Caffeinated Clint
Christian Bale doesn’t exactly owe Brad Anderson one in the same way Robert De Niro owed Martin Scorsese one, but Anderson was playing Russian roulette when he pulled the trigger on using the then-unbankable Bat-Brit in his ambitious 2004 flick “The Machinist”.
Now they say “Batman Begins” was the film that changed it all for Bale…pfft! That’s about as right as a stickless icy-pole; it’s just the first film of Bale’s that made some decent cash. The reviews and accolades that the thesp won for his transformational turn in “Machinist” is what finally made Hollywood wake-up to the actor’s potential. Remember all that weight he lost for the film? Amazing. The man is dedicated. It paid off though. “The Machinist” put Bale – who made his film debut as a kiddie, of course, in Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” – on the map. And got him rich. And to Gotham City.
Bale is reuniting, all these years later, with director Anderson for “Concrete Island”.
Here’s a quick rundown of the Filmax flick :
Los Angeles, 2020. Robert Maitland is a highly successful architect. One day, he speeds down the freeway losing control of his car and crashing into the middle of a manmade ‘island’ underneath a freeway intersection. After days of suffering agonising physical pain and the mental turmoil, he begins to suspect that he may not be the only person on the ‘island’. When his fellow inhabitants finally reveal themselves, it soon becomes clear to Maitland that on this ‘concrete island’, only the strong survive.
And here’s a poster, courtesy TwitchFilm :
