The Goldfish Chronicles

This weekend I watched El Maquinista (The Machinist), starring Christian Bale. I added it to the Netflix queue while desperately searching for anything of interest (we have 100 movies in our queue, 95 are my wife’s) and so wasn’t expecting a lot. Happy to say, I got a lot more than expected - excellent movie.

It felt much like a short story - very focused and self-contained. The first half of the movie explored and expanded and then the second half refined and resolved. According to imdb, Christian Bale dropped a record 63 lbs to play the role - and it was worth it, the extreme thinness of the character stopped any feeling of empathy and kept the watcher feeling on edge throughout the film.

Best movie of 2006 - not that I’ve seen that many.