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Descent (Original 'NC-17' Version)
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List Price: $26.98
Our Price: $19.99
Your Save: $ 6.99 ( 26% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: City Lights Home Entertainment
Starring: Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, Alex Reid, Oliver Milburn, Wilson Jermaine Heredia
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: NC-17
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0897246001164
Format: Anamorphic
Label: City Lights Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: City Lights Home Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: City Lights Home Entertainment
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2008-02-05
Running Time: 104
Studio: City Lights Home Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Editorial Reviews:
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Maya (Rosario Dawson) is like many other college coeds, booksmart yet shy, curious about sex, yet scared to let herself go. One night she meets Jared (played by Chad Faust). When their courtship turns from romantic to horrific in a single violent act, Maya's world is ripped inside-out. Shutting out everyone in her life, Maya loses herself to a dark throbbing underworld of experimentation. Lured by club DJ Adrian (Marcus Patrick), she awakens to a cold and vicious new strength. But will Maya's downward spiral consume and destroy her - or will she be saved by its power? (Edited R-Rated version also availble on DVD).
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Descent (original 'nc-17' version
Comment: extremely well written and acted. will scare the hell out of you on the
1st watching(rape scene at end). again, excellant acting by everyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From J. Kaye's Book Blog
Comment:
Descent was what this movie was about. Maya descends into a dark place after an act of violence. As she struggles to come to terms with what happen, she turns to drugs and falls into a cycle of promiscuity. Maya has come close to hitting bottom when she encounters Jared and confronts him over the rape.
The film was very dark, a bit confusing and surprisingly, I liked it - especially the ending. Justice was served.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dawson's Creep
Comment: As much as I like Rosario Dawson, Descent is not a success for her as a producer and lead actor. It is a date rape revenge drama, but the second act, where she becomes withdrawn, a clothes folder in a boutique by day and a club denizen by night, is a muddle. I couldn't really tell what was going on, except she meets a DJ (Marcus Patrick) who makes his boyfriend smoke a cigarette held in his toes.
She is miscast as an undergraduate, but the project wouldn't have gotten a green light without her star power. She is still attractive but just is no longer the ingenue she once was. Will she get the green light for her next vanity project? I think not, she has squandered her chance. Finally, the ending is too graphic, and there is zero pay off. Charles Bronson built his whole career on revenge sagas--or Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, which they mention in the interview segment. It is an easy formula, but they reject it. Though it is commendable that they reject the easy formula, they have no formula of their own, easy or complicated, to replace it with. By the time she gets back at her frat boy (Chad Faust) even her character is sick of it all. No closure, no insight, no resolution.
Rosario and the director (Talia Lugacy) wanted to make their statement, with little regard to how a mainstream audience would react. What is that, the Andy Kaufman school of film making? A private joke amongst themselves? If they wanted to get their message out, it should be encapsulated in a film that entertains. No one wants to pay to see a movie that hectors them. This movie would've really hurt Rosario Dawson's acting career, except that no one is going to see it. But it will go on her "permanent record" as far as her producer career goes. That's a shame because they had a feminist message that deserves to be heard, but no one wants to be lectured. Even a film about date rape shouldn't be audience rape.
1 Seven Pounds [Theatrical Release] (2008) .... Emily Posa
2 Eagle Eye (2008) .... Zoe Perez
3 Grindhouse Presents, Death Proof - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition) (2007) .... Abernathy (segment "Death Proof")
4 A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) .... Laurie
5 Clerks II (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition) (2006) .... Becky
6 Rent (2005) .... Mimi Marquez
7 Sin City (2005) .... Gail
8 Alexander - Director's Cut (Full Screen Edition) (2004) .... Roxane
9 Josie and The Pussycats (2001) .... Valerie Brown
10 Kids (1995) .... Ruby
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ouch
Comment: Descent has got to be one of the slowest movies I've ever seen, but maybe that gives it some extra power it might not have had without those incredibly long drawn out medium shots. Maya is a college student who's looking for love, and when she meets ballplayer Jared at a party she's intrigued; he really holds her attention. He has the surface charm that sociopaths learn to mimic from close observation of normal people, but how's a girl supposed to know that? When she crosses the threshold into his apartment, and sees his trashed living room, she asks if something happened, but he doesn't reply directly, just gives her a heaping glass of wine and tells her to bring it upstairs. That messy living room should have told her to just go home when the getting was good, but Maya is a bit of a naïf and ignores the signs that the audience never does.
Rosario Dawson is beautiful and talented, and her portrayal of Maya both before and after Jared attacks her is nothing short of breathtaking, but the problem is that there really isn't anything for her to play with. There are some amusing scenes set in the high-fashion boutique Maya takes a job in, where a snooty Sloane Ranger teaches her how to fold expensive blouses for better presentation ("loose--give them some air"), but by this time Maya is incapable of doing anything but looking woebegone and numb. About this time it dawned on me where I had seen this character arc before--in Rent, of course, in which Rosario Dawson played Mimi, first as a warm, loving spirit, then as a drugged out zombie with zero emotional range. I have to say that Rent did it better, and maybe Descent with musical numbers would have made it more lively. I don't know. The whole film is set up solely to deliver to Jared what he has laid on Maya, and the cat and mouse game she plays with him is suspenseful up to a point.
This is the second film I've seen in a month's time in which the superjock guy is humbled by the invasion of his most private of parts. (The last was "Playroom.") This must be a trend in the making, perhaps inspired by what happened to Seann William Scott and his nurse in "Road Trip." And of course, to way back when, the notorious Rusty Godowsky rape scene in "Myra Breckinridge." That film was a mess, but it had more spirit than the listless, if well-meant, "Descent."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Less Is More
Comment: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: From the Secret Files of Harry Pennypacker
The Art of Storytelling: How To Write A Story....Any Story
Shadow Watcher
Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake
This is a powerful, vivid and depressing story about a college student (Rosario Dawson) who is brutally date raped by a football jock (Chad Faust), then goes into a self-destructive state of depression, only to emerge from that void in order to extract an even more brutal revenge on her rapist.
Ms. Dawson and Faust deliver convincing performances and co-writer (with Brian Priest) and director Talia Lugacy attempts to deliver an important message about how violence can destroy the human soul.
However, Ms. Lugacy needs to learn an important basic lesson about storytelling: "Less Is More".
There is not one sequence in the movie that would not have benefitted from being cut in half. Scenes that could have made their point in the first ten seconds seem to go on endlessly. Indeed, there was one point, about halfway through the picture, where I got so bored that I jumped to the next chapter stop, so that I could get on with the story. Later, after the picture was over, I went back to see if I'd missed anything important. I hadn't.
In the future, I would suggest that director Lugacy not only light her scenes so that the audience can see what is happening on screen, but also work with an editor who can convince her that every shot in a film is not "sacred".
The DVD has deleted scenes, audio commentary by the director and star and "Behind the Scenes" featurettes.
© Michael B. Druxman, author of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
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