You won't be disappointed!
... View MoreThis movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place
... View MoreThe film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
... View MoreThrough painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
... View MoreIntelligent, low key sci-fi piece, impressive looking for it's reported budget of $500K. This has stylistic echoes of films like David Cronenberg"s "Dead Ringers". In a near future dystopia, a scientist builds a robot that looks like him, and has his memories. They end up both competing for the same girl. While the basic building blocks are familiar, the acting is quite good (especially for a no-name cast), and there is more thought put into the creepy, complex philosophical and moral elements, and the moody muted tone then into cheap scares. The ending is a bit of a let down, in that it feels a bit more formulaic. But overall this is an impressive first film by a director who sadly has yet to make another.
... View MoreThis movie sounds promising but just plain doesn't deliver.A potentially interesting plot is completely ruined by: Terrible acting.Poorly mixed sound. I had to crank my receiver way up to hear what these poor excuses for actors and actresses were blathering on about.Beyond low budget filming and effects, what effects?A kid with a camcorder could have done better.This would have made for an excellent episode of MST3K.Hopefully I can save someone from wasting an hour and a half of their lives by steering them clear of this failure.
... View MoreThis movie is one of the most original films I've seen in years. If you like thought provoking films you'll love it, if you are more into action and exploding cars you probably won't be so keen. My only reservation about it is the setting which is only mentioned once and it's tantalisingly left at that. That's fine by me because you can see more or less what's happened but it still would have been nice if the background was a little more consistent. I wanted to see more of it especially as it was so hauntingly shot.I was interested by a comment someone else posted - "I don't understand how tripe like this can still be churned out in the 21st century with over 100 years of film history behind us.."It's almost like they are saying movies started off terrible and amateurish and have somehow gone on an evolutionary journey to being better. I don't see that with Hollywood at all, it seems to me as though intelligent movies like this one are a rarity whereas in the past plot was something writers worked at because flashy effects and exploding cars were harder to come by."NO movie studio should back things like this." The person adds. Sadly, most studios won't so you have almost got your wish there. It's a shame though because films with an actual story to tell like this one will stay with you a lot longer than that exploding car scene. Each to his own though, I think this is a work of genius but I know a lot of people will disagree simply because it is slow and thoughtful. I personally found the implications quite scary, more so than a CGI monster popping out and a blaring noise to inform the viewer when to jump which is what passes for horror these days.
... View More"Puzzlehead" is much like an extended "Twilight Zone" episode warning about man creating artificial life in his own flawed image.It draws on myths from the doppelganger to the golem to Pygmalion and their psychological counterpart in "Fight Club," to sci fi from Asimov's Robot Rules to "Star Trek"'s "Data" character to darkly answering Philip Dick's question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the basis for "Blade Runner"). But this film makes battles about the Rise of the Machines more intensely personal than in "The Matrix" trilogy and even more intimate than in the new "Battlestar Galactica" series.Several elements raise it up beyond other robot genre films - the look, sound and, to a lesser extent, the role of woman and procreation in this nihilistic future.While filmed all in Brooklyn, the film looks like it is set in a violent, post-apocalyptic vaguely Eastern European dictatorship, both through the settings and the gritty and changing point-of-view cinematography and editing.The sound design very effectively adds to the creepy mood. According to Q & A with the director and crew at the Tribeca Film Festival, problems with the original ambient sound necessitated a re-recording of the entire soundtrack, including the actors' voices. Capitalizing on the look, the actors' original voices were replaced by other voice-overs with added accents so that all the speaking has the slightly disconnected feel of dubbed over foreign films, adding to the uneasy theme of relations between man and machine.The superior music selections, mostly heard Dogme style played in situ, add to the tense atmosphere, from the Yiddish folk song "Dona Dona" (its chorus here is eerily ironic, usually translated as "But whoever treasures freedom/Like the swallow has learned to fly."), to Bach and Scarlatti played on a harpsichord as if it's an automatic player piano.A unique element to the Frankenstein aspects of the story is the viewer's shifting sympathies between the creator and robot, usually based on how each relates to the woman, even as toward the end we scarily lose track of which one is the human.Writer/director James Bai, in the Q & A, cited Daniel Keyes' ironic story/novel "Flowers for Algernon" (the basis for the movie "Charly") as an influence, but I was struck more by the warning of human creators transmitting their intrinsically violent and emotional flaws.This film deals with some of the same issues as "Artificial Intelligence," but is to that film as the recent version of "Time Machine" is to "Primer." It is being showcased by the Alfred Sloan Foundation as the latter film was, for creatively showing science in society."Puzzlehead" can definitely be marketed to adult fans of robot movies, sci fi and "The Twilight Zone," but I doubt it will appeal more widely.
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