The 25th Hour

This was an interesting movie. I liked it a lot, although I thought that the plot had some random parts. I still don't know if Naturelle sold out Monty. I also don't know how the movie ended. I like how it has a purposefully open ending; that made me think. I'd like to think that Monty and his dad did drive west, and that Monty eventually established a family there, but somehow I don't think so.

This film definitely had showed some clashing moral values. I would have expected myself to automatically dislike the drug-dealing character the most, but I really sympashizd with Monty. I thought it was interesting that other characters kept referring to how his money was earned through other people's suffering. The beginning of the film (where Monty is sitting with Doyle, around 0:08:00) was effective in that it showed how Monty really had profited from others' pain. It was strange to see Monty sitting with Doyle, a dog he went out if his way to rescue, ignore the desperate pleas of someone he used to deal drugs to. I even wondered once or twice if that guy was the one who turned Monty in, but I think it was Costa.

I didn't understand why, at 0:30:00, Naturelle never got busted for the drugs. The apartment was Monty's and hers, so I would have thought that she'd be punished too.

I have to say, I really hated the subplot with the teacher and the student. I thought it was completely unnecessary, overdone, and irrelevant to the film as a whole. At least the similar scenes in American Beauty are justified by the fact that they're important to the movie's plot. It also confused me to have all of that Ground Zero footage of the World Trade Center reconstruction--I didn't see what that was trying to prove.

Overall, I really enjoyed this movie. My favorite part was around 0:37:00 when Monty is cursing the city of New York. Even though the movie occasionally goes on irrelevant tangents, it's a great movie overall.