When I was a wee lad who was old enough to make wee on his own, I used to watch the Twilight Zone. This was not the classic Rod Serling series but a new updated version. The Serling series was black and white. Who watches black and white? Communists and Vikings. There was this one episode where a box with a button is delivered to a married couple and they are told that if they push the button someone somewhere that they don’t know will die and they will be given a lot of money.
Clever premise, even for a junior high kid who had just recently stopped wetting his pants. To this day, I still remember the end of the episode because it was the scariest thing I have ever seen. There was no violence, no horror, just dialogue. I won’t tell you what was said but it has stayed with me for over twenty years as one of the greatest stories I have ever seen. Now Hollywood plans to ruin it.
Somehow Richard Kelly has taken that short fifteen minute story and expanded it into a full length feature with Cameron Diaz. I must admit I’m quite intrigued how he’s going to keep an audience’s attention for over ninety minutes when the short Twilight Zone piece only revolved around the last line uttered. Filling in the holes seems to have worked for Spike Jonze and The Wild Things, maybe Kelly can pull one out too.
Rich is one of those directors that I haven’t made up my mind about. Kind of like Tim McGraw’s hat (it hides those beautiful eyes). Kelly burst on to the scene with Donnie Darko, which if you haven’t seen you should. What’s it about? That’s the hard part. It’s sort of like trying to explain how America voted for George W. Bush twice.
After I saw Darko I was impressed that someone could make that as their first film. It took real balls to do that, I mean the kind that Pink has. After Darko Kelly was clearly buoyed by a certain amount of confidence and directed what he thought was a sprawling narrative called Southland Tales. If you’ve seen Southland Tales all the way through you must have won a prize of some sort. The film is so boring and uninteresting that I thought Kelly was going to get kicked out of the Hot Young Directors Club (lucky for him such a club doesn’t exist although membership dues are still expected bi-annually). I might have said you had to give Kelly respect for going after such a big idea but Southland was so bad it was not even worth the effort (kind of like playing basketball against midgets). So with a fifty percent track record I’m looking at The Box to be the deciding factor.
The Box stars Cameron Diaz who seems like the kind of girl you want to take out on a date, get drunk, and never tell your last name to. She doesn’t seem like a serious Hollywood actress who can carry a clever thriller. Even when she does show up in serious fare she seems to drag it down a level. She couldn’t hold her own against Leo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, but she fit right in with Drew and Lucy in Charlie’s Angels.
I’ll give Kelly the benefit of the doubt on both the story and Cameron if only because the source material was so smart and scary to begin with. It also couldn’t hurt that it might transport me back to a time when there were less worries and people didn’t get mad at you if you wet your pants.
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