. W. Griffiths, the movie hurtles toward its shrieking finale. Sara's burnout happens simultaneously with Marion's sexual degradation (she stars in a lesbian sex show, shot like a descent into the maw of Hell, which earned the film an NC-17 rating in the United States). Meanwhile, we have the progressive deterioration of Harry's gruesomely abscessed arm and Tyrone's drug withdrawal in a Southern prison.

All this Sturm und Drang is intended to be emotionally devastating, but is instead just gratingly histrionic. There's a relish in Aronofsky's depiction of the characters' suffering that speaks of anything but sympathy. At best, they're little better than puppets in his hyperstylized creep show. Requiem For a Dream may be like nothing you've ever seen before, but for a real trip to an alternate universe, you can't beat God's Army, a Mormon propaganda film that, for some reason, is showing in mainstream theatres. Perhaps distributors noticed the success of Mormon director Neil LaBute ( Nurse Betty) and decided to cash in on a possible trend.

If you don't happen to believe -- as the film's director Richard Dutcher does -- that Jesus Christ visited the Americas after his resurrection and established the Church of the Latter Day Saints, you may find it difficult to fully appreciate God's Army. The real joy of this professionally made, if unrelievedly corny, movie, consists in watching the young missionaries converting non-believers to the faith.

The movie opens with the arrival of the golden-curled, 19-year-old Brandon Allen (Matthew Brown) in the modern Sodom of Los Angeles, from his native Kansas. "You're not in Kansas any more," says one boyish Mormon friend after another, displaying an affection for and knowledge of The Wizard of Oz that would be considered gay in any other movie. But that would be finding an irony that is utterly at odds with the spirit of God's Army.

Having been given a room in a household full of men (all in white shirts, ties, pressed black slacks and name tags), Brandon falls under the tutelage of Elder Dalton (Dutcher), who is known as "Pops" because he's all of 29. Pops becomes Brandon's spiritual guide.

Sex rears its head with the appearance of a number of wholesome young women who look like backup singers from Lawrence Welk's show. "If you don't look once, you're not a man; if you look twice, you're not a missionary," says Elder Dalton. Brandon does enjoy some wholesome flirting and theological chat. He avoids major pitfalls such as coffee drinking, a weakness that is preventing Brother Rose from baptism.

Over the course of the film, the Mormon boys face rejection at many doors, debate the tenets of their faith, suffer doubts and make some converts. Just to show they aren't a humourless bunch, they also photograph each other on the toilet and tell wildly offensive leper jokes. At other times, the movie stops briefly to answer Frequently Asked Questions About Mormons. The boys tell skeptical potential converts why the Mormon church refused black ministers up until 1978 and still doesn't allow women to preach. Finally, when Pops reveals he has terminal brain cancer and has dedicated the last few years of his life to teaching young men, Brandon finally sees the value of becoming a "soldier and martyr" for the Church. Somehow, you knew he'd get there.

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