How sad is this?

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

While flawed, Anesthesia is better than 90% of what comes out of Hollywood. Tim Blake Nelson explores the mystery of what life is all about. There are some brilliant performances by K. Todd Freeman and Gretchen Mol. While I like Kristen Stewart (unlike most people), her part is very small although powerful and sad.I did not love the ending but the movie is still well worth watching.This is not a feel good, happy movie but It felt real and raw and very much what life is like. Instead of wasting two hours on a formulaic, predictable movie, try this and contemplate how beautiful, terrible, messy, and wonderful life is.

It's a series of short films tied together tightly to make one feature. Tim Black Nelson does a good job at directing himself and a group of strong actors in this film about dealing with the choices we make while living our lives, from a variety of different levels, which makes it such a perfect film about New York.Everyone was good, but I gravitate greatly towards the performance of Micheal K. Williams whose doing something far different than the roles that he's really known for. The whole movie was a masterpiece. Such an amazing set of stories being told.

I found this film to be disappointingly predictable and a self- indulgent piece of "entertainment".It would have been more entertaining to watch paint drying - and about as easy to guess the next scene. The characters were all two-dimensional and lacking in any depth. One detail that particularly irritated me was the lecturing manner - and content - of the supposed Columbia University philosophy professor. He addressed his class in a manner that no real lecturer would, speaking in over-written prose found only in bad novels - and poorer made-for-TV films. The subjects matter he seemed to cover was so eclectic and with such a tenuous connection to any school of philosophy that I wondered if the script writer was having a joke at the audience's - or academia's - expense.The concept of one incident linking various disparate individuals, and thus illustrating aspects of life - or in this case New York city - is so over-used that it will now only succeed with a better than average script. Unfortunately, despite the reasonably capable cast, this was a forlorn exercise.

He's not in this film but he could have been. "Anesthesia" reminds me of a serious WA movie, complete with NYC as a character in itself. I am a great fan of most of WA's work and I also really like this movie. As far as films go, it's "deep" raising some of the "big" issues of human suffering and the meaning of life, and it's done really well. One thing that made it compelling, in my opinion, is the casting. The various actors in it make for a great visual variety in terms of race/ethnicity and looks. Everyone is not beautiful looking, yet everyone I found to be very engaging. Another way of saying this is the acting was excellent across the board. For a movie with subject matter that could have wound up seeming pretentious, I think the big issues were handled well. For example, towards the end,when the two teenagers were so delicately having sex for the first time, while the boy's mother was undergoing exploratory surgery, it was an artistic way of showing the "life can't help but go on" theme. Likewise, the ending, in which the Sam Waterston character extends kindness to the street drug addict who then intervenes and gets killed when Sam W. is knifed by another street person, I found to be quite moving. Ultimately we die and some people are bigger a-holes than others, but in the end what we choose to be meaningful matters.