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| Artisan Entertainment | Release Date: September 16, 1998 |
Starring:
Ben Stiller, Chauncey Leopardi, Elizabeth Hurley, Fred Willard, Jay Paulson, Lourdes Benedicto, Maria Bello, Mary Thompson, Owen Wilson, Spencer Garrett
Summary:
A comedy writer struggles to overcome his addiction to heroin.
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Permanent Midnight is a slick, entertaining, show-biz saga whose worst fault may be that it has a happy ending. Stahl has not only recovered from debauchery, he's making a ton of cash with his book and the movie. In fact, this may be as quintessential a morality tale for the nineties as the Monica Lewinsky story. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]
Despite some small narrative flaws, though, Stiller alone is reason to keep watching. It's a brave, scary and antic tour de force from a performer who, over the past few years, has been slowly banging his head against the glass wall of typecasting. In Permanent Midnight, the clown finally shatters the barrier and comes out the other side an actor.
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This cautionary tale, complete with the swank cars, cool clothes and depraved babes that inevitably accompany degradation Hollywood style, is based on former sitcom scribe Jerry Stahl's lurid tell-all memoir of his descent into heroin addiction. Under the witty surface, the moral seems to be "The devil made me do it." Even by sitcom standards, that's old.
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Permanent Midnight's Hollywood segments are clever and amusing, but the more Stahl's life unravels in his demeaning search for drugs, the more the film inevitably goes down along with it. Watching Stahl searching frantically for an unused vein in his neck with a baby fussing next to him (don't ask) may be unnerving, but it is far from irresistible.
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Perhaps if Jerry were a three-dimensional character, or the movie had focused on one plot instead of trying to do it all, Permanent Midnight might have been engaging. But in the end, all you see is another rich spoiled brat shoving tar up his arm, and at this point it's just too hard to care.
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Mar 28, 2023
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