Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Like Monki, Jeff “TVO” Harris is one of our occasional contributors, an Austin student who has worked the last few fests, and who also spends a good deal of time rabble-rousing in our chat room. He’s written up a good report on the PHONE BOOTH premiere, something I’m surprised none of our regulars covered. No worries, though... TVO is on the case:
PHONE BOOTH SXSW PREMIERE AND REVIEW
By Jeffrey “The Vile One” Harris
I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of this film festival thing. My first film festival experience was last October with the Austin Film Festival. My main motivation for that was seeing the best movie of all time, Cowboy Bebop. Just a few months later I would be doing volunteer work on a much larger scale, the South By Southwest Music/Film/Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. The most prestigious film festival in the U.S., only second to Sundance! I started things off Sunday getting to view the panel with director and Texas native, Robert Rodriguez, who showed some footage of Once Upon A Time In Mexico, a sequel to Desperado and the third movie in the El Mariachi series. Later that night I went with my family to see Bubba Ho Tep. My real work started Monday and Tuesday when I would be sweating it out in eight hour shifts in the theatre staff at the Paramount. Now at 7:00 PM would be the screening of Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, which was a late addition to SXSW.
Luckily, all volunteers are allowed to watch the screenings, and the Paramount theatre is probably one of if not the best venues for a film festival in Austin because it has a maximum seating capacity of 1,300. It’s difficult to try and keep lines organized who were there to attend the screening, seeing as to how the lines for patrons with badges, film passes, or general admission tickets were curling all around the block. Despite the overwhelming amount of seats at the Paramount, many people (mostly with general admission tickets) did not get in and the show was entirely sold out. I tried to cheer them up by trying to explain to them that missing an advanced screening of a film directed by Joel Schumacher is not the end of the world, and the movie comes out in a few short weeks on April 4th, but that didn’t really help. I’ve mingled with some strange crowds in my work for SXSW. The biggest head-scratcher is the people whining about being rejected out of a screening of Pauly Shore’s movie, “You’ll Never Wiez In This Town Again” at the Alamo Drafthouse. Come on people! It’s Pauly freaking Shore. Are you going to suffer if you don’t sit through a new Pauly Shore movie? I thought so.
Oh... review, Phone Booth, right... sorry, I got a little sidetracked. While badge and film pass patrons made their way in, Joel Schumacher had already arrived and was observing the scene and talking to some friends. Mr. Schumacher was nice enough to take a picture with me, and he appreciated all the hard work I did for his screening. I explained to him it took me a hard time to completely rearrange my volunteer schedule shifts and hours to see the film (Yeah I know, I’m a crazy weirdo) and happy that’s its finally getting released after all the delays. He mentioned that Fox made the right call in delaying the film because people wouldn’t want to see a sniper movie at the time of the events in the Washington D.C. area, and its good that the movie is being released now since Kiefer Sutherland has 24 while Colin Farrell has Daredevil, dating Britney, and snogging Demi Moore. I asked him about the rumors of a sequel to Lost Boys, and he stated the “lost boys are dead” and the sequel should be The Lost Girls, vampire chicks on motorcycles. Schumacher also said he is working on an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version of Phantom of The Opera, but I believe most people on the internet movie gossip scene already knew that. People ask me why I didn’t punch Schumacher, the man who ruined Batman, and director of a slew of other lame films. Funny thing is I made a lot of jokes of that sort all day, but in all honesty I didn’t want to risk losing my volunteer privileges.
I was relegated to upper-level balcony seats for the screening, but I had a pretty good view of everything, not like some of the poor saps in the somewhat obstructed seats. Joel Schumacher started things off by introducing the movie and was pretty humble of the statement in his introduction of how people “grew up on his films.” Schumacher stated that the movie screened at the Toronto Film Festival, and that this was the official U.S. premiere of Phone Booth. Schumacher talked a little about the movie, about how it was shot for two weeks in late November of 2000, nearly three years ago. He also thanked the film volunteers for all our hardcore work and effort. The movie didn’t start right then. Preceding the movie was the obligatory SXSW film short and then the almighty full length trailer of X2. Did I mention that Sony provided a digital projector for the screenings at SXSW yet?
Now on to the movie. Phone Booth does not suck, it’s not even terrible. It’s actually quite good. I didn’t find it to be a great film, while there were still some things in it that bothered me. The technically high concept of the film which can sound borderline ridiculous at times, a man is stuck in a phone booth and will be shot if he hangs up the phone and leaves it. The movie opens in a rather clichéd fashion, with Kevin Richardson and his booming voice explaining how “In a world a bazillion people talk on phones a crap-tillian times a day and blablablablablabla yackity schmackity, people use this phone booth three hundred times, a day,” and I think you can figure out the rest.
This is followed by the setup and exposition of the man stuck in the phone booth, Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell), a conniving, deceitful, lying, possibly cheating New York publicist. He reps rappers and wants to nurture the film careers of young up and coming actresses like Pamela McFadden (Katie Holmes), who he always has to call from a phone booth so his wife, Kelly (Radha Mitchell), won’t see the records of his calls to Pam on his cell phone.
As soon as Stu hangs up from his call to Pam, the phone rings, and well... “a ringing phone has to be picked up.” That’s pretty much the whole set up of the movie in less than fifteen minutes. Thankfully, it keeps a pretty brisk pace through its 81 minute running time. Of course, the sniper picks off a guy who was trying to beat up Stu for taking up the phone booth, which attracts quite a lot of attention by the police, SWAT teams, and the media. Forest Whitaker plays a police captain named Ramey who is trying to keep the situation calm without the police shooting Stu or enticing the itchy trigger fingers of his colleagues.
I think everyone knows by now that the ominous, creepy voice of the Caller/Sniper belongs to that of Kiefer Sutherland. In all honesty, the vocals of Mr. Sutherland are the best part of the movie. Even though you never actually see him, you can actually feel his influence through the whole thing, like he’s pointing the gun right at you, unlike Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin in Daredevil who’s supposed to be the most seedy, ruthless and influential criminal in the world, and he does next to nothing. I think it’s a testament to Kiefer Sutherland’s acting ability by being able to convey so much with just his voice. Well maybe we can also chock that up to good sound mixing and editing too.
Colin Farrell does a good job as the typical slimy celebrity rep and publicist. He’s not playing it over-the-top like he did as Bullseye in Daredevil or “generic expository white guy” in Minority Report. He’s the protagonist of the story, but he’s not necessarily a “good guy”. He’s actually an asshole who lies and deceives constantly to people he calls his friends, and his wife especially. And he wonders why a sniper wants to kill him. However, there is a large character arc for Farrell’s Stu, which is really the one of the big showcases in the film.
I really enjoyed the cinematography by Matthew Libatique. There’s a lot of prolonged shot progression especially with the close-ups. The color of the movie often appears very understated and drained almost giving it a look and feel of film noir. What appeared a lot after the film’s introduction were some shots within shots, but I can’t recall specifically if they were spread throughout the rest of the film.
What probably disappointed me the most about the movie was its original music by Harry Gregson-Williams. I’m even more disappointed when I looked up his IMDB filmography seeing that he did the excellent music from the video game, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The music overall, sounds like bad trailer/techno music, without a real distinguishing unique theme. The tunes are not intrusive or really annoying, but in the end really bland when they could’ve been unique. Gregson-Williams even did good classical original music and themes for Shrek. At the most, I guess I can say it the tunes were subtle for the most part.
In the end, I think Schumacher did a good job with this movie, and it’s not painful to sit through and doesn’t insult your intelligence. If you really, really don’t want to see it, see it if only to hear Kiefer Sutherland as the sniper. However, I guess the scars of Schumacher’s Batman films will always be there, but “time heals all wounds” right?
Jeffrey “The Vile One” Harris
Thanks, man. Nice work.
"Moriarty" out.
