PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

edwagreen Another film that literally goes up in smoke in this 1999 mess of a picture.Everyone is off to a party. There are 2 girls from Ronkonkoma who could easily be compared to Fran Drescher and her idiotic friend Val on the super television show "The Nanny." In fact, one of the girls is named Val.Ben Affleck as a supposed law-student, serving drinks, barely appears and when he does, he says little. How fortunate he is.Martha Plimpton is hosting the party and panicking by 9:30P.M. on the night of New Year's Eve when it appears that no one shows up. By the time they do, she is totally out of it and misses a night supposedly to remember.Kate Hudson steals the show as the girl so prone to accidents. This film is one big accident.These 20 year old guys abd gaks are completely immature, neurotic and heaven knows what else. The writing is absolutely miserable and Jan. 1 can't come fast enough.

gangstahippie MPAA Rating:Rated R for strong language and sexual content Quebec Rating:G Canadian Home Video Rating:14AI saw 200 Cigarettes yesterday night.I wanted to see it.I was born in 1992 but I really like the 1980's culture.Mostly the music.I find the 80's to be the best decade for music.This film has an all star cast featuring Courtney Love,Dave Chapelle,Kate Hudson,Paul Rudd,Elvis Costello as himself,Ben Affleck and plenty of others.200 Cigarettes takes place during New Years Eve in the year 1981.There are a bunch of different people all trying to get to the same New Years party.They each cope with problems of their own during that one New Years Eve day such as relationships.200 Cigarettes is a very interesting and good film and I recommend that you watch it if you're a fan of the 1980's.

MartianOctocretr5 A complete flop. This is one of those "people finding themselves in spite of themselves" type of stories. Lame script writing, unrealistic situations, dreadful overacting, and aimless direction lead this movie on a meandering voyage to nowhere.It's New Year's Eve, and some 20-somethings are having an overdue dose of coming-of-age, mentally, socially, etc. Already, I hear you snoring. Why should anyone care about losers who are 10 years behind in their intellectual development? The film engages on a wild dance between several groups of characters, each more dimwitted than the last, as they try to seek out some big "in people's party." We all know that we find ourselves by getting bombed on New Year's Eve, don't we? Every single character is a familiar "Dumb and Dumber" stereotype, and the pseudo-philosophical speeches they deliver fit these stooges about as well as The Gettysburg Address would fit being recited by Michael Jackson. The cornball link for the disparate group of random fools is that they're all chain smoking nerds. Inspired? Thought provoking? Maybe you'll be thinking about what you'll do after the film is mercifully over; that's about it.Nobody achieves anything useful, and the story just plods along until you have an epilogue sequence on New Year's morning, most of the characters waking up in strange beds, and realizing that they learned nothing from all of this. The audience ends up feeling the same way.

James Hitchcock Most of the film takes place during the evening of December 31st 1981, with the last few scenes set during the morning of January 1st 1982. There is not a great deal of plot other than an account of how a group of young people spend New Year's Eve in New York. The one linking thread is that most of them are on their way to a party being given by a mutual acquaintance named Monica, although we do not see much of the actual party itself. For most of the film, in fact, the neurotic, self-pitying Monica worries that none of her friends will actually turn up- even her best friend Hilary leaves- and that she will be forced to spend the entire evening arguing about her sex life with her equally self-pitying ex-boyfriend Eric, a Scottish artist who specialises in multicoloured close-ups of the female genitalia.A number of reviewers have wondered why it was necessary to set the film in the early eighties rather than the late nineties when it was made, speculating that this may have been a device to market a nostalgic soundtrack album. Certainly, we get to hear a lot of songs from the era by artists such as Blondie, Roxy Music, Kim Carnes and Elvis Costello (who makes a brief cameo appearance)- all of which took me straight back to my own college days- although I suspect that the real reason for choosing 1981/2 was that this represented the end of the carefree, pre-AIDS era.If the film has been set in, say, 1998/9 all the bed-hopping and partner-swapping that goes on would seem a lot less innocent. This is very much a film about sex. Some of the characters are looking for love, but most of them are just looking for sex. Most of them end up with a partner, although not always the one they started the film with. Monica dumped Eric because she found him inadequate in bed, but now worries that she will be unable to find another boyfriend. Val, Monica's young country cousin from Long Island, throws herself at every man she can find, overcome by the excitement of being in the big city. Lucy, a girl even more man-hungry than Val, tries to get off with a handsome young bartender and her (hitherto platonic) flatmate Kevin, who is depressed over the failure of his own relationship. Cindy, a naive and innocent girl, has just lost her virginity to the handsome but obnoxiously conceited Jack, a young man who complains that every girl who goes to bed with him falls in love with him. (He sees that as a major problem).Cindy, in fact, is one of the few attractive characters in the film. She is terminally clumsy and accident-prone (in one of the film's grosser moments she manages to slip over and land in a pile of dog-dirt), but there is at least a certain sincerity and sweetness about the way Kate Hudson plays her. (Justice is done when Cindy ends up with sensitive punk rocker Tom, about the only likable male character on view). Most of the other characters are an unlikeable bunch, whose main vices are self-centredness, arrogance, reckless promiscuity and an even more reckless tobacco addiction. (The early eighties may have been pre-AIDS but they were certainly not pre-lung cancer). The title presumably refers to the number of cigarettes the characters smoke between them. Is this some sort of product placement for Big Tobacco? The film has certain similarities with Barry Levinson's "Diner", another nostalgic film (in that case made in the eighties about the fifties) about a group of young friends in the period leading up to New Year. Both films are episodic in character and concentrate on character rather than action. "Diner", however, is by far the better film, the main reason being that the characters in that film emerge as rounded individuals, whereas the characters in "200 Cigarettes" are little more than one-dimensional ciphers. "Diner" concentrated on only half a dozen characters; the scriptwriter of "200 Cigarettes" made the mistake of trying to interest us in nearly twenty in a film lasting just over an hour and a half. There are really no stars of this film, just a long list of big-name actors in cameo roles.The film's other main weakness is that, although it is meant to be a comedy, the script is not really witty. The running dog-dirt-on-the-back-of- someone's-coat joke may be gross, but it is about the only memorable joke in the film, even if it is memorable for the wrong reasons. It must say something about a scriptwriter's lack of imagination when you are forced to include that corny old gag "how do you like your eggs done in the morning, scrambled or fertilised?" in your list of "Memorable Quotes". The words "scraping the bottom of the barrel" come to mind. 5/10, chiefly for the music.