Boy, the flu can take a lot out of you … har, har, har.

Fortunately, that isn’t me, but Christian Bale in The Machinist. The guy deserves a method acting award just for dropping the weight to physically inhabit the body of a man who hasn’t slept in a year. The first hour and a half of this film is perfect, and a neat and tidy ending didn’t spoil it for me. Reminded me a lot of Memento, and if you gug that, this will appeal as well. It was nice to see Jennifer Jason Leigh again, who I always liked.

Considering I was in bed for the second day with the flu, it allowed me to watch three films that Lisa wouldn’t watch. Unfortunately, The Machinist was the only great film in the bunch. Before we left the States, I loaded up my TiVo with a bunch of films we could watch over here, thinking I might be able to manually record stuff off the TV, which hasn’t worked out. Still, we have nearly twenty films at our disposal.

There was a lot of hype about Audition, deeming it one of the ten best horror movies of all time. It could easily be summed up as the Japanese Fatal Attraction. First of all, not very much happens for the first hour and a half of the movie. I wasn’t enaged in the search to find out more about the woman the main character was falling in love with. Things do get horrifically graphic at the end though it ultimately didn’t pay off for me.

I suppose there was a message somewhere in Gus Van Zandt’s Elephant, but I couldn’t find it. His docudrama about a Columbinesque shooting left me more angry than anything else. What was the point? Or was that the point there was no point? The film won all kinds of awards, including an award at Cannes. Though, I have trouble with realistic films that traumatise you like the victims. Could an uneducated viewer get “the message” of this film, or just tap into the non-chalant violence these kids displayed, wreaking bloody revenge on other kids for sustaining spitballs in science class.

Disclaimer: All three of these films contain graphic violence. View at your own discretion.

(Image from IMDB.)