One Hour Photo (Widescreen Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Pictures are forever
Review: "Everyone always takes pictures of happy times. No one ever takes a picture of something they want to forget." Those are the words of "Sy the photo guy" , expertly played by Robin Williams. That's exactly what happens to Nina Younkin at the begining of the film. "It's a shame to waste this one exposure", Sy says as he takes a photo of himself using the Younkin's camera. Nina cringes a little, but as in all really good movies the early warning signs are missed.

Sy is a lonley man who dosen't realize he's lonely. His world is filmed in stark whites, and most of what we learn about Sy is told in spoken monolauge while we watch his bland and uneventful daily activities. In contrast, everything about he Younkin family has color and expression. We see early on that the marrage is troubled, but even those scenes are given a depth that Sy's life dosen't seem to have. Sy realizes this, and has filled his pale home with pictures of Will, Nina and Jake Younkin. For the past ten years or so, he prints an extra set every time the Younkins bring film in to the Sav-Mart where Sy runs the one hour photo lab.

Throughout the movie, we see Sy as wierd and a little frightening. The Younkins see a man who is a little eccentric, and harmless. Sy begins to "accedently" run into different members of the family as his desire to be part of thier happiness grows. All people have faults, and eventually Will's becomes known to Sy. This is his breaking piont. Robin Williams is wonderful to watch as he portrays Sy's struggle with himself and with the blemish that Will Younkin etched upon Sy's personal ideals.

Nobody dies, but people are destroyed. Watch this a second time after you know all that Sy tells the dective. There are clues, but Sy is a picture of something we want to forget. We look past the cause and just look at the effect. The movie isn't horror, or even an edge of you seat thriller. It's just really creepy. It stays with you longer than an action filled adventure would. Watch it, and be prepared to start developing your own film. Pictures can riun lives, and in this all to real story they do.

Rating:
Summary: Creepy and disconcerting
Review: Those of us that live in the suburbs know that, a few miles away, we will find one or more of those huge chain retail outlets, a place we can go to shop for everything we need. While we're there, we might drop off a roll or two of film to be processed. Unknowingly, perhaps thinking the whole process is done via computer, we don't realize that the technician developing the prints might actually be looking those prints over, an invisible eye to our private moments. That's the premise of Mark Romanek's chilling "One Hour Photo."

Robin Williams is Sy Parrish, a photo technician for one of those large nameless stores. He's polite, friendly, and knows many of his customers by name. Over the years he's become particularly fond of the Yorkin family: Will (played by Michael vartan), the handsome father and husband; Nina (Connie Nielson), the beautiful mother and wife, who over the years has come to know Sy; and son Jake (Dylan Smith), who also likes Sy, and is sad in his belief that Sy is lonely and has no friends.

We've all seen the manic Robin in many of his comedies, improvising like crazy, not really playing a character, just another version of himself. In "One Hour Photo," Williams takes that manic energy and stuffs it inside, and he becomes Sy the Photo Guy, no longer Robin Williams. It's a chilling performance. Sy is indeed friendless. Lonely and depressed, he eats his meals alone and returns home to his tiny, empty apartment.

Sy has done some decorating: one wall is covered with photos of the Yorkins. Over the years, Sy has made a set of prints for himself every time the Yorkins bring something in to be developed. And over the years he's become fixated on what he thinks, via the photographs, is a perfect family. He imagines himself as a part of the family, "Uncle Sy," and his fixation is now turning to obsession.

"One Hour Photo" is writer/director Mark Romanek's first film. Like many directors, his work over the years has primarily been in music video. He also directed Johnny Cash's heartbreaking video of "Hurt," which conveyed an overwhelming sense of heartbreak and dispair.

Romanek is some kind of genius for getting the performance out of Williams that he did. It's an amazing transformation.

The last third of the movie has Sy's world tumbling down around him: he loses his job and has discovered a piece of information on his "adopted" family that finally drives him over the edge into near madness.

The movie ends with many questions unanswered. There is no nice and tidy Hollywood ending where all problems are resolved. We, the audience, must now try to make sense of what has happened. It's a film that will stay with you long after the end credits roll.

DVD highlights:
-- Commentary track with Robin Williams and Mark Romanek. Apparently this is the first time ever that Williams has recorded a commentary track for one of his films. The two have a good rapport, and while the commentary lags in places, we do get a glimpse into the "real" Robin Williams. His commentary is, for the most part, subdued and intelligent, with the occasional humorous bit thrown in.

-- Standard "Making Of" documentaries, theatrical and television trailers, as well as a longer interview taken from the Charlie Rose show.

Note to parents: Your kids might be big Robin Williams fans, but this is NOT a movie for children.

Rating:
Summary: Photo Phreak
Review: Sy Parrish (Robin Williams) is a lonely guy. He works as a photo-finisher at the local Sav-mart, where he takes his job VERY seriously. For ten years now, Sy has given special attention to the Yorkin family. He's developed their film in under an hour, and even made sure to get an extra set of prints for himself. Poor Sy has no life at all. Each night he gets off work, drives his boring little car home to his dull little apartment, and watches tv. Sy has only one ray of sunshine in his otherwise gray existence. It is the Yorkin family. Over the years their pictures have become Sy's obsession. They have given him a sense of belonging and a reason to live. Sy has covered an entire wall with the Yorkin clan's photos. This collage represents their history with "uncle" Sy. One day, Sy gets called in to see his boss at Sav-mart. He's been busted for his decade worth of making (stealing) extra sets of pictures. Sy gets fired. What else is there for a man like Sy? While finishing out his final week, Sy runs across some pictures of Will Yorkin (head of Sy's adopted family) being romantic with another woman. Sy is outraged. His dream has been destroyed and he must face a reality he's spent a lifetime supressing. There are no perfect families. There are no perfect people. There are only human beings doing messy human things. This doesn't sit well with Sy, who sets out to teach his ex-boss and Will Yorkin a lesson in humility. Yep, the glue has dissolved, Sy's come apart, and he's on a rampage! What comes next is retribution for those who have dared to betray him. ONE HOUR PHOTO is a scary movie. It achieves a thickening atmosphere of dread without any cheap shots or unnecessary violence. Every crack in Sy's mind is tiny and subtle, until these cracks join together into one huge split. I thoroughly enjoyed Robin Williams' performance, as it was one of his most gratifying. Highly recommended...

Rating:
Summary: Good Psychological Thriller
Review: I saw this film when it came out in the theaters, and recently caught it again on HBO. Seeing it again reminded me what a gem it is.
Robin Williams stars as Sy, a middle aged loner who works at a Drug Store One Hour Photo. Sy loves his job(maybe too much), and knows just about everything about his customers, especially a family that have been his customer for years. Connie Nielsen stars as the wife of the family. She and her son Jake frequent the One hour photo, and are on a first name basis with Sy.
Little do they know, that Sy is obsessed with this family. When Sy goes home, he has hundreds of photos of them on his wall. The photos on the wall date back to when Jake was a newborn. This scene is very creepy. The film gets better when Sy learns he is being fired and will lose his job in a week. Sy begins to crack, and to make matters worse, he discovers the perfect family he's obsessed with arent so perfect at all. Williams does a great job here. He convinces us that Sy is a guy who we can pity, but also fear if we ever wrong him.
The movie is slow moving, and slowly builds to a creepy finale.
If you're looking for a fast paced slasher flick, you're in for a let down. If you like psychological thrillers, you're in for a treat.

Rating:
Summary: His best performance to date!
Review: This movie has got to be one of Robin Williams' best work ever! He shows, with this movie, that he can play characters out of his normal comedic realm.

As you can tell by the title this is about a one hour photo counter in a Savemart store. It is about Sy the photo guy, who is a middle aged man and very lonely. Sy takes great pride in his work and knows all of his customers, their addresses, the type of pictures they take, how many prints they want, the size of print, etc. However, he is so lonely that over the years he has become obsessed with a family who has been developing their pictures with him for 9 years or so. Sy, figures out something about this family (by putting 2 & 2 together), and becomes obsessively angry. So much so that he sets out his plan to make someone pay (can't tell you what occured to make him snap as it hasn't been seen in the tv trailers yet so I can't spoil the movie).

Robin's performance is riveting and compelling. There is enough suspense to keep you on the edge of your set. However, this movie is quite disturbing in some ways and is not for everyone, especially children. There are a several disturbing scenes but that is what makes the movie, along with Robin's unforgetable performance.

I see an oscar nomination for Robin's portrayal of Sy the photo guy as this movie shows how diverse Robin's acting abilities really are & what a great actor he is! This is a must see in the movie theater type of movie! You won't be disappointed!!

Rating:
Summary: Williams Shines as Poor, Lost Soul
Review: I never know what to expect of Robin Williams anymore. He skipped from Mrs. Doubtfire to Death to Smoochy in one bewildering leap. So I rented this movie based on its plot, and without any consideration for the cast.

I must say that Williams really shines in this movie as I have never seen him before. In Hook, What Dreams May Come, and Dead Poets Society, there was a hint of that dramatic core hidden beneath the childlike flippancy of the movies that are great hits with the younger set. But in this movie, Williams puts on a stellar performance, demanding that you feel something for him, about him, and possibly about yourself.

The best part of this film is that it is not a knife-and-dagger, grotesque, blood-all-over thriller, but the psychological kind -- the type that leaves you thinking about it afterward, and yet, feeling intense emotions for the poor soul Sy the Photo Guy. Every person has more than one dimension, even people who we might not consider normal. But what is normal, anyway? Everybody has a different defining line for that term. Watch this movie and decide where you think the normal line is crossed.

This movie is not suitable for the younger set, by the way. And, for the record, neither is Death to Smoochy.

Rating:
Summary: "I just took pictures"
Review: This is a very, very impressive film. Robin Williams, whose comedies are nothing short of loathsome, takes us into dark territory very believably. Mark Romanek wrote and directed, and obviously knew what he was doing in every shot and with every angle. The writing is superb.

Creepy is a word that is easily brought to mind, almost too easily, by this movie. This is partly do to the movie's understated style. We nod our heads, because we've encountered people like this. Sy "the photo guy" is not an ogre, is not unintelligent, and has his own peculiar compassion for people. This makes it easy to empathize with Sy, and pity him, even as he concocts his despicable and pathetic strategies to insinuate himself into the lives of the Yorkins. When we watch him methodically eating and watching the Simpsons, just barely existing, there's something of an accusation directed at us watchers as well. Sy's obvious alienation from society, and his inner sterility, seem even more genuine with his dutiful participation in and obedience to the bankrupted, valueless and commodified civilization embodied by the SAVEMart, and maintained by the petty and bureaucratic manager (Gary Cole). Romaneck almost takes the manager character towards stereotype, by with Cole even it rises above two-dimensionality.

Sy casts himself in the role of protector, as a sort of unbidden defender of human value and values, transcending his own mediocrity by--I suppose--denying it. The delusional grandiosity of this role is even more sad if we have to believe that Sy's dysfunctionality is the only reason he gives a damn. What does that say?

The melodrama of a Hitchcock is absent here. The aesthetic violence of Scorcese's ritualistic TAXI DRIVER also isn't to be found. ONE HOUR PHOTO is most poignant in a main character who is everywhere today in our society. He's easy to understand because we've encountered people like this. The alienated and socially dysfunctional, who are unable to form relationships, respect boundaries, and understand intimacy are all too frequent. The near sympathy with which he's treated in the movie, and protrayed by it, may help us to be able to recognize and maybe address it somewhat in our lives.

A movie that is a clear forerunner, and I think influenced Romaneck, is Coppola's 1974 THE CONVERSATION, starring Gene Hackman, a sort of commentary on the Watergate era. It most closely compares to ONE HOUR PHOTO. Hackman is superb as Harry Caul, whose inner world is a contentless vacuum, yet guarded with obsessive paranoia (Kafka's allegorical story, "The Burrow," explores this kind of existence). Isolation and paranoia morally hamstring the protaganist, yet guides his obsession when he suddenly decides to act as a moral agent. The conclusion of that movie is extraordinary.

Rating:
Summary: This movie is for women only
Review: I recommend something like Survivor: Borneo on DVD.

Rating:
Summary: Better the first time you Watch
Review: I rate the movie a 4 the first time through. But it's just not a movie I can see people watching over and over. It does a good job of showing what being lonely can do to a person. I wasn't really fond of the ending.

Rating:
Summary: Where are my pictures?
Review: A nice sunrise opening is never explained, but it would make a good postcard. We are told that 'family photos are almost always of the happy moments and show smiling faces.' We don't take pictures of something we want to forget.

In the case of a fire, after pets, people usually save their family photos. In the early '60s, I lived in an apartment building in the historic West Hill area of Pulaski, TN, where a fire started in the walls between the floors. A neighbor sat down placidly to look at her photo albums, which I thought strange at the time. I was busy getting my baby and cat and run down the stairs to deposit them on another neighbor's sofa.

Sy has worked in a photo developing department of a store for 20 years and it is his life. He gives special treatment to customers he likes, sometimes a free disposable camers as a birthday gift.

He is a loner who "adopts" the Yorkin family. Similarly, Miss Barnes, a spinster librarian at the college where we were, had considered me and mine as her surrogate family. It is so sad when you have no one in your life, no one who really cares.

He lives vicariously through the photos he personally handled (sometimes making a copy for himself) for nine years. He tells the waitress at a seedy restaurant where he eats alone that the child is his nephew. He collects all kinds of old photographs of people he doesn't know. One was a Senior High picture of a girl taken in the '50s which he pretended was of his mother.

His narration at intervals throughout the movie was most informative, such as, "I was here; I existed. Someone cared enough about me to take my picture."

In fact, he took one of himself at the end of one of the Yorkins' roll so they would see it. He explained that a snapshot is a hurried shot taken without deliberate aim; a hunting term. When I take photos, I always aim with an eye for a good background and sometimes abandon the shot if the background is not what I want.

Sy gets a little too personal in his comments about their lovely home when he encounters the husband in the store one day. A fantastic tree (such as the large one which grows outside my window) is shown at the Yorkin's front door. He "visits" when they are not at home and makes himself 'at home' with a beer watching t.v. and even using the bathroom. One day they catch him there and pretend he was expected.

He observes a family coming apart emotionally with lots of interpersonal and financial problems, while Sy sits alone watching the Simpsons on t.v. and looking at his wall covered with snapshots of this young family. He shadows the family wherever they go, even sits in the bar reading Deepak Chopra's THE PATHS TO LOVE as he knows that Ms. Yorkin is also reading this book. He quotes a passage of Chopra's Eastern philosophy: "The things we fear the most have already happened to us."

From his voyeurism (looking through a set of intimate photos a young girl left to be developed), he discovers the adulterous behavior of Jake's father. As a result, he inserts them into the envelope for some rather silly snaps the child took with his 'free' camera.

He has made hundreds of copies of other photos without paying and, as a result, gets fired. I liked the scene where he sits dejectedly on a bed in the store with a Kitty pillow. Pathologically, he withdraws and his personality changes. He sits in a corner on the floor and smiles at the atrocious assortment of snaps Jake took which Sy developed as his last 'job.'

As he leaves on his final day of work, he steals a long butcher knife. He follows as the Yorkins retrieved the photos to observe the wife's hurt and torment when she sees the evidence of her husband's infidelity. He even goes so far as to hide and take pictures of the family through a large picture window as they go through the normality of a meal. The purloined revealing, sexy photos didn't have the lasting effect he'd hoped for.

He is clever in his demented state as he sets out to make things right for his beloved "adopted" family. He tracks the philandering husband with his mistress to a hotel and maneuvers to get a room on the same floor. He tortures the nude couple as he photographs them in sordid situations.

He has committed a criminal act previously, by taking photos of his manager's young daughter. Gary Cole was good as the manager who had to fire him. He was marvelous in the t.v. series AMERICAN GOTHIC. He has invated their existence and subsequently indirectly threatened the child's life. The police are called and discover the wall of photographs which Sy has defaced by scratching the face of the husband in each one.

He is able to delude them by intervening through a conference on 'retinal implants' at the hotel and escapes through the kitchen. He runs like the athlete he never was, down the garage ramps. But gets caught nevertheless. He'd left the unused knife behind in room 519 and says, "I just took pictures."

On the surface, Jake's dad looks the same but nothing will ever be the same. Is this man smart enough to appreciate the good he has? Or will he continue to cheat on his wife and neglect his son. No one will ever be the same.

Sy was harmed emotionallly by some of the content of photographs he'd developed for fifteen years. Seeing some of the things people did to their children had left lasting damage to his psyche. He ended up with stupid photos of inanimate objects that only a crazy person would take. The scene where his nightmare showed blood gushing from his eyes had set him on a trail of depravity.

Did this move have any redeeming quality? I didn't see any, but this is one film it will take me a long time to forget. Sorta like PSYCHO. I guess that stands for something in the long run of things; perhaps a lesson was learned after all.