Brad Anderson
87 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
It is, however, more like a weak episode of TV’s “Criminal Minds” than Jonathan Demme’s great 1991 Oscar winner “The Silence of the Lambs,” a landmark film of its kind from which “The Call” borrows a twist or two.
Slickly photographed by Tom Yatsko, who takes moody advantage of the long, winding stretches of roadway throughout Los Angeles and the Santa Clarita Hills, "The Call" comes very close to being a top-notch effort in the vein of 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs."
Indeed, the movie is so effectively constructed that it recalls enormous hits of decades past like Fatal Attraction and The Silence of the Lambs .
You know, the sort of thriller that wasn’t completely ridiculous, an effort in the vein of “Seven” or “The Silence of the Lambs,” an experience worthy of accolades.
The Call, directed by erstwhile indie wunderkind Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9, Vanishing on 7th Street), looks and feels almost exactly like the long string of post-The Silence of the Lambs serial killer thrillers I was used to seeing as a teenager.
Director Brad Anderson (Transsiberian, Vanishing on 7th Street) keeps a tight lid on the chase, and even when Richard D’Ovidio’s screenplay — adapted from a story he wrote with Nicole D’Ovidio and Jon Bokenkamp — ends up in The Silence of the Lambs turf the suspense never lets up.
Following in the same vein of “Memento,” “The Machinist” is a clever, taut thriller that will have everyone guessing right up to its avant-garde conclusion.
The puzzle of what happened to Trevor starts to slowly piece together, with flashbacks and clues slightly reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's equally moody "Memento."
Anderson borrows rather obviously from his own Session 9 and other films like Memento , the original Norwegian Insomnia, and Secret Window.
Akin to "Memento" in its psycho-cinematic deconstruction of an obsessed man's disintegrating mental state, this movie taps into something disquieting from its earliest images of Trevor (Christian Bale, who insanely lost 63 pounds for the role) examining his bruised, emaciated body in a bathroom mirror after what evidence suggests was a struggle that ended in murder.
Yet Scott Kosar’s script fails to conceal its central surprise from the get-go – the film is so predictable that I immediately guessed the answer to the hangman game (written on a post-it) that mysteriously appears on Trevor’s fridge, and anyone who’s seen Fight Club, Memento or any number of similar movies will immediately be hip to the big mystery.
The Machinist, one gleans pretty quickly, is about duality and split personas, meaning that the central mystery of the piece is the amount of time it will take for Trevor to figure out what an audience savvy with like entertainments ( Identity , Memento , Jacob's Ladder, Angel Heart) already knows.
The framing allows us to see Arthur from odd angles to emphasize his impoverished nature, reminding me of former Batman Christian Bale in The Machinist.
With a physical transformation to match that of Christian Bale in The Machinist, Phoenix has remodeled his looks.
Still, Phoenix commands every frame whether he’s laughing maniacally, grappling with alienation or contorting his body into shapes we haven’t seen since Christian Bale lost all that weight to star in The Machinist .
Reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist , but worse) by a diet of nicotine and pain, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare, a beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter.
Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) dons a soft smile and breathes a tender, impressionable, good-spirited soul, as malleable as his beaten body, which conjures memory of the lack of person that was Christian Bale in The Machinist .
As Arthur, Phoenix is as gaunt as Christian Bale in The Machinist, as awkward as Michael Scott in The Office, and as self-loathing as… well, Michael Scott on The Office.
Joseph Gangemi’s screenplay is based on a humorously macabre 1844 Edgar Allan Poe story that’s been adapted numerous times before, notably by two screen surrealists: Juan Lopez Moctezuma in his 1973 cult film “The Mansion of Madness,” and Jan Svankmajer with 2005’s “Lunacy” (which also took inspiration from the Marquis de Sade).
There are Hitchcocks Psycho, of course, in its own class, and Polanskis Repulsion, and many more recent variations on the theme, the under-esteemed Angel Heart, Eriq LaSalles Crazy as Hell , and Cronenbergs atmosphere-y but less effective Spider among them.
Hitchcock was the master of the Preposterous Thriller — just watch Suspicion , Spellbound or Psycho .
With only a ping off a cell tower near a highway to go off, Asger jumps into action—though, unlike Halle Berry’s character in the similarly premised The Call , he never leaves the call center.
Like Steven Knight's Locke (or Brad Anderson's American 911 precursor, The Call ), almost the entirety of The Guilty revolves around one individual, on the phone, trying to work through a problem - a scenario that doesn’t really lend itself to captivating cinema.
The sparse and stripped down Danish thriller The Guilty will likely earn favourable comparisons to similarly minded efforts like Locke and The Call, but this single room drama about a disgraced police officer’s last chance for moral redemption will leave viewers riveted from start to finish with ease.
We’ve seen a similar framework go horribly awry (Phone Booth, The Call), yet The Guilty breathes new life into this low-budget, high-concept subgenre.
If you loved Tom Hardy in “Locke” or Halle Berry in “The Call” you’re going to love “The Guilty.”
Unlike a film like Brad Anderson’s The Call starring Halle Berry, The Guilty doesn’t cut away to the actual action whatsoever, not even in brief cuts.
Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Stonehearst Asylum (2014), Session 9 (2001), Fractured (2019)
Visuals Themes Plot
With a look and feel quite reminiscent of 2010’s Shutter Island, Stonehearst Asylum is replete with dusky caverns, hidden passageways, shadows, secrets, and lies.
Like Martin Scorsese 's "Shutter Island," "Stonehearst Asylum" starts with the hysteria knob set at 11 and goes up from there.
Echoes of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Shutter Island” hang heavy in the air, again promising a film with something to say and personality to spare; setting a table on to which too slight a meal is placed.
The presence of Kingsley—as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere—might suggest Shutter Island , but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s Freaks, with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy.
Stonehearst Asylum director Brad Anderson has very clearly seen Shutter Island.
Arriving at the titular remote sanatorium (think Shutter Island with even more creaky ooga-booga), Jim Sturgess’s naive Edward discovers glamorous Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale) unhappily ensconced amid indistinguishable doctors and patients.
Yet compared to the broad disposability of other phone-centric thrillers like "Phone Booth" and "Cellular," "The Call" delivers a terrifying scenario and survives its descent into nonsense.
In many ways, "The Call" resembles Joel Schumacher 's " Phone Booth " (2002) — another movie with a strong, simple premise ruined by execution (interestingly, Schumacher was originally slated to direct "The Call").
From "Phone Booth" to "Cellular" (a film with which "The Call" shares many similarities), phone-based movies have generally been bad service for moviegoers, who so often would rather look at their own mobiles in the movie theater.
The presence of Kingsley—as well as all the ornate cabinetry and shadowy atmosphere—might suggest Shutter Island , but the real referent appears to be Tod Browning’s Freaks, with its complicated mixture of fear and sympathy.
I also was glad to see him onscreen again with Caine, because they were so good together in the Sherlock Holmes comedy, “Without a Clue.”
Literally devoted to depicting a waking nightmare, collaboration between Anderson and first-time scripter Scott A. Kosar most readily calls to mind Polanski in his “The Tenant” mode, with echoes of Hitchcock, Lynch, Kafka and Dostoyevsky wafting through as well (Bale’s character is conspicuously making his way through the latter’s “The Idiot”).
But if you just have to go grisly, Roman Polanski's on-DVD The Tenant has a better black-comic bent.
It's a wonderful romantic comedy that borrows the basic formula of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) -- two lovers fated for each other but tantalizingly kept apart -- and brings it to life.
Cheerful, accomplished and straightforwardly commercial, "Next Stop Wonderland" is basically the second best version of "Sleepless in Seattle" ever made--and that's not a criticism.
In addition to showcasing the type of nutcase maniac that in the 1980s might have attracted actor Michael Ironside (see: "Visiting Hours"), "The Call" is a paean to the dedicated professionals who work the emergency-service phone banks of our urban jungles.
The film's conceit—of an inexplicable, non-material, undead force haunting the living, who in turn combat their enemies via flashlight—merges Carpenter's fantastic The Fog with Remedy Games's excellent Xbox 360 thriller Alan Wake , though Anderson's film never feels egregiously derivative so much as familiar with genre hallmarks.
Taking its stylistic cues not from today's crop of horror films, but from such masterpieces as Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" (1965) and Ingmar Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf" (1968), it makes even scarier that most scary of bogeymen: the human mind.
There are Hitchcocks Psycho, of course, in its own class, and Polanskis Repulsion, and many more recent variations on the theme, the under-esteemed Angel Heart, Eriq LaSalles Crazy as Hell , and Cronenbergs atmosphere-y but less effective Spider among them.
And then “Fractured” becomes a riff on “The Lady Vanishes” (or “Flightplan” for modern audiences), in which we have to decide if Ray is crazy or if everyone at the hospital is conspiring to make him so.
Whereas a film like “Flightplan” merely elevated Alfred Hitchcock’s locomotive mystery onto an airplane, “Fractured” sews the story into the knotted fabric of the American healthcare system, a curious wrinkle that helps to endow some (very) familiar beats with a fresh palette of anxieties.
Unfolding like Jodie Foster’s “Flightplan” (but in a hospital) Ray enlists law enforcement to investigate the shady hospital who insists Ray came in for a head related injury following a car accident (don’t they always?)
Matthew McConaughey shed fifty pounds to play Ron Woodroof, and it is an alarming metamorphosis to rival that of Christian Bale in 2004's " The Machinist ."
Christian Bale lost 63 pounds for "The Machinist", Russell Crowe the same amount for "Body of Lies".
Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds to play the older Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull, and Christian Bale dropped 62 pounds (from 182 to 120) for his lead in the 2004 The Machinist.
We haven't seen this kind of sacrifice for a role since Christian Bale's emaciation for "The Machinist" in 2004.
Most people remember Tom Hanks' transformation in both "Philadelphia" and "Cast Away" (in the second he gained and then lost a lot for the role) -- both of which earned him Oscar wins -- but few saw Christian Bale's far scarier looking 60-some pound lost for his role in "The Machinist."
The caliber of his performance, not to mention his Christian Bale/ The Machinist -style physical transformation (he lost 50 pounds), fulfills Oscar nomination criteria (although, considering how crowded the field is, it's a crapshoot whether he'll make the cut).
Representing a slightly skewed take on 2004’s “Cellular” crossed with a lobotomized “ Silence of the Lambs ,” Brad Anderson ’s high-concept thriller “ The Call ” would be an unremarkable bit of women-in-peril dreck were it not for two distinguishing factors — the sexualized sadism inflicted upon the half-dressed 16-year-old Abigail Breslin, and the equally sadistic Sideshow Bob coiffure affixed to the otherwise lovely Halle Berry .
While the story is as head-shakingly ridiculous as the likes of Cellular (2004), Berry’s character’s brutal, though improbable, determination keeps the intensity high.
Like 2004’s Cellular, another enjoyable chiller built around crime and mobile technology, The Call is the rare horror film in the last decade or so to forgo metaphysics, the supernatural, and source material that was first a hit in Asia.
You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.”
Then he begins to notice his harassing co-worker (John Sharian, who has the shaved head and dangerously psychotic air of Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now") lurking around outside his apartment.
There’s also terrific support from Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael Ironside, Aitana Sanchez Gijon and English actor John Sharian, who was apparently cast because of his creepy resemblance to Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, something that, bizarre as it sounds, adds considerably to the film.