It confirms that Buscemi is a director that's here to stay.
Animal Factory (2000)
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:25
Rotten:5
Average Rating:6.7/10
Runtime: 1 hr 34 mins
Genre: Television
Synopsis: For his second film as a director, actor Steve Buscemi (TREES LOUNGE) brings ex-convict Edward Bunker's poignant jail drama to the screen. Trapped with a long-term prison sentence in a Pennsylvania... For his second film as a director, actor Steve Buscemi (TREES LOUNGE) brings ex-convict Edward Bunker's poignant jail drama to the screen. Trapped with a long-term prison sentence in a Pennsylvania state penitentiary, 21-year-old Ron Decker (Edward Furlong) feels like a terrified fish-out-of-water. His cellmate, Jan the Actress (an impressively unrecognizable Mickey Rourke), is a cross-dresser who won't stop talking. Enter Earl Copen (Willem Dafoe), an aging convict who has been in prison so long that he runs the show. Earl takes Ron under his wing, and a strange and intense relationship develops between them. However, the relationship offers Ron the protection he needs and gives Earl the feeling that he is a father figure. After Ron's appeal is denied, ensuring his place in the penitentiary for five more years, Earl thinks up a dangerous plan of escape that will either set them free or cost them their lives in the process. Buscemi's drama successfully balances the brutality of prison life with the touching, intimate relationship between Ron and Earl, providing ANIMAL FACTORY with a sensitivity that most prison films rarely contain. The movie features an atmospheric score by actor-musician John Lurie. [More]
Starring: Edward Furlong, Willem Dafoe, Seymour Cassel, Mickey Rourke
Starring: Edward Furlong, Willem Dafoe, Seymour Cassel, Mickey Rourke, Steve Buscemi, Tom Arnold, John Heard, Danny Trejo, Mark Boone, Eddie Bunker, Chris Bauer
Director: Steve Buscemi
Director: Steve Buscemi
Screenwriter: Eddie Bunker
Producer: Julie Yorn, Elie Samaha, Steve Buscemi, Andrew Stevens
Composer: John Lurie
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Reviews for Animal Factory
You come away with the sense that you should have come to care (or at least to know) more about its central characters than you do.
It's the relationship between Willem Dafoe, as Earl, the hard-time veteran, and Edward Furlong, as Ron, the new boy he takes under his wing, that makes the film so compelling.
Here we see prison as we’ve seen it before, but with a touch of originality.
Gets much of its power from Willem Dafoe's potent portrayal of Copen.
The prison atmosphere of constant danger was fully captured, as the film had a gritty, realistic look.
A picture about adapting one's instincts, and Mr. Buscemi's deftness works well in this context.
Perhaps at 95 minutes, the film is just too short to do justice to all these matters, and maybe one needs to read the Edward Bunker novel to fill in the blanks.
The bleakness and myriad cruelties of the prison system are telegraphed with a graceful touch.
One has to admire Buscemi's film not only for its achievement, which is considerable, but also for the traps it gingerly avoids, which were equally great.
A sober drama set in a maximum-security prison where a middle-aged "King of the Yard" mentors an inexperienced middle-class young man.
Where Darabont's drama is an overlong 142 minutes, Buscemi's is a just-right 94, and where Shawshank is predictable, Animal Factory surprises.
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