Posts Tagged ‘ 2004 ’

The Incredibles was an amazing family-friendly action-adventure comedy that still managed to stuff in some adventure and action here and there.  It can truly be something that entertains the entire family and not something that is simply child-friendly and adult-tolerable.

Along Came Polly is the most recent film in Hollywood’s long tradition of cookie-cutter plots.  Reuben Feffer, portrayed by Ben Stiller in a rather mediocre performance, lives a comfortable, if cautious life where his professional efforts are so focused on the prevention of any type of risky behavior that he lives a very quiet and very carefully planned life.

The Butterfly Effect is the must-see directorial debut from directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, who worked previously together as a screenwriting team for Final Destination 2.  Ashton Kutcher, made famous by his role on That 70s Show, stars in this film as Evan Treborn, a man who periodically blacks out due to a rare neural disorder he shares with his institutionalized father.  Evan and his best friend Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart from Road Trip and Rat Race), her brother Tommy (William Lee Scott), and Lenny (Eldon Henson), grow up in a hellish childhood environment and are all traumatized by a childhood incident where a woman and her baby are killed very gruesomely.

In Layer Cake, which is based upon a British novel of the same name, we get a rare peak into the British criminal underground through the eyes of a very successful cocaine trafficker who is never named, but is played by Daniel Craig.  He is well-educated, smart, respectful, and not greedy.  Having accumulated enough of a modest fortune for himself to live pleasurably he plans to leave the business while he is still ahead, but that all changes when his supplier Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) assigns him two very difficult tasks before he will be allowed to leave: find the whereabouts of a young woman named Charlie, the daughter of a powerful associate name Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon) and find a buyer for a massive amount of ecstasy pills which have recently been stolen in Amsterdam.

Christian Bale’s performance as Travor Reznik in The Machinist may rank as one of his best ever.  He plays an industrial machinist plagued by chronic insomnia and a mysterious weight-loss that is bringing him down to levels that make him appear like someone from Ethiopia during its infamous famine.  He is, essentially, dying of insomnia and his work as a lathe operator begins to suffer because of it.  He claims to his friend/lover/prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that he hasn’t slept in a year.