Best films about drug use and addiction?

[piradical]

Who'll Stop The Rain. Better than super incredibly good. Tuesday Weld gets the drug zone down. Nick Nolte controls the screen. The writer and the book capture how it was, drug life at that time.
The French Connection. A BIG film. Putting a deal together, being smart, out witting the cops and out classing them. Pretty true to life.

[Popinjay]

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I skipped 5 pages of this thread, but nobody had mentioned Traffic.

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Wrong.

[j555]

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The French Connection. A BIG film. Putting a deal together, being smart, out witting the cops and out classing them. Pretty true to life.

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Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies. The 2nd one isn't as good as the first, but it deals more with the drug addiction side. Hackman gives a superb performance and his heroin withdrawal scenes are very compelling.

[Blarg]

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Who'll Stop The Rain. Better than super incredibly good. Tuesday Weld gets the drug zone down. Nick Nolte controls the screen. The writer and the book capture how it was, drug life at that time.
The French Connection. A BIG film. Putting a deal together, being smart, out witting the cops and out classing them. Pretty true to life.

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Very good movie. Excellent contribution by Richard Masur, too, who was such a reliable commodity every work you saw him in, back then.

[rpr]

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I was waiting to see anything remotely like Tarantino come out for a long time, and it's still far from common. By that I mean showing people into drugs are not all evil, and certainly not all the time. I'd just suggest that drug dealers not be turned into cartoons, nor the people who use drugs into victims or idiots or both, if you want to give a feeling of welcome verisimilitude. Tarantino showed you can do that even when hyping the action and absurdity way up. It can feel real even when it's very unlikely to be, if you do it right. The after-school portrayal of everything druggy has long been bankrupt and an instant ticket to irrelevance. I guess I'm saying, these stories are so much more interesting and true to life when they aren't cheap and full of paint-by-numbers predictable attitudes and events. Leave your characters the room to live and breathe in your script rather than talking down to the audience, and your flick will be so much better.

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This is exactly what the goal is. This person was probably the hardest partier in the 20th century. Younger people likely have a caricature-view of him. However, the people who really knew him describe an entirely different person. He did do a few very bad things which he paid for but nothing he did eclipses the intellect, spirituality and genius that he possessed.

Most drug-related films have a message and it's usually crafted poorly. There's probably more people who do drugs (or have) that are normal rather than evil, stupid or victims.

With this person his drug use was beyond excessive but the story isn't about a moral message. It's about the real person behind the legend. Something a normal person could relate to -- universal human ideals. It's certainly going to have a lot of wild grandiose scenes but there's more to him than just the drugs and ego.

[Blarg]

Good. If you make him a whole person he will be so much more interesting. I think a character should have something about him that makes him feel like he could run out of the room at any minute and live his own life, but you have to rope him back into the story sometimes because it's just THIS part of his life you want to tell at the moment. I like characters who still have some surprise in them, something I may not be ready for and that is a bit out of the box of my preconceptions sometimes. Just like real people. If I always know what they're going to say next, I start to tune out and feel they are "crafted" rather than real. Pat attitudes about drugs are an instant ticket outta there, for me, as by far most people I know who have taken drugs are exactly like everybody else.

[John Cole]

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The only oedipal film I can recall.

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DB,

Then you must have missed Angel Heart, Alan Parker's brilliant retelling of Oedipus Rex.

[John Cole]

Drugstore Cowboy at least has William Burroughs going for it. Loved The Man with the Golden Arm, another Code-challenging film from Otto Preminger, severely underrated today, I think.

One aside: a friend and colleague mentioned one night that he was stranded in a snowstorm for a weekend at Nelson Algren's house. He was quite young at the time, and when he saw a Black woman serve Algren a drink, he asked for a martini. The woman glared at him and said, "Get your own f***ing drink." Somehow, he thought she was hired help; turns out it was Algren's wife.

[Blarg]

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The only oedipal film I can recall.

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DB,

Then you must have missed Angel Heart, Alan Parker's brilliant retelling of Oedipus Rex.

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I usually look for these things, but Oedipal things never occurred to me with Angel Heart. I don't recall any mother figures or father murdering, though he did kill his friend, as I recall, and go after a sexy young black girl. I'll have to watch for this when I next see the flick.

[samsdmf]

Withnail and I deals with drug use/alcohol abuse, although it is really a film about friendship/ circumstances it deserves mention here if only to highlight the other end of the spectrum from the Dark, downbeat films that are common in this style of filmmaking.