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List Price: $27.98 | | Label: THINKFilm
Salesrank: 5739
Released: May 20, 2008 |
| Our Price: $12.99 |
| Used Price: $6.33 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
In this powerful film four very different people on the edge of desperation are unexpectedly linked by their destinies. A top-notch cast featuring Forest Whitaker Andy Garcia Kevin Bacon Brendan Fraser Sarah Michelle Gellar and Emile Hirsch unforgettably brings to life the stories of a clairvoyant gangster a rising pop star an unlikely bank robber and a doctor desperate to save the love of his life. Filled with surprising twists and turns this suspenseful action-filled drama employs both brutal violence and aching poetry in a moving exploration of the search for happiness in a gritty urban world.System Requirements:Running Time: 95 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 014381493924 Manufacturer No: TF4939DVD
Description of The Air I Breathe:
Every so often a crime drama with delusions of existential grandeur comes ambling down the pike. Sometimes, as in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, a philosophically-inclined filmmaker strikes cinematic gold. If video director Jieho Lee's erratic debut falls short of that estimable mark, he can't be faulted for lack of ambition. Set in an anonymous urban metropolis and divided into the four pillars of life--happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love--The Air I Breathe means to illustrate Henry Ward Beecher's opening epigram: "No emotion, anymore than a wave, can long retain its own individual form." A mild-mannered stockbroker representing happiness (The Last King of Scotland's Forest Whitaker) kickstarts this disquisition into destiny when he decides to take a risk (all four principals are unnamed). Inspired by a coolly confident client who stands for pleasure (Brendan Fraser), he places an unwieldy bet on a fixed race, attracting the attention of sadistic loan shark Fingers (Andy Garcia, doing his best Al Pacino impression). Fraser's character reports to the latter, who manages sorrowful pop star "Trista" (Sarah Michelle Gellar, last seen in the equally strange Southland Tales). The psychic henchman also looks after his employer's motormouth nephew, Tony (an uncharacteristically unconvincing Emile Hirsch). The lovelorn doctor (Kevin Bacon) who treats the hitman after an injury turns to Trista when his best friend's wife (Julie Delpy) falls ill. Whew. Inconsistent acting and clunky dialogue aside, The Air I Breathe infuses conventional genre thrills with introspection to intermittently engaging effect. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
The Air I Breathe Reviews:
A film of substance 
2008-08-15 - If you like light weight films like "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle "or "Pineapple Express", this film is not for you." The Air I Breath" is a film that explores how our actions affect others, in ways, that we can not begin to imagine. The film follows what happens when a man take an unforseen action that ends in tragety for himself, but ultimately ends in joy for another, through a series of events in the lives of the characters in the film. It starts a little slow, but picks up speed taking you on roller coaster ride of emotion and pathos as you
are involved in the lives of people caught in the slipstream of anothers
seeming random act. The acting was first rate with Fraser, Whitaker, Gellar, and Garcia give outstanding performances. This is the kind of film Hollywood used to be famous for.
Very intirguing movie. Nice piece of celluloid. 
2008-08-13 - The stellar cast by itself would be enough to spice one's curiosity. Come on, Fraser, Garcia, Gellar, Whitaker, Bacon, Delpy, Hirsch... It's unresistible.
But, as the saying goes, the road to hell is full of good intentions, and this low-budget project could be a catastrophe. But it is not. The movie is farily good, captivating. All the actors involved give solid performances, no matter how much screen time they got.
Good movie.
Emotions like waves are constantly in flux...
2008-08-04 - The Air I Breathe is a movie of the entangled lives genre, similar to Crash in that respect, and it also conforms by way of gratuitous violence and strip clubs it gladly flaunts. But that is not to say that the narrative lacks depth or emotional layers. The viewer becomes acquainted with three lives that will intertwine so as to lend freedom to a fourth in four vignettes titled: Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow and Love. These characters, respectively played by Forest Whitaker, the disgruntled Wall Street clerk turned bank robber and suicidal sociopath; Brendan Fraser, a reticent hitman who seems to have lost his ability to predict the future as he decides to forsake fealty to his heartless crime lord (Andy Garcia); Kevin Bacon, a doctor who saves the life of Trista, a persecuted pop-star, and is thereby enabled to save from a snake bite his best-friend's wife (Julie Delpy), with whom he also happens to be secretly in love; and Sarah Michelle Gellar's pop tart, Trista, who becomes entangled favourably by the three lives but will lose everything in the while, love, career, and friends.
This is the debut feature by Jieho Lee, a Korean-American director and screenwriter who wrote this script as a reflection to his journey in a "bimodal world". The cinematography is well suited by the description of bimodal, as the colors are very stark but a terrifying chiaroscuro breathes the presence of a dual tone universe which seems to preface the destiny we all have set out for us, but not independently of others. The acting is mediocre, but for the outstanding consummate performance of Andy Garcia, who seems to be getting better with time and roles, and the flaky, horned-up supercilious nephew of Garcia's role played by Emile Hirsch.
The movie bounces along several themes but seems to defragment a somber reality where death and debts seem to frustrate everyone who has a heart, and where life is held hostage by forces that threaten us at all times, from every angle.
The congruence of themes is intriguing but the direction fails to fully represent this enigma in ways that portray the meaningful (or lack thereof) essence of life, aside from the role of coincidence. It seems to have no meaning save for being a yarn tangled and reeled compact. Ultimately however the violence seems to be overbearing and inopportune to portray the pain of ordinary lives and extraordinary men, some of which inexplicably have the advantage to foresee the future. This last aspect of the movie is very clearly a deus ex machina, which functions effectively as a means to allegorize destiny, but it does not fit with the pragmatics of the narrative's realist outlook. I fault the writing for that, whereas it was clearly insightful by other turns. There are deaths upon deaths and several cars slamming into people. A practice which I've yet to see done as well as in the Mexican movie Amores Perros, which was also about debts.
Herein I think much of the movie fails as well: the restraint it practices in regards to theme of debts, as was the case with the theme of destiny. I enjoyed the movie and it does hold you riveted to the screen thanks to stories that intersect and diverge only to meet into the future of one pop-star who is running away from her past and her present. It could have been better, but it deserves to be viewed.
A movie with a lot of questions, too bad it does not know how to ask them...
great actors 
2008-08-03 - i watched this film mainly for the actors sarah michelle gellar,kevin bacon,brendan fraser, have to say it was a very weird story line 4 different story going at the same time and then they all link together,i think i would of liked to have seen more
Before the Bullet Enters 
2008-07-31 - Jieho Lee's first feature fell flat for me, winding up a chore to finish before the video return deadline. Brendan Fraser who is currently in another "Mummy" movie does a decent job as the love-struck hitman. I don't know why his name is Pleasure other than he gets to be intimate with Sorrow before Pleasure is whacked. Sarah Michelle Gellar, fresh from her Golden Globe nomination for TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" eight years ago, plays Sorrow, a rock star also named Trista. She's not actually a very good rock star, but she thinks she is. I wouldn't have bought her CD. She becomes even more sorrowful when her contract is forced into the hands of con-man Fingers played gruffly by Andy Garcia. Kevin Bacon who is in "Frost/Nixon" plays Love, a doctor who loves a doomed researcher named Gina played by the lovely Julie Delphy. Watching Delphy's hospital deathbed scene was the highlight of this depressing film for me. Happiness played by Oscar winner Forest Whitaker from The Last King of Scotland (Widescreen Edition) & Vantage Point (Single-Disc Edition) finds joy just before the bullet enters. This was a depressing flick notable for Brendan Fraser's fine performance and Julie Delphy's beauty. Taxi!
