The movie starts off with a scene that can lead to some people puking right where they sit and can make others lose their appetite. If you are like me, you would just enjoy it and expect more from the movie. It will live up to your expectations. The film opens with a middle aged man sharpening his razor later calmly testing it out on his own thumb. He opens the balcony door, gazes at the moon and proceeds to…

The lesser you know the better. The movie then revolves around the girl (Simone Mareuil) and the boy (Pierre Batcheff). It’s weird – dead donkeys, hands with holes in them, pianos and car accidents. It’s erratic without any underlying story as such and it’s confusing with the non chronological timeline that recently got famous with Christopher Nolan’s Following followed by Memento. This movie has it all. Here’s the link I promised in the first paragraph. Enjoy!

Jan is known for his work with stop motion animation. He uses clay models for the movie with weird sounds in the background. Stop motion animation is a pain in the ass. I have tried it in the past after watching a how-to on Discovery’s popular mechanics for kids (wonder how this was mechanics, but anyway) this thing is painfully slow. You keep changing the models every frame, so slightly, as not to lose the persistence of vision, take a picture, change the model again. It a meticulous process done very well in this movie.

The limbs eventually manage to put themselves together. They form into a fully grown human being only to be trapped inside the room they connected. I read a nice comment about this movie somewhere, it said

The movie is an exceptional example of how human beings are. They try their entire life to figure out the meaning of their existence only to end up trapped in the discovery of their life.

Without wasting too much time, here’s the movie on YouTube. This is not safe for work and if you plan to eat soon, please watch it tomorrow. Enjoy!

There’s another movie, not as popular as Back to the Future, that deals with time travel – Primer. A movie which has been hailed by the critics at Rotten Tomatoes as one of the best science fiction movies for the thinking man, Primer is about the accidental discovery of a means of time travel. Primer is written, directed, produced by  Shane Carruth who also plays the role of Aaron in the movie and has also done the editing and music composition for this movie. Geeks rejoice, here’s a man who knows what he is doing.

Primer starts off in Aaron’s garage. With Abe (played by David Sullivan) and a couple of other friends, Aaron makes and sells JTAG cards to people to attract Venture Capital. They undertake these projects and then each person in the team pitches his new idea for new project. Aaron and Abe, after a conflict start working on a machine that is intended to reduce the weight of an object. They eventually, after using palladium, mercury bath and a counteracting magnetic field against a ceramic shell to reduce the shielding, make it work.

The Primer Flowchart

Abe experiments on the machine with a pea and then a wrist watch to oversee the effects the machine has on them. The watch comes out of the machine with some anomalies. It seems like the clock inside the machine ran 1347 times faster then outside. Abe reasons they have built a time machine.

Abe then builds a larger version of the machine which he later uses to travel back in time (this is where you open the image you see on the left and try to understand how it actually works) and tell Aaron of their accomplishments. As with every human being, they start off, nervous at first, by investing money since they now know the future. They spend 6 hours inside the machine every day only to go back and live 2 lives in the same timeline in parallel. They start investing money in the stock market making sure it’s a mid-cap investment so it doesn’t draw much attention to them.

They continue this for some time and eventually start to get more adventurous. The movie after this point starts getting obscure. The usage of a high grain film that suits the movie setting, the engine humming noise used as background score and the story narrative which also keeps getting obscure keeps the movie intelligent. It’s not for people who get bored by technical jargon. Carruth felt the dialog being technical was one of the important reasons along with the obscurity. If two aspiring engineers were to accidentally discover the means of time travel – this is the most natural reaction you could possibly get and the dialog goes with it very well.

The movie has soldering guns, talk about JTAG cards, mid-cap stock market investment, Feynman diagrams, palladium, mercury bath, electromagnetism, coil strengths, series – parallel field connections. If you are put off by such language, this movie is definitely not for you but with a $7000 budget, this movie earned just under half a million dollars and is a treat for home-brew geeks playing with their soldering irons. Finally, if you still don’t understand the movie, read this timeline.

The narrator of the story is Max Cohen. A number theorist Max believes that the world around us can be explained with numbers alone. He thinks everything is a mathematical model. Everything is governed by a deterministic function. You can tell when a passion turns into an obsession. As soon as that hint of obsession is observed, things begin to get interesting.

Max is brilliant. A gifted mathematician who is capable of doing number manipulations in his head without the need of a calculator. His neighbor, a little girl, plays with him by asking him to do large calculations in his head which he does before the calculator – you remember the old calculators I hope, the ones which used to take several seconds to compute operations like square root. This guy is faster than those, and he’s correct.

Max calls his computer Euclid. His sole aim in life is to find a unifying calculation to predict the behavior of the stock market. Seems interesting right? Every broker on the Wall Street would be after this guy if he were to succeed. Max made Euclid work and chunk out a number which he later discarded only to find out next day that Euclid predicted the pick spot on. Euclid eventually crashed. Max’s suffering from headaches, social anxiety, hypertension. Max’s only contact with the outside world warns him to stop and take a break – he doesn’t. Max eventually meets Lenny at a coffee shop, a Jew interested in Torah. Max is, as you predicted correctly, approached by Wall Street agents.

What do they want with Max? Will Max be able to find what he is looking for? Will Euclid survive the initial crash and give Max what he wants? With ever so increasing headaches, hallucinations, the painkillers, the numbers – will it get to Max? Will Max be able to go through this without going mad? Will Sol, his mentor, be able to put an end to his obsession? The movie is a pure genius. The high grain film, the handheld cameras, blotched out images – it brings out the creativity of Aronfosky. The movie can leave a lasting impact on you and leave you wanting for more.

The Condemned is a movie about savages. Some crackpot jackass millionaire (maybe multi) thinks it’s cool and justice to drop 10 criminals on death sentence on a deserted island, unknown to all the governments and intelligence agencies, and make them compete for 30 hours against each other in a match till death where the sole survivor gets to live, beating the death sentence.

That’s about it. There’s nothing else in the story. No dramatic twists, no brilliant performance, no witty humorous dialog ? The script was more or less like my blog posts written by an amateur – at least that was the impression I got. The movie is utterly boring unless all you like to watch is boring fights, censored cruelty and monotonous dialog.

The WWE/F star – this is one more stupid thing I totally hate/hated/will hate forever – Stone Cold / Steve Austin is acting in his second movie here. He does an okay job. The girls are okayish, the villains are stupid. The best performance has to be from Vinnie Jones. He is simply brilliant in this flick. Portrays a maniac like a maniac

Nothing much to write. As I said, nothing happens in this movie. Wasted 2 hours of my life.

My Rating? 1.5/5

Requiem for a dream revolves around four people. Adapting the theme from his own novel, Hubert Selby Jr. tells us the story of four lost souls. A tale of four trapped entities trying to climb out of the hole they have been thrown in. The hope of happiness in form of some material possession, an interaction with the inner self, the downfall of the castles and breaking of the shackles woven by drugs around them – and their failure to do so.

Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are junkies. Pushers. Like every other teenager, they have a dream to make it big. And how are they going to do it? Selling drugs they get off the streets of Brooklyn. Buy – Test – Sell, Buy – Test – Sell. Then go and buy the real stuff. Test and sell again – a never ending loop, the pi of their life. Marion (Jennifer Connelly), Harry’s girlfriend is hot. At least initially she is. When Harry and Marion interact – it looks like the read deal. You get the feeling that they’re really in love. Their on-screen chemistry is great. Marion does not want to make it large like Harry. All she wants is her life, planned and laid out in front of her. Marriage, her own dress designing avenue, stability… Marion wants to escape from the her parents and live an independent life. She’s playing a losing battle and Harry is her only hope.

The fourth character in the movie, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother. Harry is one of the two things she has left in this world. The other thing – TV. A real nice mother and a typical old gossip loving lady turns into a weight loss freak as soon as she learns she has a chance to appear in a TV show. She visits some doctor to try and reduce her weight before the show to be able to fit in the red dress which reminds her of her dead husband.

From here on, the movie is a sad tale of these four people. Their desperations, the dark emotions, the love, the passion. It’s all there.  The movie is cold and it’s harsh. Unless you are really made of stone, this movie is going to have a long lasting effect on you… maybe forever.

Speaking about the background score, it is one of the best suited soundtracks I have ever heard. It blends into the movie and unites all the different facets of the story as a whole. Remove the music and – well, there is no and. You simply cannot remove it.

Coming to the end,  there is only one thing which I would like to point out. The movie IS disturbing it is cold and it is intense. It might give you nightmares even if you are not a 10 year old (and the fact that a 10 year old should never watch this movie). Near the end of the movie, it gets even more intense and involves scenes which are not for the feint of heart. And my personal favorite is the ending scene of the movie. It is intense, it is good and sad at the same time…

Overall Rating: 4.5/5