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THE MACHINIST
Starring:
Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael
Ironside, John Sharian
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Running Time: 102 minutes Released: 11th March
2005
You
should be paying attention to the plot. You should
be absorbed by the bleak, gritty direction or
the lush, theremin-heavy soundtrack. Instead,
it’s fairly likely you’ll spend the
first five minutes of this stylish headscratcher
staring slack-jawed at the screen and thinking
“My God, he’s so THIN!!!” Christian
Bale’s physical transformation for this
dark thriller is already legendary, but you can’t
truly appreciate it until you seem him in character.
Having dropped 63 pounds in weight, he’s
like a ghostly skeleton wrapped in skin, but it’s
all just a physical symptom of the deep problems
lurking inside the head of main character Trevor
Reznik.
A worker in an industrial machine shop, Reznik
is a haunted loner who hasn’t been able
to sleep for a year. His grip on reality is tenuous
at best- but when a sinister new worker named
Ivan (Sharian) starts bothering him, Reznik ends
up being responsible for a gory, limb-ripping
accident- but afterwards, he discovers nobody
at the machine shop has ever even heard of Ivan.
In the grip of serious paranoia, Reznik is soon
convinced someone is out for revenge, and he goes
to increasingly lunatic lengths in trying to find
out who is responsible. Most of all, he has to
work out the meaning of the sinister Post-it notes
that are being left on his refrigerator door,
and a game of Hangman that may hold all the answers.
The hints of a conspiracy unravel quickly, and
instead what we have is a dark, Kafkaesque character
study that builds to a reality-warping examination
of guilt and self-loathing. Set in an American
everytown but shot in Barcelona, the film has
a grimy, timeless feel, even though the script
can’t help occasionally feeling like an
over-extended episode of The Twilight Zone. In
the end, what pushes this edgy, thought-provoking
drama beyond being just another trippy psychological
thriller is Bale’s astounding portrayal
of a damaged personality falling apart at the
seams. It’s yet more proof that he’s
one of the finest screen actors around, and it’ll
have you waiting for his take on Batman even more
urgently than ever….
Rating:
* * * *
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THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
DVD
AND VIDEO RELEASE
2003 Dir: Larry and Andy Wachowski
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo
Weaving
Cert: 15 Running Time: 129 mins
RRP: DVD - £22.99 Video - £16.99
It
was supposed to be the “Year of the Matrix”,
twelve months when we’d thrill to the continuation
of one of the funkiest sci-fi action epics in
decades. Instead, 2003 turned out as the year
we stared at the cinema screen and asked questions
like “What the hell did the Architect just
say?”, “Will this stupid Rave sequence
never end?” and “When exactly did
the Wachowskis forget how to make movies?”
True, MATRIX REVOLUTIONS is both visually stunning
and a marginal improvement over the mechanical
MATRIX RELOADED, but anyone looking for the first
movie’s pace and energy is wasting their
time. Pompous and self-important, it’s pitched
like the Wachowski’s cyberpunk version of
the Sermon on the Mount, but instead we’re
just left giggling at the sixth-form cod philosophy
and wishing Hugo Weaving’s stunning performance
was in a film that actually deserved it.
Particularly in the wake of RETURN OF THE KING,
the daft dialogue and minimal emotional impact
of REVOLUTIONS suddenly makes it all seem terribly
silly- although putting in a vomit-inducing “cute
ethnic kid” and revolving huge sections
of the plot around the boring inhabitants of Zion
was asking for trouble. Annoyingly, you can still
see fragments of the crazed Manga-epic the Wachowskis
were aiming for, like Neo’s arrival in the
surreal Machine City, but their self-indulgence
finally gets the better of them. Time to hang
up your long black coat and put away your shades-
the Matrix has left the building, and there’s
not many who’ll care if it’s ever
coming back…
DVD Extras: Warners has learned
their lesson;- the goodies on show are an improvement
on the RELOADED disc’s shoddy selection,
with plenty of short but highly informative featurettes,
as well as a 3-D timeline, storyboards, trailers
and a shameless plug for the upcoming MATRIX ONLINE
game. It’s not as good as the original MATRIX
disc, though- and who wants to gamble there’ll
be a more extensive “super-ultimate-extreme”
edition in six months?
Rating:
* * Extras:
* * *
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OLYMPOS
Author:
Dan Simmons
Publisher: Gollancz / 694 pp / £10.99
ISBN: 05750726285
There
are some stories you can walk in on half-way through…
and there are some you can’t. Specialising
in dark horror and ferociously complex sci-fi
universes, it shouldn’t be any surprise
that Dan Simmons’ latest epic falls into
the latter category. However, even those familiar
with the awesome heights of his previous SF saga
the Hyperion Cantos might be boggled by the sheer
scale, variety and lunacy of this surreal tale
of gods, myths and monsters.
It’s the kind of story that deliberately
defies rational analysis, splicing together different
genres, historical periods and styles along with
literary references and a truly eye-opening level
of gore. However, while Hyperion may have begun
life as a sci-fi take on The Canterbury Tales,
the combined story formed by previous volume Ilium
and this concluding chapter is far more ambitious,
taking the non-Hollywoodised version of Homer’s
Iliad, and remixing it into a mind-blasting look
at the nature of humanity, and what it truly means
to be a hero.
Picking up the story eight months after the events
in Ilium, Olympos begins in the era of the Trojan
War- but it’s a version of the battle that
has spiralled in a very different direction from
recorded history. Thanks to the interference of
Thomas Hockenberry- a 21st century scholar of
Homer’s Iliad who’s been revived to
observe and record the conflict- the Trojans and
Greeks have now formed an uneasy truce in order
to take on the Gods of Olympus, who are in fact
living on the Olympos Mons volcano on the surface
of Mars, several thousand years in the future.
Naturally, the Gods are keen to use their suspiciously
non-magical technology to collapse this truce
and get the Trojan War back on track- but there
are counter-plots and betrayals happening on Olympus,
and something monumentally dangerous has made
the journey from Mars to the surface of the future
Earth. Something with many hands, awesome powers,
and an insatiable appetite…
Once again, Simmons is in his element here, and
the sheer imagination driving the story is something
to behold- from a spacecraft designed like the
Empire State Building and driven by Coke-can sized
nuclear bombs, to a bizarre cable car ride across
the Himalayas supported by hundreds of replica
Eiffel Towers.
He’s maintained the detailed and truthful
look at the Iliad-era peoples, refusing to tone
down the violence or distil the brutal moral outlooks
of characters like Odysseus or Achilles, while
also tempering the bloodthirsty tone with a healthy
blend of humour- especially from the delightful
pairing of Mahmut and Orphu, the two part-organic
Moravec machines with an intense liking for Shakespeare
and Proust.
Complex and multi-stranded, the ferociously devious
plot heads in a number of unexpected directions,
building to a conclusion that’s very different
from than the ‘titanic showdown between
good and evil’ you might expect. Admittedly,
the eventual explanation for all the pan-dimensional
Olympian business may prove to be the ultimate
litmus test, where readers either surrender willingly
or say “What the hell just happened?”
–but those ready to take the chance will
find this free-wheeling and beautifully bonkers
epic more than worth the effort.
Rating:
* * *
* *
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