The Air I Breathe (2008)

THE AIR I BREATHE Forest Whitaker as an office drone who robs a bank, one of the crisscrossing stories in Jieho Lee's flawed directorial debut

Chance, destiny, happiness, sorrow, unintentional parody: Somewhere between the bit where Sarah Michelle Gellar weeps as a sad rock star with a rare blood type whose career is under the thumb of Andy Garcia as a mean gangster named Fingers, and the part where Forest Whitaker blubbers hysterically as an office drone who robs a bank, the air gets much too thin and polluted with pretense. And filmmaker-y posturing on the part of first-time writer-director Jieho Lee interferes with the clarity of his interwoven stories in The Air I Breathe, which relate, he says, to a Chinese proverb about the four pillars of life. D-