Product Details

• Actors: Jason Schwartzman, John Leguizamo, Patrick Fugit, Brittany Murphy, Mena Suvari
• Directors: Jonas Åkerlund
• Writers: Creighton Vero, Will De Los Santos
• Producers: Ash R. Shah, Bradford L. Schlei, Chris Fisher, Chris Hanley, Clark McCutchen
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: January 6, 2004
• Run Time: 101 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00009Q4WR
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #274,723 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Rated R version

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you don't understand this movie..., December 26, 2006

By 

allicat - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spun (Unrated Version) (DVD)

So, most people have never experienced anything close to the heavy drug use depicted in this film.

At first glance, Spun is exceedingly obscene and pornographic, and the editing is enough to make anyone dizzy. However, not only does it excellently depict the drug sensations, the movie has a moral as well. I fully believe that the lack of character development and plot (according to numerous critics) is intentional -- drug abuse doesn't just suddenly get a happy ending, nor does it have any essential purpose beyond the feelings of the drugs.

And in the end, that's what this movie delivers: the experience of a pointless week-long meth binge, and a glimpse at the kind of life few of us would believe exists. Imagine the events of Spun expanded into a year, many years -- people actually live this way, losing days like drops in a bucket of water, doing what they can to get the next high. Extremely important things are simply forgotten, drama explodes as the drugs twist emotions..

There are so many elements of this movie that are thought-provoking, when you get past the layers of grime and tweak editing. A great many people won't care to get past the surface, and understandably so.. You might have seen this kind of depravity in the first half of A Clockwork Orange, but never presented in such a visceral way. Beneath the surface is a silent cautionary tale -- everything from constantly blinking Fasten Seatbelts lights to Ross taking another bump as you cringe "again??" and prepare for another sensory assault..

If this film takes you nowhere, perhaps that is exactly the point.

Love the presentation, 5 stars =)

58 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wakeup Call, September 11, 2003

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spun (Unrated Version) (DVD)

A wide-awakeup call, in fact. About five days worth. That's the amount of 24 hour cycles, Ross, the central character spins through in this relentless movie. Yes, this film is derivative. Shades of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (the animation sequences, especially), David Lynch's Lost Highway (a repeated shot of the dark, empty highway ahead, illuminated only by the car's headlights), D.J. Caruso's The Salton Sea (also about tweakers, with Mickey Rourke here substituting for Vincent D'Onofrio as Mr. Space Cowboy, menace 2 society, honkeytonk hairtrigger), and Darren Aranofsky's cutting-edge, Requiem for a Dream (similar downward spiralling of characters and not too dissimilar an ending).

So why the five stars, you ask? Because this film, while borrowing heavily from its sources, is still entirely original and innovative. Swedish born director, Jonas Akerlund has taken his music video sensibility and "tweaked" it to an extreme, combining visual and aural sensations in entirely novel ways. The camera work must be seen to be believed. Reviewers who denigrate the script are missing the point. This movie is about the camera. This is not herky-jerky, cinema verite, hand held camera work we're talking about here. This is carefully story-boarded, minutely crafted creativity at play. There are shots that could only have occured to a director who is either as crazy as his characters are (or as drug addled) or to someone possessing something along the lines of cinematic genius. Maybe it's a combination of all these. As this is Akerlund's first foray into feature films, I guess we'll just have to wait for his next movie (Lords of Dogtown, in pre-production) to decide. Don't worry yourselves about from whom, or from what, Akerlund is borrowing. Real artists worth their salt openly acknowledge that they're only building on the works of those who have come before them. I have a sneaking suspicion that Akerlund might be an artist to reckon with in the future.

BEK

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Burning the Candle at Both Ends, January 18, 2005

By 

Ian Vance (pagosa springs CO.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spun (Unrated Version) (DVD)

I decided to rent this film after reading reports of a serious methamphetamine epidemic in my hometown. Already having some brief experience with this scene and its denizens - some acquaintances of mine in college indulged/abused the substance - I pretty much knew what to expect, and in that regard *Spun* hit all the right notes, reconfirming the horrid extremities that make up this by-the-moment existence of abuse, degradation and constant, unsatisfied addiction.

*Spun* chronicles three days ("three? or four? or three?") in the transient lives of So-Cal tweakers. The characters are vividly drawn, complete with excellent costume-garb and cartoonish titles. We begin with: the paranoid dealer Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), his filthy girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari), and a necronerd ADD poseur by the name of Frisbee. These, however, are periphery to the triumvirate of Ross (Jason Schwartzman), a greasy-looking everyman; Nikki (Brittany Murphy) a implausible-fit methhead whom he meets at Spider Mike's, and her paramour The Cook (Mickey Rourke), a meth-chemist, pusher and stoned philosopher. The `plot' consists of this cast scoring, snorting, smoking and/or shooting their drug of choice, and how, afterward, the ways they seek to acquire more tweak and/or cope with said lifestyle.

To be more specific, the main thread of *Spun* hinges around Ross carting Nikki and The Cook about in his battered Volvo on various missions, scoring little bags of dope as a reward. "How long have you managed to stay up on this stuff?" Ross asks The Cook during one such errand. "Twelve or thirteen days," Mickey Rourke replies in a typical performance: the cowboy-burnout, world-weary and impeccably `cool': but this method of madness actually enhances *Spun* tremendously. Rourke gives a standout performance in his career, and the tenuous relationship of mentor/protégé between Ross and The Cook slowly exposes, by jerk and twitter, the unifying thread by which these people manage to make it day-in, day-out: burning the candle at both ends, looking ever forward to the next hit and ignoring the damage wrought in the meantime.

It's rather unfortunate that *Spun* borrows quite heavily from a number of films, for the audience finds itself forced to compare the movie with its predecessors. *Requiem for a Dream* is the most obvious influence, with the constant eye-surge shots and several key editing techniques, as is *Trainspotting* - the opening monologue practically invites comparison - and indeed, the juxtaposition of grimy addiction-subsistence and zany humor makes *Spun* a photo negative of the latter example. *Trainspotting* worked in large part to its `lust for life', the strangely uplifting quality to the writing and character development. The same cannot be said for this film: despite moments of earned levity and some truly bizarre animation sequences (the video-game hallucination standing out as particularly disturbing to these eyes), *Spun* is dark, negative and grim - just like meth - but it fails to successfully balance its humor and drama, struggling to find even ground in the integration of tragedy and comedy.

This unevenness is epitomized in the undercover cop subplot, which should have been excised from the film in my opinion, or at least radically reworked. For 1) it's not particularly funny, at least not anywhere near as funny as it tries to be 2) it's a cliché 3) it comes off contrived, breaking the spell of the movie, and 4) the attempted parody - 70's style copper-drama editing and dialogue - serves in ultimately subverting the pain and emotive catharsis intrinsic in the meth-abuse material.

Still, the way the director manages to combine and build upon his varied influences suggests an artist who has skillfully emulated and synthesized these elements a la Quintin Tarentino; hopefully on future films he will be able to step beyond homage and fashion something (breathtakingly) original. Above all else, *Spun* certainly shows promise.

~Potential Spoilers:~
The last image, beautifully shot, can be taken literally... but I wonder, given the (general) competence The Cook displays throughout. Rather, I prefer to see it as a symbol for how these addicts subsist: fuel for the constant burn.
~End Spoilers~

World religions tend to focus on the dichotomy of a Heaven and a Hell - tranquility for the blessed, punishment for the wicked. In my view, Heaven and Hell is a metaphor for how people choose to spend their lives; and for a fairly accurate scrutiny of Hell in its refined form, look no further than *Spun* and its assortment of damned souls. One glimpse should be enough.