Dotbankey A lot of fun.

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kamini Abdool Is it limerick or should we say it's prose? The movie "Basketball Diaries" is a great one of childhood friends as depicted by Mark Wahlberg, Leonardo DiCaprio and others as they grow up hoping to achieve recognition on the courts as well as remain friends, grow into good lovers, and tackle society in their midst. There presence together and apart challenges themselves and each other to recognize their demons and remove them to be able to move on with each other in a sportsmanlike fashion. The story is fashioned to be a parody of puberty in a sense I think but for the boy, and not the girl. It is a funny story about how boys grow up, the mistakes the make or might make and the challenges that could possibly face growing up. It reaches for goals as they would and then get disappointed with them and embraces them as they do it, challenging them along the way giving nothing but heartfelt recognition to the plight of boyhood but in a tough kinda way.

Sarah Mueller This film isn't for everyone, you either hate it or love it. It sometimes lacks that constant up-beat easy to watch feel that certain types of audiences need to enjoy a film and is replaced with brutal honesty.The performances from all of the actors were outstanding, with Leonardo DiCaprio performing some of the best acting I have ever seen. His portrayal of Jim was so real and raw that he gave so much of himself to the role that it began to look effortless. So many scenes in this movie were beautifully done. A few stand out moments to name: The basketball scene in the rain, every confrontation between Jim and his mother, and the Withdrawal scene where once again Leo gives a spine tingling performance. If you want to enjoy The Basketball diaries you must go into it with an open mind and take the film for what it is. It isn't a fancy, modern, stylized, glamorized film about drugs but rather an honest, raw, bold and touching movie about the self-destruction of a boy who falls head first into the harrowing world of drug addiction. This movie for me is an overlooked, underrated piece of art. Which is why I love it. I wouldn't change one thing about it.

david-sarkies There was a huge uproar regarding this movie because of a scene where the main character walks into his classroom and starts gunning everybody down with a shotgun. As is typical everybody has missed the whole point of the movie. It is not designed to encourage school shootings, but to show people what heroin is really like. When it comes to violence on television and video games then I will repeat what was said to me once, not that anybody will listen - people are so stubborn that once that have a mindset, no amount of reason will change their mind. Anyway, before television there was an awful lot of violence - the Napoleonic Wars, the thirty years war, the crusades, and even World War I: probably one of the most violent of wars. Even then before literature or even the written language, Cain killed Abel, and he did not do it because a video game made him think that it was a good idea. Violence is apart of our nature and we do it because we are frustrated with the world and the way people react to us. It is basic to our nature, and I am not saying that it is alright, but rather stopping violence in the media is not going to change anything.The Basketball Diaries is about a heroin addict. We follow his life from when he becomes one to when he finally gives up. Even though he does not start off as a heroin addict, he is still taking drugs, or rather sniffing glue. He, Jim Carol, hangs with three other friends and they simply act like teenagers with a lot of energy. Jim is also a champion basketball player. There is a darker side to his life and that is that his best friend is dying of Leukemia. He does not want to believe it, but it is reality and once he dies things slowly begin to change. We are not sure what really happens, but I guess it has something to do with the realisation that they are no longer immortal. But that is not the main reason, it more has to do with the pain and the loss that he suffers after his friend dies, and it is not something that they could have fought against - in fact he was powerless to do anything about it. The realisation of ones weakness is a true humbliser.Starting the addiction is not focused that heavily on in the movie, but his first trip is, and it shows him running through a field of flowers. It is more that he describes how all of his pain has gone away - both the emotional and the physical. This is the thing about Heroin - it is one of the world's best painkillers, but it is also an incredibly addictive drug. What we see is how his life collapses around him as he becomes addicted to Heroin. He is kicked out of school, slowly looses his friends as they are each arrested for various crimes, and finally he himself is taken away as he lies in a pathetic heap before the door to his mothers' apartment. Near the end we even see him resort of Homosexuality, something that horrifies him, especially when he is molested by the basketball coach, to get money for drugs. This is further undermined when the drugs he purchases are fake.The Basketball Diaries is an incredible movie and shows something that we wish to ignore. The school shooting scene is not all that bad, and more shows his frustration with life and the way the drugs take away this frustration - but at a cost. It is something that has been taken right out of proportion and as such people take the wrong idea about the film.

jzappa 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.