BEFORE: Almost done with the Robin Williams chain. Three days after Comic-Con, and I'm still recovering, with a sore back and sore arms - and the latest is that I got an infection in my foot, from the blister I got walking so much around the convention center, so I'm on antibiotics for the next 10 days. Which I think means no alcohol, so it's up to movies to entertain me.
THE PLOT: An employee of a one-hour photo lab becomes obsessed with a young suburban family.
AFTER: Perhaps a departure for Williams, playing a lonely older man who becomes unhinged after looking at so many photos of happy families. It's tough to set the right tone with a topic like this, do you make the character sympathetic or not? This is sort of the flipside to "Dead Poets Society", you can see what happens to a man who did NOT seize the day, never married, never had kids, never got out of his dead-end job at the photo place.
Williams plays Seymour Parrish, aka "Sy, the Photo Guy", and saying he knows his customers intimately is an understatement. He can spot the first-time parents, the frequent vacationers, and the amateur pornographers among his customers. Yes, it's a violation of privacy for him to look at their photos (and make copies for himself), but come on, you know it happens.
Aside: I went into a sandwich shop in San Diego, right near my hotel, and the woman at the counter said, "Didn't you come in here, like, a year ago?" Why, yes I did. Either this woman had an incredible memory, or she recognized I wasn't one of her regular customers, or I somehow made an impression last year when I ordered a sandwich.
This film simmers for a long time before it comes to a boil, and there's a lot of creepy music that warns us about what's to come, as Sy gets bolder in the ways he tries to connect with a particular family. Then he learns a secret about the husband through the photos in his store, and he really goes off the deep end.
Infidelity is a tricky subject - if you learn that someone is cheating, should you tell their spouse? Yes, of course, obviously they should know - but then, also maybe no, because you don't necessarily have all the facts of the situation. They may already know (at least on some level) and they may already be dealing with it (at least on some level).
Unfortunately this seems like a 5-minute story, stretched out to a 90-minute film. I wonder if the pacing would have worked better as a 15-minute short film, rather than as a feature. The movie makes a few interesting points about photography, but considering the switch to digital cameras and on-line photo albums, that all seems rather outdated. Photo-developing centers are on the endangered list, aren't they?
Also starring Connie Nielsen (last seen in "The Ice Harvest"), Michael Vartan, Gary Cole (last seen in "Extract"), Eriq La Salle and Clark Gregg (last seen in "(500) Days of Summer").
RATING: 3 out of 10 soccer games
"I don't understand the kids today. They have no notion of privacy, what with the blogspaces and the facetweets!"
ReplyDeleteAnd these are the same people who'd hand over rolls of film containing allllLLLLLlllllll of their private family moments, to total strangers who aren't being paid enough to not want to find ways to amuse themselves on the job.
But it's kind of sad, what happened to one-hour-photo places. I had a great relationship with two different photo labs: the little nearby photo shop for most of my film processing, and then a high-end lab that charged you an extra $13 per enlargement but were staffed by obsessive detail freaks.
Over time, it becomes a social thing as well as a commercial service. You kind of enjoy the few minutes of chat, and you like the fact that you're supporting a local business (usually, I'd be paying the people who actually own the shop).
I was an early user of digital cameras and I felt like the Ghost of Christmas Future during my increasingly-infrequent trips to those shops.