Kelly Hu Movie:

		List Price: $35.98		Label: Velocity / Thinkfilm Salesrank: 35079 Released: May 20, 2008
		Our Price: $11.05
		Used Price: $5.57
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: Blu-ray

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.

Description of The Air I Breathe [Blu-ray]:
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 [Blu-ray] Reviews:
It's a small world after all
2009-11-20 - I think this film was made by someone who really wanted to make a movie and then made the awful mistake of trying to learn 'how' to make one. The ambition of the first 20 minutes is completely disappointed by the rest of the film--like wearing cologne to go to work digging ditches, everything smelly-good quickly wears off, purged by the sweat of hard work. It shouldn't be such hard work. The whole 'random lives converging' thing just doesn't work out here. And it's not as simple as 'it's been done before.' The difference between something that looks like a trope or a cliche and something that is a trope or cliche (and thus laborious) is ownership. This film does far too much borrowing, and I had no reason internally to believe it had any direction or intention, much less to care.

As a positive note, I think the first 20 minutes would make a really neat music video or something.

I can live with that
2009-11-17 - Pros! Delivery was prompt and ahead of delivery time and the movie same in good condition.
Cons! There was a little glitch in the first quarter of the picture but i can live with that.
C.Ruben Rep of Trinidad and Tobago W.I.

Smart pretentious mess
2009-07-17 - What a magnificent cast: Whitaker (great here!), Bacon (bland), Garcia (diabolical), Fraser (brooding), Hirsch (crazy), Delpy (absent)... Even SM Gellar turns out to be a decent actress when not chasing monsters.
And what an uneven, messy and yet intelligent film. The right one for a slightly soaked philosophical late night. Pretentious existentialist brooding: what does it all mean?

4 interrelated crime episodes: Happiness (Whitaker), Pleasure (Fraser), Sorrow (Gellar) and Love (Bacon), connected by common denominator Garcia as evil incarnated, the loan shark, horse race manipulator, protection racketeer, show biz bulldozer.

Whitaker's is the most solid stand- alone story: the unsatisfied bank clerk who takes a risk and has his life run away with him into scenarios that he would never dream of.
Fraser is the main philosopher around, involved in 3 of the 4 episodes. He is the psychic strong arm of the bad guys, who has a distaste for his chosen profession. As long as he can see the future, if only for a short span, he never loses a fight. But happiness, if short lived, comes only with the loss of special talents... Pretentious, isn't it.

Don't watch it when you are entirely sober or when you expect something that makes complete sense. On other days, it is splendid entertainment.

What a great movie
2009-05-15 - This movie was on my Netflix list and when I got it I didn't even know what the movie was about (I just put it on my list because I love Brendan Frasier). As soon as I watched the movie I bought it.

What a great movie! Suspense, sadness, drama, amazing acting. I cried. Absolutely recommended.

Thought provoking, intriguing, intense. Leading Thespians chose it, SO search for what they felt so compelled to tell.
2009-04-20 -
This film fits the "Crash" formula, although it's hardly a prizewinner - which is not to say it's awful. The movie takes itself way too seriously, and it doesn't add up to much, but, nevertheless, it's borderline entertaining and philosophically stimulating. The performances have a certain tanginess. Perhaps the stars felt freer than usual because, thanks to the film's episodic structure, none of them had to carry the entire movie.

Its layered, interconnected and thought provoking. Definitely allegorical and disturbingly real.

The first of four episodes focuses on a mousy, unhappy businessman (Forest Whitaker, convincingly pathetic) who overhears a tip on a horse race. He tries to change his life by taking a loan from mobsters and betting it all on a horse. Along the way, this man encounters a mob henchman (Brendan Fraser, strong and often silent), and we eventually discover that he can see the future. The second section of the film concerns what happens when the mob kingpin (a commanding Andy Garcia) assigns this henchman the task of keeping an eye on his out-of-control nephew (Emile Hirsch, amusingly amok).

In part four, an up-and-coming singer (Sarah Michelle Gellar, effectively distraught) abruptly learns that the kingpin has acquired her management contract. She wants nothing to do with him but discovers that his desire to control her career is the kind of offer you can't refuse.

The final segment concerns a doctor (a properly pensive Kevin Bacon) who loves a woman (Julie Delpy, appropriately angelic) who suddenly finds herself at death's door. It's up to the doctor to devise a plan to save her - a plan that somehow includes the singer from the previous segment. And to keep the story spinning round and round, it turns out that the singer has a connection to the businessman from the first segment.

If this sounds rather contrived, it is. And the various parts of the story don't robviously fit together.

The performances give the film a lift. And if the accomplished, eclectic cast was not enough to put The Air I Breathe in contention for a major award, it certainly could help to make you a winner the next time you play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.