The first Brad Anderson film I saw was Session 9. (I also spent $27 on the out-of-print DVD, which I've watched at least three times in the last year. It's a great movie.) And then I saw his dark and twisted love letter to Alfred Hitchcock: The Machinist. Wow. Aside from Christian Bale's staggering performance, it's just a rock-solid, old-fashioned mind-bender of a noir thriller. Good stuff. Most recently I saw the director's train-bound and icy chiller Transsiberian at Sundance, which (shocking!) I also enjoyed quite a bit.Which leads us to a logical question. What can Brad Anderson fans expect next? According to Bloody-Disgusting, the writer / director is not straying far from the genre fare any time soon. First on the filmmaker's plate looks to be All Lost Souls, which is a "serial killer movie," and then perhaps Vanishing, which Anderson describes as "a smart post-apocalyptic horror film." Sounds good so far.
But even further down the road, Anderson could be looking at a remake of the 1943 occult flick The Seventh Victim -- and a Cronenbergian thriller called Concrete Island, which just might reunite the director with two of his Machinist collaborators: screenwriter Scott Kosar and low-key superstar Christian Bale. And to all those projects, I say this: Cool. Get to work, Brad!
[ Thanks to Bloody-Dee for the cool info. ]
1. Hang on. I've got to call you out for liking Session 9. After seeing it due to it's cult status, I couldn't figure out what the big deal about it was. An excerpt of my review:
"How would you feel if you sat through an hour and twenty minutes of nothing happening just to see a gimmick twist ending? If that is the kind of movie you want to see, by all means, rent Session 9 immediately. I was simply not impressed - rather, I was angered and felt tricked by sticking around for nothing to happen. Please do not fall for it like I did. It is NOT a horror film. It is a twist-ending film, with complete boredom leading up to that. "
And I'll stand behind that. I haven't seen Anderson's other films since, but they could only improve over the abomination that was Session 9. Sends shivers down my spine for all the wrong reasons.
Posted at 10:11PM on Jul 18th 2008 by MCW