Fetid

fetid







Y

D



–adjective 

having an offensive odor; stinking. 



Also, foetid. 





　

Not least among its questionable achievements, Brad Anderson's The Machinist plays like a remarkably thorough David Fincher clip reel. Set in a stylized edge-of-nowhere wasteland where electrical storms forever loom overhead, this fetid mood piece [embraces] split-psyche trauma (Fight Club), paranoid headfuck (The Game), machine fetishism (Madonna's "Express Yourself" video), and most of all, the freak-show grotesquerie and Gomorrah-on-Earth ambience of Se7en. 



A prematurely retro exercise in mid-'90s industrial goth-grunge abjection (epitomized by Mark Romanek music videos of the period), the movie goes so far as to install Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor as presiding deity. As downward-spiraling insomniac Trevor Reznik, a 120-pound, famine-physiqued Christian Bale gives new meaning to "minimalist acting." His performance here is a sort of super-downsize-me stunt, pitched at South Beach Dieting academy voters who may well find his nutritional masochism even sexier than Charlize Theron's post–Krispy Kreme rebirth. 



But The Machinist isn't close to being worthy of his all too visible efforts. It's obvious within minutes that Trevor's cackling, Lynchian arc-welder friend (John Sharian) is imaginary, and much of what transpires has a tepid hallucinatory aura. Anderson and screenwriter Scott Kosar (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) struggle to kill time before the hammer drops—the images get more dutifully surrealist, culminating in a bleeding fridge and a freezer full of stinking fish heads. 



As its stricken hero's prominently posed copies of Kafka and Dostoyevsky suggest, the movie takes itself more seriously than it should. The climactic pop-psych flashback is beyond deflationary—it's flat-out inane. Trevor's skeletal form and déjà vu twinges eventually come to symbolize the movie's problems. The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before. 



twinge

–noun 

1. a sudden, sharp pain: On damp days, he's often bothered by a twinge of [rheumatism]. 

2. a mental 

or 

emotional pang: a twinge of [guilt]; twinges of [sorrow].  





rancid

as through decomposition, esp. of fats or oils

rancid [butter]

obnoxious

noxious

noxious [fumes] 

a noxious plan to spread [dis]sension.

pernicious

nocuous

delectable deleterious

inebriate

and asks her irascibly [inebriated] uncle to translate.

Detest