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One Hour Photo (Full Screen Edition)

One Hour Photo (Full Screen Edition)

List Price: $14.98
Your Price: $13.48
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Who knew Robin could be so creepy?
Review: This was a weird film. The premise is not new, but Robin certainly brought something to the table here. He can absolutely do a weirdo. No screaming, no big gestures. He nailed it. It's a rare talent Robin possess and I don't think he gets his due.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Nice creepy concept but not properly explored.
Review: The idea of a photo mart employee becoming obsessed with one of his clients is a pretty damn good one in the thriller movie "big ideas" scale of things. Add to this some very convincing acting by Robin Williams (of whom I am no fan at all) and some great moments of directing. With this package one would expect to have a classic in the making, but this movie falls well short of the mark. It is never boring to watch, but it simply doesn't explore some of the darker possibilities it alludes too and it concludes with a chop-off ending that won't satisfy anyone. Some viewers will be haunted by the plot next time they get their photos developed, but for me this is an opportunity missed. What might have been a classic doesn't satisfy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Worlds Collide
Review: Another outstanding performance by Mr. Williams as Sy! He convincingly portrays a character living in the sterile world of madness set on a collision course with the mad world of "sanity".

The slow, deliberate build up to this collision is riveting, and builds a strong empathy between the viewer and Sy, until the point where he completely breaks with reality - the conclusion I'll leave to the viewer to ponder (and you will)...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: dark, shocking and sometimes sick
Review: Robin Williams plays a photo person at SavMart as Sy who is obsessed with Connie Nielsen and her family including Alias' Michael Vartan who is extremely good as well. very creepy in the word but Williams delivers another awesome and disturbing performance next to his other hit this year, Insomnia. some moments will get under your skin and some will just make you go huh, but all in all its agreat movie, probably one of the best fof 2002

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Get ready to be freakd out for a long time....
Review: This movie will freak you out it will make you make sure that your doors are lockd maybe even make you sleep with the light on
it makes you never want to go turn in your film ever again
I give it 5 stars because they really did do a good job of freaking people out lol thats all im saying

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Extremely boring!
Review: This was not a thriller, nor was it creepy at all. The actual "creep" in the movie was the husband. Avoid this at all costs! No excitement and a disappointing ending.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Deceptively Thrilling, Predictably Disappointing
Review: Although many elements of the film were well done, the director's choice to make a trompe d'oeil illusion of a thriller leads an anti-climactic wimper of an ending.

Robin Williams plays Sy Parrish, a dedicated one-hour-photo technician who has no life outside of his work. As his life is immersed into his work, he becomes obsessed with being part of the lives he sees through the prism of his work; in this case, the family of Yorkins. Being psychotically unstable, Sy's work feeds his imaginary reality of the happy lives he sees in the photos and how he helps in bringing their joy. His fantasy is soon shattered when he sees that photos are only a snap shot of family life and that there are ugly sides of married life that are never included in the photo album: false expectations, mundane routine, dissatisfaction, and of course, infidelity.

The film does a great job in setting up the scenes to show the bland and montonous life of Sy. His empty life just blends in with the neat generic shelves and products of the supermarket he works in. The film brilliantly shows that theme unfolds in Sy's private life and how his neurotic attempts at breaking out of his routine soon become psychotic. Robin Williams played his role surprisingly well. The acting by Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan as Nina and Will Yorkin was nothing special however.

The problem with the film is that it takes almost all of its time in building suspense and leading the audience to think that Sy is a demonic killer. Instead, the ending is as bland as Sy's character in that he ends up being nothing more than a harmless peeper who went a little overboard instead of the predatory stalker the film prepared us for. Perhaps the writer and director thought that they were being clever but, ultimately, the joke is on them given the box-office results of this film. They shouldn't have been surprised; they got exactly the same response from the audience as the feeling they sought to evoke with the end of the film: an unimpressive anti-climax.

I have trouble recommending this film to rent as there isn't much to see in this film afterall; again, all of this suspense is frustratingly brought to nothing of an ending. For this genre, I prefer films such as "Taxi Driver" or "Silence of the Lambs" instead.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Very Good Psychological Thriller!
Review: This was a very entertaining psychological thriller about a lonely and mentally unstable photo developer, Sy (Robin Williams) who becomes obsessed with a family that he develops the pictures for. Making copies of all their personal photos, he keeps them for himself and builds a shrine in his apartment out of the photos. But when his boss fires him from his beloved job, he goes on a jealous rampage against the innocent family. This heart-pounding, psycho-thriller will leave you on the edge of your seat!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worst movie I've ever seen
Review: The movie one hour photo seemed an interesting film to me so i rent it, but then wow! What is that?

Its one of the worst movies i have seen this year, the plot goes on and on so slow and eventually when you finish watching the movie you simply ask yourself: WHY? Does it really worth 90 minutes of your life?

Well i did not seem to think so; Williams gave a nice performance but nothing more.
Honestly, i expected much better.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An effective, stylistic thriller... and Williams is amazing
Review: Right up front: I'm a fan of Robin Williams. I think he's a comic genius and a fine actor to boot.

With this in mind, I pretty much expected to enjoy "One-Hour Photo." I thought it could be an challenging role for Williams, and it had been a while since I really saw him stretch himself much. I didn't really know what to expect from the film as a whole, though. I was very pleasantly surprised.

"One-Hour Photo" is one of those atmospheric films that seem to happen by chance every now and again, happy accidents of mood and observation that seem almost accidentally skillful, but most likely are good by design. The director, in a DVD commentary, expresses the fact that one of the motivating themes behind the style of the film was a fascination with the massive discount store chains that have spread rapidly across America in the last couple of decades. It's a thematic element which shows through in almost every scene, most especially in the expansive, clean shots of the store interior, and mirrored in the ordered simplicity of the decoration and furnishings in Williams' character's house. By contrast, other locations seem complex, chaotic, even messy.

Another impressive element of the film is the use of color. Early on, in a bit of narration, Williams' photo clerk describes his disdain for the work of most one-hour photo labs, criticizing them for prints which are too dark or too light, or in which the color is improperly balanced. In another scene, later, Williams gets into a loud argument with a technician about a slight blue shift in the photo processing machine he uses. Williams speaks with pride of the care he takes in getting colors perfect in his prints. This immediately made me start looking for color and light cues in the film itself, and there are many to find. One of the few places where color and light seem perfect are within the store where Williams works. The store is clean, well-lit, reds are perfectly red and blues (such as on the vests store employees wear) are perfectly blue. However, when Williams steps outside the store, light becomes too yellow or too blue. The only exceptions to this are when he is in his own home, or when he is looking into the home of the family he has been stalking. In a most striking scene, Williams is sitting out in his car, looking into their house. Everything is perfectly-lit there, and colors look right. However, outside its too dark, and blues are stronger then other shades. In the final scenes of the film, as it comes to its denouement, color becomes washed out, lights too bright, as Williams' understanding of this perfect family becomes increasingly fractured. Color plays an important part in the film. Considering that it's about a man who develops photos for a living, why would it not?

Stylistically, I enjoyed the overall visual tone of "One-Hour Photo." It's atmosphere is somehow both antiseptic and creepy. The few truly shocking moments in the film are made all the more so by their contrast to the movie overall. Like a Stanley Kubrick film, One-Hour Photo uses a strong sense of order to highlight the chaos. A dream sequence near the end of the film, in which a comparison to Kubrick is even more apt, uses this in a most remarkable and truly surprising way.

It's Williams himself who's the real treat in the film, though. This is a man who has spent much of his career either making us laugh or making us feel empathy for his character. In this role, more even than in Insomnia, he abandons all of that. Somehow, the man who was so open and likable in other films becomes a closed door. While watching One-Hour Photo, I forgot very quickly that he was Robin Williams, as he allowed his usual persona to be completely subsumed by that of the character. Even his narration sounds almost completely unlike what we are used to hearing from him. Gone is the bright, animated voice of Aladdin's genie or the warm voice employed for "What Dreams May Come." He's calm and quiet and cold, until he gets a little bit excited. Then he becomes nervous and jumpy. His pathetic attempts to be a part of something he can't attain for himself make him simultaneously pitiful and creepy. He has a distance in this film that is rare for any actor, most especially Robin Williams. Though he is in almost every scene, one is left with a feeling at the end of the film that we do not know him - perhaps that we cannot know him.

The end of the film was also a pleasant surprise, in that it goes against most established Hollywood standards of moralizing and defies expectations. Without giving any specifics away, I can say that one comes away from the film wanting to make a solid moral judgment on some of the characters, but there is no way to do so. There's no easy answers, it seems to say in the end. There's no excuse here to finally pass judgment on this or that character, only more questions, most of which will never be answered. The implicit challenge to the audience to draw their own conclusions about the characters (or even more challenging, to keep an open mind about them all), is what makes "One-Hour Photo" a great film in the final analysis.


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