The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)

[chaddoli]

SLT is the best film made in America since 1970. Nuff said.

Please elaborate.

[John Cope]

The Playlist taunts us with details.

[domino harvey]

I'm just trying to figure out how that short story is a movie, because as a little fifteen minute segment in an anthology, it would work-- it's a one-note morality fable, like most TZ-fodder stories. I'm also more than a little confused at how a movie about three people and a box costs $30 million.

How will those two hours be filled? Why, by Oscar nominee Frank Langella's disfigured face and good clean dialog, of course

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I'm kinda scared as to which Scott Walker song gets used in the film.

[Antoine Doinel]

Here's the trailer. Am I hearing things or is Cameron Diaz attempting an accent? Also, it's kind of absurd that they're complaining about living paycheque to paycheque while wearing designer clothes and sleeping on 700 thread count sheets.

[MTRodaba2468]

Here's the trailer. Am I hearing things or is Cameron Diaz attempting an accent? Also, it's kind of absurd that they're complaining about living paycheque to paycheque while wearing designer clothes and sleeping on 700 thread count sheets.

It said in the AICN interview that Diaz's character would have a Texan accent (based on his mother's accent), so I'm not surprised at that.

I enjoyed Donnie Darko, so I'm willing to give this one a chance.

[eljacko]

Here's the trailer. Am I hearing things or is Cameron Diaz attempting an accent? Also, it's kind of absurd that they're complaining about living paycheque to paycheque while wearing designer clothes and sleeping on 700 thread count sheets.

The plot of this film kinda reminds me of that ridiculous sequence near the end of The Dark Knight with the two ferries that are supposed to blow each other up. Except, now there's Santa Claus? What?

[Antoine Doinel]

Cameron Diaz gives up some big spoilers about the film, and holy shit, it's ridiculous.

[Murdoch]

Spoiler

Cameron Diaz just came out and gave up the whole movie with a few comments about people from Mars and some race testing mankind as a whole

I guess that about says it all.

[Antoine Doinel]

I'm kinda scared as to which Scott Walker song gets used in the film.

It's "When Joanna Loved Me".

[domino harvey]

Cameron Diaz gives up some big spoilers about the film, and holy shit, it's ridiculous.

Boy, I bet those people who were keeping an open mind feel real stupid right now

[J Adams]

I saw this yesterday. Yes, it's ridiculous, but for some that might be part of its appeal.

The acting is all over the place--sometimes good, sometimes bad.

And, yeah, there are plotholes up the ying yang.

But there are a number of very effective moments before it goes off the rails in the last 30 minutes.

I'm just glad Hollywood is still willing to support stuff like this.

[jesus the mexican boi]

http://ebaumnation.com/2009/10/16/-the-box-parody

Just thought to share.

[Cde.]

I tracked down the original sketch so as to stop people from giving hits to the thieves over at eBaum's.

The biggest problem with this film is that all the weirdness and conspiracies are largely superfluous. Barely anything that happens after the initial set-up has much bearing on the outcome.

For many people I suspect this won't matter and the journey will be half the fun, but all-in-all I found it a bit flat.

Against the odds though, it's not a disaster. There are some interesting moments, and the plot doesn't feel nearly as ridiculous in context as it does coming from the mouth of Cameron Diaz.

[Tribe]

La Manohla doesn't really know what to think about this movie:

November 6, 2009
Simplifying One Life, Complicating Another
By MANOHLA DARGIS


Richard Kelly, the writer and director of the much-loved “Donnie Darko” and much-loathed “Southland Tales,” has a thing for the apocalypse. Like those films, his latest, “The Box,” is sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious, a serious work that insists on its own seriousness even when it edges toward the preposterous. As in his earlier films, he is again using genre (and pretty actors) as a vehicle to ask questions about the human condition (and conditioning) amid a thicket of high, low and trash cultural allusions and against a backdrop of impending doom. But the end isn’t nigh in Mr. Kelly’s world. It’s here.

The similarities among all three of his features (he also wrote the screenplay for “Domino”) are striking and suggest that Mr. Kelly is developing a worldview, puzzling through the great questions, or fast-working himself into a creative impasse, maybe all three. Based on “Button, Button,” a short story by the fantasy writer Richard Matheson, “The Box” is the first of the movies Mr. Kelly has directed that he didn’t write from the ground up. This doesn’t much matter, because the original story, which was first published in Playboy in 1970 and runs about 10 pages, is merely a humble scaffolding for Mr. Kelly’s mazelike narrative, with its sharp and snaking turns, its periodic dead ends and various pathway choices.

Navigating those paths alongside the audience are Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) and her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), an attractive, seemingly happy middle-class couple who in 1976 are living in a pleasant Virginia suburb with their only son, Walter (Sam Oz Stone). Norma, a teacher at a private high school, and Arthur, an engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who’s hoping to make astronaut, live somewhat beyond their means, or so she says. There’s a sports car in the driveway, and Walter attends the school where Norma teaches Sartre’s “No Exit” to rich whelps more interested in her limp. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that after they receive an offer to earn a million dollars, they grab it.

As in the short story, the payout comes with a shocking condition: they have to murder someone first by pressing a red button on a curious little box, or so says the man making the offer, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). Norma doesn’t seem terribly shaken by this stipulation or by the fact that she can see some of Mr. Steward’s teeth through the hole in his cheek. (Don’t worry about it, he says, and she doesn’t, though I did.) Mr. Kelly doesn’t seem too concerned about the moral angle, either, which he takes his time getting to, creating a needless complication in a movie overstuffed with complications, including severed toes, watery portals to another dimension, the Mars Viking mission, murdered wives, tall ships and even, alas, the twin towers.

A lot happens. Some of what happens tracks, some does not. Sometimes this matters, sometimes not. The actors are fine, and to watch Norma trying to persuade Arthur that they need to push the button is to realize that Ms. Diaz should go dark more often. Mr. Marsden seems a little lost (you can’t blame him), but he handles the story’s hairpins. He’s also better served by the digital cinematography than Ms. Diaz; shot by Steven Poster, the movie has been washed in 1970s browns that serve the vibe if not her skin tone. But Mr. Kelly leans too heavily on traveling shots here, and his habit of slowly moving the camera toward something or someone, a creeping meant to intensify suspense, soon feels like mannerism.

Mr. Matheson, perhaps best known for his novel “I Am Legend” (the basis for the Will Smith thriller), has described the idea behind his short story as “a sacrifice of human dignity in exchange for a specific goal.” That more or less describes the themes, which he bundles together with unadorned prose, a heavy serving of dread and a gratifying, blunt, O. Henry-like kicker. It’s the kind of ending that can make you laugh out loud because the final twist of the knife is at once so expected and yet nonetheless pleasurable. (Part of the delight, of course, is having that expectation met.) Like many fine genre works, the story satisfies your appetite for tales of this type and leaves you a little something extra to savor.

For his part, Mr. Kelly has an uneasy relationship to genre, or maybe he just needs a writing partner, someone to help him edit all his bright and dim ideas. “The Box” is alternately fluid and inspired, and rarely dull (though it is a little, on occasion). But too often it also feels strained, which might be expected from any movie that name-drops “No Exit” in one scene and the grim 1970s sitcom “What’s Happening!!” in the other. There are, as with his previous films, various visual gifts, like the spooky image of an airplane hangar glowing in the night and the odd image of Norma’s little toe waving like a finger. But Mr. Kelly is so busy sampling genres and confusing the issue that he rarely gives you time or space to enjoy them. In the end, he often seems as lost as his characters, trapped in a Pandora’s box of his own making.

[Vic Pardo]

the grim 1970s sitcom “What’s Happening!!”

I don't get this reference in Manohla's review. What was so grim about "What's Happening!!"?

[Zumpano]

So, how's the music?

[Cde.]

So, how's the music?

One of the best things about the film. Very Bernard Herrmann-esque.

[MoonlitKnight]

Kelly continues to be what you'd imagine to be the offspring of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam, with Ken Russell serving as surrogate. His two problems continue to be lack of restraint and his desire to cram far too many different ideas into a single film (which, I suppose, ties into the first point).

That said, like his previous efforts, "The Box" is a fascinating mess...though I think overall it's his most accomplished work to date. It's an effective metaphor for how the human race continues to repeat the same fuck-ups and never seems to learn lessons from its past. Give me 'ambitious-but-flawed' over 'expertly-crafted-but-totally-run-of-the-mill' any day.

[HarryLong]

Give me 'ambitious-but-flawed' over 'expertly-crafted-but-totally-run-of-the-mill' any day.

Amen.
Given the vast number of new films with barely a notion, much less a single idea, I'll go for someone trying to cram too many into a film any day.
(And Gilliam and Russell are two of my favorite directors.)

[redbill]

This movie had me for about the first half, then it started to make no sense, and is wrapped up with a non-explanation involving

Spoiler

martians?

Reminded me of Darko, that actually had me for the first 3/4, then went a little crazy and was wrapped up with a non-explanation involving a worm-hole.

[royalton]

Jesus, that was dreadful. It started out okay and then boom, into Southland Tales territory. Worse, Kelly

Spoiler

tries to tie it into Darko and SLT with the water tunnels - I'm sure that's another example of "Fluid Karma" from the SLT continuity. AFAIC you shouldn't get to make your own universe when you're this bad a creator. And I have no idea what that whole rigamarole was about - the audience I saw it with got the giggles every time Steward's wife started spouting off about "eternal damnation."

The best scenes had to do with Cameron Diaz's impediment, and the Scott Walker dance. If you ignored the dialogue.

Spoiler

Though the Diaz/Langella face/off where she talks about love was good - yet ruined by the intercutting with perhaps the most ludicrous sequence in the film.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I was expecting to hate this. I didn't like Donnie Darko and avoided Southland Tales like the plague. This said, it's still not a very good film. The basic premise is Matheson's, right? But Kelly takes it into different directions that he never develops and then just abandons. There presumably IS a connection between the Mars landings and what Steward is up to, but there's never an attempt to explain it. I liked elements of how it was shot; the over-saturated yellows in the family home, for instance, but much of it was silly and the acting was erratic. Only Langella seemed comfortable in his villainous role. In spite of this, I've found myself thinking about it constantly since. I can't quite dislike it against my better judgement. It's an interesting mess of a film.

[John Cope]

Mark Fisher shares some extraordinary reflections on an extraordinary film.

It's certainly deserving of the praise. I'm a fan of Kelly but he's outdone himself here. At first I wasn't so sure as I like the original story quite a bit and found the idea of embellishing it to be pointless and counter-productive. But Kelly understands that to elaborate upon it demands a good justification. What he gives us is sprawling and byzantine, rich and deeply layered but, ultimately, a profoundly moving experience derived from that same strategy of elaboration and distension. There is indeed so much inside The Box that it would take, and does demand, further careful viewings to appreciate it all; but what is not in doubt its its accumulated force and rare power. This is not some case (as early reviews would have it) of stretching out the story for its own sake. Kelly finds ways of compounding the moral anguish at the center and expanding its implications.

Part of what is so exciting about it is the fact that, as with Southland, his formal strategy is so totally attuned to the needs of his narrative and unconcerned with making excuses for its potentially risible elements. I love the fact, for instance, that there are many moments in which no matter how well we've been concentrating on the flow of story the sequence of events before us escapes a totalizing comprehension. This is, of course, not an error but a strategy, marginalizing irrelevancies with escalating insistence (as was the case on Twin Peaks when Lynch would come in for an episode and basically wipe the board clean, indifferent to the supposedly critical issue of "continuity"). So much is displaced and elided in order to better accentuate the themes and ideas which are clearly Kelly's main concern. And yet he never neglects the heart of his picture and trusts the actors to convey the warmth of their familiar characters.

I also like the fact that in terms of those characters The Box recalls early Spielberg like CE3K. I can't remember any recent films with such a determined cast of serious sci-fi/fantasy which also centered on protagonists depicted so simply and sympathetically; the characters are presented as a relatively average middle class family with little discernible friction, which is a rarity to see without tinges of cynicism or barely withheld contempt festering just under the surface. I really wonder if this, and then also the final outcome of investing in such a model family, could be part of the reason for the film's commercial failure.

Kelly's aesthetic also borrows certain stylistic tics from past models and fuses them into something wholly new. The lighting and set design of the more fantasy pitched environments made me think of Mann's The Keep. For whatever reason I also thought of William Peter Blatty's superb The Ninth Configuration (mostly due to the off beat humor but also the uniquely paced editing rhythms, sense of atmosphere and the spiritual speculation). The army of zombified "employees" recalls Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween 3, as do bits of the synthesized Carpenteresque score. That score, meanwhile, is another strange blend with elements that range from the purely electronic to cues that sound straight out of Philip Glass' Candyman soundtrack or Bernard Hermann's work for Hitchcock. The point is that even when you pick up on these influences they never detract or distract, they never make the film feel derivative; rather they embolden the whole with a complex identity, drawing on the unique and the special to further enhance Kelly's own specific vision.

The Box may have died at the b.o. but it will, I am certain, re-emerge with typical Kelly-cult- in-the-making ferocity on home video where its complexities and painful scenarios can be more easily managed.

[karmajuice]

I dunno. When my friend tried to rent this at Blockbuster, all of the employees unanimously discouraged him from doing so. In fact, I think they outright refused to let him rent it.