Review of Dopamine (2003) by Sydnie J — 19 Aug 2004

When I was gathering my thoughts to do this review, I figured that I would lead off with something like "[i]Dopamine [/i]isn't a bad movie...". But then, the more I thought about it, I thought to myself: "well, yes it was!".

There are gonna be people - the "anything if it's INDIE!" crowd - who will disagree with me on this. Which is fine. Look, [i]even though [/i]most Hollywood films are indeed pretty shallow and appeal strictly to Joe Six-Pack and [i]even though [/i]independent films are a worthy and artistic way to use film... [i]Just because [/i]it's an independent film, that doesn't make it "good".

This film absolutely falls into that category. It tries to be smarter than it is and comes across sounding more like the endless quasi-intellectual banter my friend James and I used to engage in in pretentious coffee houses when we were in high school than an actual intelligent, cohesive story. The pacing is slow and tedious and I found it hard to care about the characters or this problems. And ironically enough, even though this film tries it's best to "out-indie" itself, the actual storyline is as formulaic as can be.

If you want to see a film about intellectual types falling in love and discussing it "within the confines of society's artifical construct of serial monogomy", I'd prefer that you watched [i]The Shape of Things[/i]. It's not [b][i]that [/i][/b]much better, but it's more watchable and has Rachel Weisz in it to boot.