Despite what some of the newspaper blurbs are saying it doesn’t come anywhere close to either Hitchcock’s orignal or the god-awful remake in terms of shocking/scary moments.
It is kind of disturbing, in fact for me it hits a bit too close to home as far as the whole “stalking angle” thing goes.
Robin Williams is good, and no, there aren’t any moments of Robin whackiness, so get that right out of your head.
Actually, one of the things that struck me about the movie was how “White” it was, and by that I mean the color shceme of things, including Williams clothes.
Semi spoilers:
It’s fairly obvious that the SavMart is supposed to represent WalMart, but the SavMart is cleaner then any Walmart that I’ve ever seen. And I finally know what Eric LaSalle has been doing since leaving ER.
The one thing that was kinda wha?!?! to me was why Williams would take pictures of Gary Cole’s kid. That made no sense in terms of Williams character unless he wanted to be caught, of which there had been no indications in the film.
Overall, I’d say it was worth a matinee, but not worth full price. But then, NO movie is worth full price these days.
Come on, it had Lumbergh in it as a not so nice boss! The only way the movie could be better is if he said to Williams, “Sy, could you come to my office? That would be g-r-e-a-t, yeah.” Or “I’ve been looking over these TPS reports…”
i thought the movie was pretty good. the best movie i’ve seen in awhile, that’s for sure. like wsler said, the whole movie is white and light, light blue. sy’s clothes, the department store, his apartment, even his car, i think. i’d recommend it if you want to see a failry creepy movie.
and gary cole is my favorite actor-constantly-typecast-as-middle-management in the biz.
I was expecting Sy (and since when is that short for Seymour?) to physically harm Will and Maya. I wasn’t disappointed that he didn’t, and I suppose he accomplished what he set out to do without hurting anyone (which is good), but something about the ending made it feel just a little flat. You sorta expect psychotic obsessed stalkers to end on a bloody note, y’know?
Well, he didn’t make great pains to conceal the fact that he was behind a lot of the stuff. Putting himself on the same hotel floor? Switching Maya’s and Jake’s pictures? Stealing a knife from the place he worked? Those aren’t things that he could easily pass off as coincidence. In fact, up until he started running from the police at the end, I was positive he was designing things so that he would be caught.
Actually, I thought the ending was the beauty of the movie. I mean, you think he’s dangerous and creepy. You feel that way through the whole thing. You think the end is going to be bloody. But then it’s not. It sort of recasts all the previous behavior. It’s more weird, I think, than dangerous. But the feel of the movie, the mood, makes you certain that this is leading to something unspeakable… when it turns out he’s just a lonely, obsessed guy who gets really mad and punishes the person he thinks is bad. And he doesn’t even do what they think he’s doing (no film in the camera, right?) Intrigued me.
For all that, it was hard to watch, as a protective mom of a little boy. I wonder if I’d have felt so tense if I’d seen this before having my son.
Charges:
Breaking and entering, assault (for bashing the woman’s head in with the door), terroristic threatening (possibly 2 charges, depending on how they interpret the pictures he took of his manager’s kid), trying to escape arrest, theft (the knife), invasion of privacy (stealing all the photos), and there has to be something for forcing the simulated sexual relations. I don’t think he got to pay for his hotel room either.
And, yeah, I think a good lawyer could put together a pretty good insanity defense. I mean, he was a couple fries short of a happy meal.
I think he intentionally just wanted to freak out his boss as revenge for firing him.
At the very end when Sy breaks down and says stuff like “you would never do nasty things to your children and take pictures of them doing stuff like that…”, I got the impression that that’s what happend to Sy as a child (by his parent(s)). He desperately wanted to be a part of a normal happy family, and eventually “adopted” one. When he discovered the husband was having an affair, he felt betrayed all over again, and wanted to humiliate the husband, sort of as revenge against what happened to him as a child. There wasn’t any film in the camera because Sy had no desire to have photos from the hotel room.
I think Sy was stuck in childhood in a way. The photos that we saw at the end were of very ordinary stuff, just like the photos the young boy shot. When he went home he watched cartoons. He didn’t fully think ahead to getting caught and the consequences.
I was really touched by the scene where the boy was talking to his mother, telling her that he was sad that Sy seemed lonely with no friends. The mom and boy then take a moment to send good thoughts to Sy (like a prayer, I guess), and when they do that, Sy pauses for a moment in his kitchen, like there really was some sort of connection.
Anyhow, I thought it was a good movie.
It depends. If he acted it in classic Murray style, it would have made a good movie quite shitty. However, if he used his new toned down style like in Ed Wood, Cradle Will Rock, or The Royal Tenenbaums…you know, when he’s being a real actor instead of a Shatner on speed, it could have been interesting.
What made you ask that question? Was it Robin’s slight resemblance to Bill in the movie?
As for the actual movie, I really enjoyed it. It was disturbing, different, unpredictable, and the cinematography was a damn smooth move. The movie just wouldnt have worked without the washed out colors and the wide angles. Definately one of the better movies of the year, though I think the American remake of Ring may beat it. We shall see.
I liked the way the movie played off audience expectations. I saw this with a friend, and we both fully expected a bloodbath at the end. Throughout the Sy-makes-himself-at-home sequence, I was waiting for the horrible confrontation sure to happen when the family came home.
The bit about the various photo customers was great. I hadn’t given it much thought in the past, but I can’t imagine a photo developer commenting on my photos without feeling creeped out. Obviously, the developers have to be aware of the photos at some level, but I would feel odd if they scrutinized them to the point of forming coherent narratives from them, let alone did it for a period of years.
Can you really be charged with anything if you take pictures of a kid while they’re in their yard, in plain view? I remember learning in Media Law class that anyone can take pictures of you, even through your open front window of your house, as long as they’re not tresspassing and they don’t use the pics for commercial use. Could be wrong, though.
I didn’t like that he took pics of the boss’s little girl either. It really didn’t fit with his psychosis at all. Seemed like he just felt he was part of the main family, that’s all. And unless I missed something, I didn’t know that was the boss’s daughter until several munites after he took the pics, when the police were questioning the boss and Yoshi up in the break room.
My friend saw the “Internet” version before it came out (pre-final-editing) and he said it was somewhat different. One thing I remember he said was that it was tols sequentially, not with Sy being questioned at the beginning. I thought that sounded like a btter editing scheme, so we wouldn’t know if Sy killed himself or not until the final scene.
I didn’t like the last shot of the family w/Sy, unless it was a pretend shot. Otherwise, I thought it really made the ending sickly sweet.
This would false imprisonment, which is by far the most serious of the crimes at just a step down from kidnapping (you have to move the captives to a new place for it to be kidnapping).
And it closes at night; all of the Wal-Marts the size of the one in the movie that I’ve ever seen are 24 hour stores. The color scheme and the little circle logo are obviously Wal-Mart inspired, but other things–the layout, cleanliness, lack of huge throngs of badly dressed people, slightly more upscale clientele–make it seem more like Target to me.
As I was telling my wife, if you come at it thinking of it primarily as a horror movie (which is how it’s advertised) you’re missing that this is primarily a character study.
And yes, the Gary Cole character is a bit stuffy, but to accept that he’s a bad person based on how he interacts with Sy is to accept Sy’s point of view, which is, I think, a bit suspect. He reprimands Sy for making a scene in front of customers, taking 90 minute lunches, giving away free merchandise unauthorized, and fires Sy for stealing from the store. All of this is entirely reasonable, indeed, he’d be remiss not to fire an employee caught stealing.
This was another of Sy’s fantasies, just like the one earlier in the movie when he’s their home when the family arrives and greets him cheerfully.