July 10, 2005

• Two nights ago, I rented 'The Machinist,' a spooky psychological noir-ish Hitchcockian kind of movie. The plot goes like this: Trevor hasn't slept for a year, and is wasting away. He works as a machinist, where he seem to be making all kinds of mistakes, with gruesome results. He believes the accidents are the result of a phantom worker there, who no one else seems to have met...

  There's a really excellent pacing and structure to this movie. It's measured, very dark, and sparse enough to mimic Trevor's wasting body. The spattering blood is kept to a minimum. But the best part of all is the way the screenwriters give you so much information, so many clues, that you know the solution to the mystery pretty quickly. So the interesting part is watching Trevor probe and prod the world and his own understanding of it. Whatever dark secret is hiding around the corner, he's trying to find it, at the same time he's trying to avoid it, which is to me one of the most interesting aspects of the human psyche. This isn't a mystery.

  And I have to say... Christian Bale lost 63 pounds of weight in order to play Trevor. His bones stick out. You can count his ribs. It adds an extra freakshow creep-out to the otherwise well-made movie, and should justify an Acadamy Award for weight loss.

  • 1:34 pm
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