The Machinist is a psychological thriller directed by Brad Anderson, based on a script by Scott Kosar, and produced and shot in Spain after most American production companies rejected the project as weird.
Trevor Reznik hasn't slept for a year. He barely eats, and has become a loner. He finds himself in trouble after a workmate loses his hand because of his negligence, and a plot against him unveils involving a mysterious cocky man called Ivan. His only comfort is the company of two very different women: beautiful single-mother and airport café waitress Marie, and sweet-and-sour prostitute Stevie. Who is Reznik? Who are the others? Most importantly, what are the answers to the hung-man post-its Reznik founds on his fridge every night?
Although this is a Suspense film, the plot succeeds more at questioning the idea of self-identity than at building a thriller. The movie is both an analysis on the need of sleep to have a healthy mind, and on the power of our subconscious to define, redefine or distort the way we see us, both physically and psychologically. In fact, Reznik's story is just a quest to respond to the question, Who am I? When the question is answered, all the pieces of the story come together in an emotional closing puzzle.
I did not notice that the movie was not shot in Los Angeles but in Barcelona until I saw the making of. However, and to be completely honest, there was something out of place or awkward about some scenes. For example, the smallness of the space related to the scene of the cross lights and Marie, or the atmosphere in the Police Station. Still, the atmosphere and lighting of the movie are fantastic and you will not notice anything specific unless you know.
Christian Bale is unbelievable as the insomniac paranoiac steel-worker Trevor Reznik, and one wonders why he wasn't nominated to the Oscars that year. The fact that he bothered to get so thin, a walking skeleton really, shows how committed (or crazy) he is about acting. The viewer has to be thankful, though, as his decayed physique helped his character and the movie immensely. Bale just doesn't act, he psychologically becomes Reznik - Method Acting taking to the core. Anything he does in this movie is believable, raw and authentic.
Bale's counterpart Ivan is played by John Sharian, who is cheekily disturbing in his performance. You hate him immediately, physically, the way the moves, the way he dresses, the way he smiles, still, there is something appealing and warm about him. I think his performance and his physique add even more interest to the theme of Raznik's quest for identity. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Jennifer Jason Leigh are correct as Marie and Stevie, and the rest of the cast are all believable in their respective supporting roles.
The main flaw of the movie is its predictability in certain areas, so the suspense is weakened at times. The viewer immediately knows that Reznik has mental problems, so, at a certain level, you are pre-disposed to anything crazy or out of the ordinary to happen. The film s full of clues for the viewer to understand Reznik, but they are overly present sometimes. For example, the time on the clock at Marie's place is shown repeatedly, and with it, you start to suspect things before you should. However, the movie succeeds at not unveiling who Ivan is until almost the end, so the viewer gets what expects in a suspense film - mystery. I would have liked the same with regards to Marie.
This is a terrific movie, with a great atmosphere, a thought-provoking script, and a brilliant performance by Christian Bale. The Machinist is one of those multi-layered stories and movies from which you get new details each time you see it.
A modern classic with a few little flaws.
Paul Conroy is a married truck driver working as a contractor in Iraq. After his convoy is attacked by insurgents, he wakes up inside a coffin, buried alive, with a Zippo, a cell phone, and a little whisky bottle. He will try to use the two first to get help and be rescued from the outside.
Buried is the second feature film by young Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés based on Chris Sparling's script, and produced and shot in Spain. Cortés got the script after it had been rejected by most film studios, and he found it to be a crazy challenge, worth of being filmed. From the very beginning, he wanted to shoot the film in the coffin, with no exteriors, and Ryan Reynolds to be the leading man. Reynolds thought that the script was impossible to shoot and said no; Cortés insisted and sent him his first movie and a long report about why the movie should be shot and, more importantly, why Reynolds should be in it.
The movie was filmed on a tight budget in Barcelona in over two weeks. The shooting of the film was very hard and challenging from the technical, engineering and emotional point of view, as the film has no exteriors, the filming happens inside a wooden box, and Reynolds had to play the movie alone, entirely in the coffin.
This is one of those movies that you have to watch in a cinema, with the lights off, so you can put yourself in Paul Conroy's shoes, both physically and emotionally, and feel what is like to be buried.
The use of camera and lighting are fantastic, very complex but very well executed.
The atmosphere is terrific.
The script makes very good points about how little American corporations and Government care about their employees/citizens in the Middle East, and also about the preconceptions that people in those areas of the world have about individual Americans being all rich and powerful not just working class employees.
Reynolds is brilliant in his performance of Paul Conroy, and it is a shame that he wasn't nominated for the Oscars that year; he really deserved it. This is Reynolds' best and most serious performance to the date, and shows the great actor he is; why does he keep accepting unsubstantial roles in Hollywood movies?! The voices heard through the phone were recorded after the shooting was finished; however, Reynolds needed a real counterpart to help him to get into character, so his acting coach played the different characters, live, and Reynolds heard her through a tiny earpiece.
The performances of the actors whose voices we hear are excellent and they transmit great emotion and feeling to the viewer, despite the viewer not being able to see them.
The main problems with the movie are, firstly, its tempo. The thrill is there from the very beginning, no rest, and although it goes in crescendo, the viewer can get tired of being over-thrilled. Secondly, it would have been better for the viewer seeing exteriors and the actors we hear on the phone, so the viewer gets a bit of relief from the claustrophobic settings. Thirdly, two of the main premises of the script are so wrong that make the rest is impossible to believe: 1/ If you are buried alive in a coffin, underground, and you lift your zippo, the flame is going to consume part of the very little oxygen you have, if you have any when you wake up, and you'll be dead quite soon. Moreover, once the oxygen is used, and less is left, the person buried will have stained air to breath, and his vital functions, strength and mental abilities will be weakened. Nothing of what happens in the movie would be possible. A torch would have been a better option, worked the same in the story, but made the settings credible. 2/ If you are buried with your cell phone, even if not very deep underground, your phone is not going to work, even if you have a powerful 3G/satellite network available, which is not the case in countries like Iraq or the Middle East, especially in isolated areas. I get that sort of problem in city underground settings in my city, can you imagine in you are buried in countryside Iraq? Not believable at all.
Having said this, this is a very entertaining experimental film that approaches the script in a very original and dazzling way, and has a terrific performance by Ryan Reynolds.
The film got a phenomenal positive reception at Sundance, but unfortunately his commercial release and distribution were very limited.
Directed by Alex De La Iglesia, and based on the eponymous book by Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Murders is an unconventional but failed thriller.
Martin (Wood), a young Ph.D. Philosophy student arrives in Cambridge with a scholarship trying to get Professor Seldom's (Hurt) attention and direction for his thesis. A series of symbol-connected murders turn them into investigation buddies and friends.
The story discusses a series of philosophical and ethical questions: 1/ the meaning of life 2/ the role of philosophy and mathematics in daily life 3/ the concept of human imperfection 4/ the adaptability of our minds and philosophical approach to different moments in life. Do our Philosophic principles, personal or not, stand the irrationality of life? 4/ the concept of moral responsibility. The whodunit is just a way to explore the philosophical points the movie wants to make. Seldom and Martin represent, at the beginning of the film, two different and even opposed ways of approaching and understanding the world and life. However, you will notice in Seldom and Martin's last conversation in the movie that both of them have shifted to the principle the other supported at the beginning. Circumstances matter to sustain or shift your philosophical principles and view of the world (Gasset, not Wittgenstein). We humans are not mathematical axioms, nor is life.
The first problem I found with the film is that, if you want to explore some philosophical points, you better chose a story that is suited for that exploration in film. Even more, if you decide that a murder story is what you want, you have to build an excellent mystery thriller to go well with it. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. The thriller has not much thrill, although the mystery is intriguing. The tempo, atmosphere and music of the movie are not good for a thriller, and without those key elements, the rest crumbles; in fact, the music was distracting and unfocused. On the other hand, I thought that the movie did not have any English flavour despite being filmed in England and with (mostly) English actors. I don't mean to say that you cannot shoot in a country or city that is not yours without the movie resenting, but that you have to be familiar with it to be able to get its vibe, its essence and portray it in a movie. The art department is perhaps the one to blame here. Some of the mathematical and philosophical goofs are remarkable, too, like number phi instead of pi (no Ph.D. student in Philosophy would make that sort of mistake), or Bormat's theorem instead of Fermat's, among the most evident.
I found the cast badly matched, and the acting bad or mediocre. I had the impression that the cast was a bit whimsical, something that Alex fancied or could get, not what the characters needed. John Hurt, Elijah Wood, and Jim Carter (as Inspector Petersen) are correct in their performances. Leonor Watling is just OK in her unsubstantial role as nurse Lorna, mostly there to give some romance and sex to the main character. Dominique Pinon plays, once more, in his usual role of sweet freak. July Cox's performance is dreadful as Beth; she seemed lost in a theatrical monologue, unnecessarily exaggerated in her performance. Also theatrical, over the top, and even ridiculous, are the performances of Anna Massey as nasty Mrs. Eagleton and Burn Gorman as Yuri Podorov. I think that they all suffer from a poor actors direction because Alex De La Iglesia has a poor English and is not able to work at a deep level with native speakers.
I am a fan of De La Iglesia, and this movie feels like it is not his. The script's premises are fascinating, but the outcome is totally forgettable mostly because of De La Iglesia's laziness at directing and focusing. What I will remember of the movie are the philosophical premises and approach, and the flashback story of the 19th century, which is very much De La Iglesia's.
Disappointing.
Steven Arthur Younger, an American ex-military man converted to Islam, has built three atomic bombs, and placed them in three cities to explode in 4 days. He has sent his family overseas, sent a video-message to the Government and allowed himself to be captured. He is taken to a secret military compound where he'll be tortured and interrogated to learn where the bombs are.
This movie reflects on the validity of torture against the so-called War on Terror, by indirectly asking these questions:
1/ Is torture ever justified?
2/ Does physical torture produce any piece of information that serves to safe lives?
3/ If you could save the world or a hundred of civilians from a bomb by torturing somebody, would that torture be justified?
4/ If not, why it is allowed?
5/ If yes, is there any limit or point, even unthinkable, that cannot be trespassed?
The main assumption taken by the story is that we live in a double-standards hypocritical world that preaches one thing but does another, that wants the dirt to be removed by using the hands of the others, so those ordering the dirty job have not responsibility on it. The movie brought to my mind many of the questions posed by a recent documentary "The Secret War on Terror" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1866818/).
Australian Director Gregor Jordan, British Actor-Scriptwriter Peter Woodward and Israeli writer Oren Movermam have guts to reflect on the subjects this movie approaches, even more because the movie (a sort of complement to the TV series 24) is filmed and produced in the USA. However, being so, you also expect it to be politically correct, and at a certain point it is.
The good thing of the movie is that uses the different characters as pawns to make its point. Therefore, they are not linear or monochrome - nobody is innocent here, morally, but some of the characters are franker and have more integrity than the others. However, the line that separates them is very thin, and is trespassed back and forward by the two main characters: H., the interrogator, and FBT agent Brody, which are antagonists at the beginning, but two sides of the same coin at the end. H, the interrogator and torturer, actually hates his job, he is cynical about the clean-hands of those who want him to do horrific things without taking moral or political responsibility; H. has a soul, and he is somewhat another victim of the system. Agent Brody is a serious and decent woman, but once the situation turns for the worst outside, she too gets embedded and feels like torturing the terrorist herself; she ends thinking that torture is justified if valid items of info are got, otherwise not, but... that is not a position, really, that is still a dilemma. The terrorist, moreover, is not a dark-skinned middle-eastern, but a white sweet-looking American man, who loves his family, his country and his religion, who is willing and prepared to be tortured to get what he wants.
I found all the leading actors good in their roles: Samuel L. Jackson as interrogator 'H', Carrie-Anne Moss as Helen Brody, and Michael Sheen as terrorist Younger (Yusef). However, Sheen and Jackson outshine the rest. You cannot even believe that Sheen is the same actor who played Tony Blair in "The Queen", so good he is here. Jackson plays a very difficult role with sensibility (if that is possible) and humanity.
The atmosphere of the movie is aseptic and cold, distant and theatrical in a way. There is no warm colours or elements at all (beyond the blood), and it looks like part of a sci-fic grim future movie. However, that cold detachment is needed to follow what happens, because the level of violence is extremely high (although less gory you can expect), very disturbing and depressing. The fact that H. has some humanity and is a loving father, another victim of the system, sends a dangerous message, and unintentionally excuses the torturer.
The tempo of the movie is not good, and that affects it from mid footage until the end. I thought that the search for the bombs by the FBI was going to have more weight in the movie, as it was also challenging and interesting, but soon the viewer realises that this won't happen. A more balanced approach (FBI approach and Military approach combined) was needed, but the movie eventually opts for the second as main focus of the story. On the other hand, when the movie gets really-really interesting and challenging, when a new oh-wow twist appears in the story, the film ends. Ploff! As if the editor had cut the movie before its time by mistake. By doing so, the viewer, or at least me, wonders whether the director and writers had the balls to provide an answer to the moral questions they present in the movie. With this end, the answer is no. However, there is an alternative ending.
The alternative ending, actually the real ending (which is available in the USA Blue-Ray and DVD's extras but not in the one I saw in Australia!), shows that, after all, the writers and directors had the balls to give an answer to their questions and show that torture does not serve for anything if the terrorist has no moral or emotional breaking point, which is always the case. In fact, the end of the movie, the real one, says that the end does not justify the means and it is a waste of time. You better look for the bombs! I guess the American producers and the American establishment, or perhaps just the public, would not be happy with that sort of ending.
A thought-provoking film, claustrophobic and difficult to watch.
