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DVD The Machinist
As a bleak and chilling mood piece, The Machinist gets under your skin and stays there. Christian Bale threw himself into the title role with such devotion that he shed an alarming 63 pounds to play Trevor Reznik (talk about "starving artist"!), a factory worker who hasn't slept in a year. He's haunted by some mysterious occurrence that turned him into a paranoid husk, sleepwalking a fine line between harsh reality and nightmare fantasy--a state of mind that leaves him looking disturbingly gaunt and skeletal in appearance. (It's no exaggeration to say that Bale resembles a Holocaust survivor from vintage Nazi-camp liberation newsreels.) In a cinematic territory far removed from his 1998 romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland, director Brad Anderson orchestrates a grimy, nocturnal world of washed-out blues and grays, as Trevor struggles to assemble the clues of his psychological conundrum. With a friendly hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and airport waitress (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) as his only stable links to sanity, Trevor reaches critical mass and seems ready to implode just as The Machinist reveals its secrets. For those who don't mind a trip to hell with a theremin-laced soundtrack, The Machinist seems primed for long-term status as a cult thriller on the edge. --Jeff Shannon
When I set down to watch this movie. I had know idea I would come out of the theatre just mesmerized. This movie was Christian Bale at his best. When has he not done better than mediocre work. The film is truly breathtaking and needs to be wached twice to really grasp what is going on.
The character development may be a little slow , but Bale carries the weight throught the entire film. The best film of 2004!
Definitely a new premise, and one that works well.
While it may fall into some other psychological film categories, it's definitely a unique film in it's ownright. From it's quirky characters, to it's unusual settings (including a lot in Bale's blue collar worker's place of employment: a machine shop), to it's visual look and direction, this is very close to being called a true, one of a kind film. It is a dark film, with some dark scenery, but I was actually surprised to find that the overall look was nowhere near as bleak as one would be led to believe from the film's promotion and reviews. It's kind of like Anderson's film Session 9, which set in an abandoned mental institution, you would think it would be a dark looking film, but it really isn't.
Christian Bale, Michael Ironside, and Jennifer Jason Leigh all give top notch performances and make you forget about it being a slow moving film, shot in hotel rooms, dingy apartments, and a grungy machine shop. The actor who plays Bale's psychological nemesis is also excellent. He is the one Bale keeps seeing show up at work, while no one else does.
The film is strong enough to keep your interest thorughout, with interesting dialog, character development, and the mystery element. While not the most thrilling or complex of psychological puzzles, the end is rather simple, yet very satisfying, and it thankfully does not go the artistic route and come up with some preposterous twist ending.
This is not a movie for everyone, but it's a fine piece of cinema and deserves to be seen.
Ehh......
Definitely a so-so effort. It wouldn't be worth your time without Bale's performance. Or without his concentration camp physique. I amused myself during the film trying to figure out why a major actor would do this to himself. It would be a terrible idea in a terrific film -- hey, starving yourself is NOT acting! -- but to go to those lengths for this mediocre effort...I don't get it. The filmmakers certainly hit gold when he elected to do that (again, the movie has little else going for it), but what was in it for him?
That story...yeah, the other reviewers are correct; we've seen it before. The interesting thing here is that they telegraph the "gimmick" from the first frame. It's almost not a Spoiler to mention those other films, because the filmmakers waste no time themselves letting you in on the "secret." The details of Bale's character's recent past are unclear, but the broad picture is handed to you very early. You're more confused than the machinist if you bought the possibility that it was all a vast conspiracy.
Hey, explain this to me. The guy's a skeleton because he hasn't slept in a year. But in dozens of different scenes, he's on the verge of nodding off. What's that about?
The Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, a dark, violent satire of the "me" culture of Ronald Reagan's 1980s, is certainly one of the most controversial books of the '90s, and that notoriety fueled its bestseller status. This smart, savvy adaptation by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) may be able to ride the crest of the notoriety; prior to the film's release, Harron fought a ratings battle (ironically, for depictions of sex rather than violence), but at the time the director stated, "We're rescuing [the book] from its own bad reputation." Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) overcome many of the objections of Ellis's novel by keeping the most extreme violence offscreen (sometimes just barely), suggesting the reign of terror of yuppie killer... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Mary Harron DVD Release Date: Released the 21 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books. In the first of three separate but loosely related stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke in heavy makeup) tries to track down the killers of a woman who ended up dead in his bed. In the second story, Dwight's (Clive Owen) attempt to defend a woman from a brutal abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens to destroy the uneasy truce among the police, the mob, and the women of Old Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last day on the job (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a kidnapper, but is himself thrown in jail. Years later, he has a chance to save her again.
More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 16 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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When you put on The Jacket, prepare for a head-trip into fragmented reality. Coproducer Steven Soderbergh might have fared better with this mind-bender than British director John Maybury (who indulges an excess of heavy-handed "style"), but it's intriguing enough to hold your attention as Gulf War veteran Jack Starks (Adrian Brody) sustains a head-wound that results in amnesia and fragmented timelines. One involves Jack's apparent killing of a policeman, after which he's institutionalized and subjected to straight-jacketed experiments in sensory isolation (with Kris Kristofferson as the doctor in charge); the other is a possible future involving a nihilistic waitress (Keira Knightley) with connections to his past, and the discovery that Jack will die in four days if he can't solve... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Adrien Brody - Keira Knightley - Daniel Craig Director(s): John Maybury DVD Release Date: Released the 21 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Movie studios, by and large, avoid controversial subjects like race the way you might avoid a hive of angry bees. So it's remarkable that Crash even got made; that it's a rich, intelligent, and moving exploration of the interlocking lives of a dozen Los Angeles residents--black, white, latino, Asian, and Persian--is downright amazing. A politically nervous district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his high-strung wife (Sandra Bullock, biting into a welcome change of pace from Miss Congeniality) get car-jacked by an oddly sociological pair of young black men (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges); a rich black T.V. director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) get pulled over by a white racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his reluctant partner (Ryan Phillipe); a... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Paul Haggis DVD Release Date: Released the 06 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Four extremely beautiful people do extremely horrible things to one another in Closer, Mike Nichols' pungent adaptation of Patrick Marber's play that easily marks the Oscar-winning director's best work in years. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer who specializes in portraits of strangers; Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer struggling to become a novelist; Alice (Natalie Portman) is an American stripper freshly arrived in London after a bad relationship; and Larry (Clive Owen) is a dermatologist who finds love under the most unlikely of circumstances. When their paths cross it's a dizzying supernova of emotions, as Nichols and Marber adroitly construct various scenes out of their lives that pair them again and again in various permutations of passion, heartbreak, anger,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Mike Nichols DVD Release Date: Released the 29 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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