Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The film brings us to the late 60s teenagers everyday life from a New York City in the USA. The main actor is Jim and his friends from catholic school are on the best basketball team in New York. Parallel with this Jimmy writes his thoughts into his small diary including his experiments with drugs, that lead him to addiction and erects huge problems with rehabilitation. He lost everything that he had before and nobody could help or give him an advice. The main idea is that even if you have a dream and all possibilities and qualities to receive it, you can lose everything with one decision, which will have consequences in another part of your life. My favorite scene is where Jim went to his friend Bobby demonstrated to him that Bobby important to him. It was also very hard psychological moment, when he started to fight and wouldn't give up to make his life as it used to be. And I also like the scene, where he stays alone and starts to write poetry or only his thoughts in his diary, which hit to the depths of the soul and help audience Toto visit his skin and feel the same.

Now this movie- oh boy, it's a toughie. If you haven't seen this movie yet, see it AS SOON AS YOU CAN. Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Jim Carroll is spot on. It seems that he really has an addiction to cocaine and heroin. Yes, he was trained by a coach to study the physical and mental side effects of drugs, but other than that he was a- mazing. Mark Wahlberg was okay, too, I guess. But he was actually addicted to cocaine when he was a teen, so it was easier for him. You think Trainspotters is good? Check this out! It will definitely make you think twice about drug and alcohol abuse, trust me. If you struggled with drugs in previous years, you'll fully understand this plot. Although it isn't 100% accurate to the book, I think Mr Kalvert did a good job. So watch this movie ASAP. If you dislike DiCaprio, this will change your thoughts.

The Basketball Diaries, is a harrowing journey, which in it's 102 minute time, we feel we've been to hell and back, it's final scene, where Jim Carrol had finally got his s..t together, reminiscent of the final scene in Stella Does Tricks, where like Jim, she addressed her young audience about her journey, through drugs and prostitution. This is the no holes barred look at the destruction of a man who had a talent for words, and what we've go through with him, is something we're glad we never endured. De Caprio shows us again here, what a brilliantly dramatic actor he is. There were moments he was so real, I was getting goosebumps. But we must give thanks to another great actor in the prime of his career, Underestimated ex Calvin Klein model, Mark Wahlberg. When not having seen the film for years, I forgot just how bloody good he was in this, almost on par with Leo, where as Jim's best friend, Mickey, saw him plummet harder with his drug addiction. Like Leo's, it's an engrossing performance. TBD is not for everyone, especially people easily affected by the drug scene, which as I said before, it's is a frank film on the subject. The dream sequence, that has Leo bursting into a classroom, opening fire on his friends, while letting out a howl of anger, was one of a couple of scenes that earned an R. It's a quite violent and frank scene, be warned. Of course, this notorious scene was the one suspected as the inspiration, or trigger for that very similar classroom shooting, two years later. The film really hones in on the desperation of that need, that fix for drugs, where money sometimes has to be earned in degrading ways. De Caprio fully embraced this role, like he does many others, although the film's well acted by everyone, especially Bracco as Jim's long suffering Mum you really feel for, and wish to hell she could help him, looking many years older than her younger self in Goodfellas. The film which has suffered some scathing reviews, which I myself believe, it could of been better, may'be stretched out to two hours, as to add some more input, to tell this tale of a hellish nightmare, where still like it is the film is bloody effective and poignant. Too, I found the film, besides being confronting, quite an entertaining view, due to Jim and his wild, but mostly funny exploits with his mates, which includes barfing on an innocent passenger below deck on a Statton Island ferry, the after effect of yes: meth sniffing. It good to see these troubled teens beat the odds, where only just learning of the demise of the gaunt faced Carroll, took me by surprise. Very recommended viewing.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries tells in tattered detail how the author went in a few short months from being a Catholic high school basketball star to being a strung-out heroin addict who turned tricks for drugs. Like many such stories, it hangs fondly over the shock and repulsion, and ends with unbecoming quickness after contentment is recovered. Will there ever be a venue for a film about a character who skips through his drug period because he's so excited to show us what he did after he pulled his socks up? Not likely. If there's anything more tiresome than a scandalous parable with a lesson at the end, it's the lesson minus the parable.And so this reverential flounder in the sewer of narcissism shows us profusely that if you become addicted to drugs, you're prone to discover yourself living distraughtly on the streets, selling a body that looks increasingly less like a worthwhile purchase. Carroll was a kid who notwithstanding his misery attempted to develop his experience into prose. The snag with Scott Kalvert's film is that he's apt to translate the experiences too literally: Jim is so urgently pale and miserable that the idealism feels vain. He plays basketball at night in the rain after his best friend dies of leukemia, and it just looks wholly contrived, fake and banal, not poignant.As the film begins, Jim is on the basketball team at a Catholic high school in New York, where a depraved priest drools while spanking disobedient students with a full-size paddle and the class cringes rhythmically. This scene's more indebted to Victorian pornography than to any real private school in 20th century America. Jim and his friends are not upright Catholic boys. They steal from the lockers of the opposing basketball team, and the preferred off-court activity is experimenting with inhalants and pills. Swifty, the coach played by Bruno Kirby, makes implausible passes at Jim. And Jim's mother, played by a sadly wasted Lorraine Bracco, is a crudely flat character who functions here exclusively to implement tough love by kicking him out.Life for Jim is a descending coil of pills, cough medicine, booze, diving off cliffs into the Harlem River, fainting during a game and masturbating on the roof. There are also stirring gleans into the underbelly of users, pushers, hookers and pimps, as Jim floats at large from his comfort zones, while recording all in his diary. Jim's writing predictably operates as a narration. Like most poetry written by teenagers, it's childish idealism, agonizingly earnest, seeing life as sad because the writer's not happy. Soon though, he samples heroin, and "any ache, pain, sadness or guilt was completely flushed out." Remarkable, how real life unravels exactly like the movies.The movie hinges on three hard-wearing formulas: Jim facilitates his dying friend's temporary escape from the hospital so he can push his wheelchair down 42nd Street, Jim sees his ex-teammate on TV playing in an all-star game while Jim is in a squalid bar and, of course, Jim is rescued by a dignified black man, who finds him out cold, brings him home and puts him through cold turkey. In accounts like this, you can continuously rely on a laudable black ex-hoodlum, combing the streets for distressed white kids, functioning for white tolerance soap-boxing purposes as hidden supplies of authenticity and honor.DiCaprio does what he can with the role. Ernie Hudson is solid as the ex-junkie, and there is genuine feeling in Bracco's underwritten mother. But it's Juliette Lewis, as a greasy hooker, who once again taps an utterly real edge. But the movie is not credible. By the end, Jim is seen going in through a stage door, and then we hear him telling the story of his decline and recuperation. We can't determine if this is intended to be actual acknowledgment or a show: That's the whole movie's trouble.While the film has a preachy earnestness more like older films that take drug issues in hand, its mercilessly murky concentration on the despair of drug abuse makes for effective, gripping viewing, if only for purely morbid interest. The teen years, an age of revolt and insecurity in the best of conditions, can be shocking when an individual gets that carried away. This stark, muddled film depicts this, with reductive prurience indeed, but also with brutalizing efficacy.