Wednesday, June 15, 2005

It's Si! The Photo Guy!

So I finally got round to watching One Hour Photo the other day. It's directed by Mark Romanek, who did the Closer and Perfect Drug videos for Nine Inch Nails, and the video of Johnny Cash's cover of NIN's Hurt, which are all pretty awesome videos so I had high expectations.

It stars Robin Williams as a lonely guy who works at a One Hour Photo shop and becomes obsessed with the family of one of his customers. It is very well directed, but it suffers from a weak script (which I think Romanek wrote too). The first half is pretty cool, as we meet the central character and see his peculiar behaviour, however in the second half it pretty much devolves into a boring conventional thriller with nothing especially interesting to say. It reminded me quite a bit of this terrible movie 'Strangeland' (written by Dee Snider of Twisted Sister) which I've unfortunately seen twice, and the whole point both movies is pretty much just 'Whoa! Check out this guy! He's CARAAAZZYYYYYYY!"

Hopefully we'll get to see Romanek direct a movie with a better script soon.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really liked this movie; I don't think the point was to centre on the craziness of the character. The family acts like the stock-standard thriller victim and Williams character is in contrast to this.

The plot is a bit hazy in my memory but I remember his character as being more than one dimensional and the movie being unresolved at the end. I thought perhaps it was playing on society trying to label his sort of character as "evil" when he was in reality fairly harmless/needed help. A good contrast to the usual thriller not that I am much of a thriller watcher.

Yeah the script was by Romanek, It could be due to his lack of experience that the movie turned out like this. I must see Strangeland.

1:35 pm
Jon said...

Well I probably didn't pay as much attention as I could have, but I didn't get anything like that out of it.

But don't bother with Strangeland: bad, bad movie.

10:39 pm

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