Hey folks, Harry here. All kidding aside here, this is a movie that seems to be in need of the testing process, and honest feedback. From what I hear from Robie and Samsa... the film is a complete egotistical style over substance mess. And they do have some ideas about what could possibly be done. John Robie has been very helpful in the past to a (unnamed summer blockbuster of yore) when dishing out his little helpful tips. So New Line, I know you'll read this, skip over the juvenile parts of this piece and head directly to Robie's helpful tips. That's what you need to look at. As for you readers... Well, this is a movie that at the moment is due to come out August 18th, that's 4 and a half months from now. From the sound of it, this might turn into one of those... 2001 February or March films, or Summer 2001 if they take the time to really work on the film's problems and not just cut their losses. NOW... there is the chance that Robie has his head up his ass... It's been known to happen on a couple of past films (notably THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, which some of you agreed with him on... sigh) So, don't go calling this a turd just yet. There's a lot of steps and directions that New Line can go with this film at this point. Let's hope they choose the right path for this attempt at a Goth Matrix Seven film.
Now you’re just being a bastard if you see a movie for free and decide to go and yell to the world that what you’ve seen is a giant turd. That’s just not right. The filmmaker is putting his movie out there on a limb, opening up this raw and still beating thing and asking you, the man or woman in the test audience, to help him, to tell him what to do with the movie. He’s asking you how to help.
I just saw the new summer thriller The Cell. Here’s my helpful advice; get a good, solid two by four, put the movie in a corner, and beat it until it stops squealing. Then beat it some more.
I’m just trying to help.
I’m not quite sure where to begin. I’ve got plenty of advice on how you can try to salvage the thing. It’s gonna take quite a bit of work, and after seeing the film I get the idea that the captain of this already sunk ship, music video and commercial director Tarsem, isn’t going to want to make the proper changes. Tarsem seems to think that he’s the star of the picture, making an already bad story worse by totally foisting his ego onto the screen, making the movie a non-stop mish-mash of visuals and style and totally ignoring his actors. Think what would have happened if Spike Jonze had made all the wrong decisions instead of the right ones in Malkovich. Then multiply the catastrophe times a hundred.
Jennifer Lopez plays a psychologist who has helped developed a machine that lets her go inside the minds of comatose patients. Vincent D’Onofrio is a serial killer named Carl Stargher who has this cell that he tortures women in, eventually drowning them in it before he…um…ha ha, see…before he bleaches their corpses, lays them on a table, takes off his clothes, hooks himself up to a bunch of chains via rings pierced into his back, raises himself above the corpse and watches a video of his victim’s death while masturbating. Like we all haven’t tried that once…or twice. Right before FBI agent Vince Vaughn catches the killer Private Pyle has a seizure and goes into a coma and guess what? There’s one victim left out there in a cell somewhere and the clock is ticking and it’s up to Lopez to get into D’Onofrio’s head and find out where the hell the cell is located. Absurdity, thy name is Hollywood.
The Cell wasn’t a good script. It was rubbish. It came from the hands of Mark Protosevich, writer of the oft talked about and as yet unmade kick ass epic I Am Legend. Did I just use the word rubbish? Lord. On the page The Cell was just bad, a mish mash of sci-fi and serial killing. It didn’t work because the story was convoluted to an extreme. The disparate elements never really came together. I suppose it got made because most of it takes place in the mind where anything can go visually and hey, them kids like visuals, right? Maybe the hope was that a director with visual panache could maybe make sense of the story and couple it with incredibly imagery.
Someone thought that bringing Tarsem in on this would be good because he’s proven he can shoot. Remember REM’s “Losing my Religion” video? That was Tarsem. Remember the commercial with the elephant swimming in the ocean, the camera looking up at it from underwater? Tarsem. The World Cup ad with the humans vs. the demons? Tarsem. Know what those all have in common? The star of the work was the visuals, whether they played towards selling a candy bar or a band. Characters didn’t matter. Dialogue didn’t matter. It was a few seconds or a few minutes to make things look nice.
The Cell as a movie—at this very, very early stage—is over two hours of Tarsem making things look nice. Or at least trying to. There is such a ridiculous overload of style that characters and story cease to be important. Hell they cease to matter. On the page this was weak enough. Now most of the time the actors don’t even get the chance to breathe life into the words. That’s because Tarsem takes about half the dialogues in the story, nearly all of the ones that take place in the dream world, and turns them into echo-filled, overlapping background noise. It’s astonishing. People don’t talk. Instead Tarsem decided to take all these moments and make them solely about how he could swoop the camera through the set, how he could quick cut images of entrails and dripping water and bugs, how he could do a neat camera effect and make J-Lo’s face cloud up, get clear, and cloud up again. The incoherence of the dialogue isn’t because it hadn’t been cleaned up in this early print of the film. The distortion was due to post-production effects.
Tarsem has basically made himself the star of the show, and the show is basically what goes on in the mind world because what goes on in the real world is utterly lifeless. The scenes that take place outside of the mind plod along. Characters have no build up. There’s no reason to care about what’s going on. The serial killings, the story of the technology, that’s all secondary. It becomes real obvious real quick that the whole point of this thing is to showcase the mind world. Big trouble, then, that the mind world is often goofy when it’s trying to go for jaw-dropping seriousness. As for the real world, well, the scene with Stargher hanging himself up by the chains and jacking is maybe one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.
Most everyone here has been miscast. Jennifer Lopez might look great but there’s nothing to her. She delivers every line in plaintive whisper. She’s always got her makeup on, she’s always dressed to kill. She’s never a psychologist who has to journey into the mind of a killer. She’s always a pretty girl who is plunked into the story and has the hair and make-up people at every beck and call. Vince Vaughn gets two punches to the head for this one. First off his character is horribly written. He spends the first half of the movie grumbling like a bad tv cop, and he spends the second half doping around in Stargher’s mind looking for Jennifer Lopez. To compound the problem he’s genuinely bad here, and I hate saying that because I really like the guy as an actor. At least D’Onofrio gets to go full tilt overboard, rampaging around in costume-designer-on-crack outfits and grumbling dialogue. He’s the only one who looks like he’s having any fun.
This next part is for the already pissed off people involved with the film. Hi friends! All you aicn guys, go over to the chat room for a little bit and meet me at the bottom. You won’t understand half of what I’m talking about in these next few paragraphs.
Enough of being the internet dickhead raining on your shit parade. Here’s my advice on how to fix the movie. I have a little experience here. Ask Harry. He’ll lie real good like.
First off cut the intro with a little more class. As is the thing is a race to show how many different ways you can shoot Lopez walking through the dessert. Cut down the dialogue between Vaughn and Jake Webber in the coffee shop, getting rid of the inane Webber speech about his monster of a wife. It ain’t important, and don’t try to say that it passes for character development. It doesn’t. Tighten up your first act and get to Stargher’s seizure more quickly. You don’t need the scene of Stargher checking out his next victim. That bit with him drawing the twat on the doll with the red magic marker? Please…you want the audience to be scared of this guy, not laugh their asses off at him. You really, really don’t want to plant the laugh-at-the-bad-guy seed this early in the movie.
In the dream world clean up the dialogue. The whole echo deal is grating. You never allow anyone to have a conversation, and an effect that should last for one or two lines is played out through the entire movie. Not only is it annoying, it destroys lots of the dialogue that works towards building up your characters.
Lopez and Vaughn don’t have much chemistry. At least you didn’t try to have the two get together. There’s a scene between the two outside the research facility during which Vaughn tells Lopez why he became a cop. Cut the scene. Number one you’re already coming out of a big talkie scene between Vaughn and Lopez. Number two your actors don’t carry the scene at all, and we don’t need to know why Vaughn is a cop. Cut from the hospital room talk (the one with Vaughn and Lopez over Edward’s bed) to a master of the outside of the facility, come in on the conversation as the two talk about Stargher and whether or not Lopez is going to go back into his mind and, before the two get all long in the tooth, cut to that insert of Jake Webber yelling to Vaughn. You’ll knock out about five minutes of dialogue. Tarsem might be able to make a woman look like she’s swimming through air, but he sure as hell can’t shoot an interesting dialogue between two people. You’re grinding yourselves to a halt with this scene.
The ending is a problem. There’s absolutely no tension to it. The script was lame but at least it held the promise of a fight between Lopez and Stargher. Here he just runs through the forest, she shoots him, Tarsem rips off his own imagery from the REM video and that’s that. At the same time you’re cutting in Vaughn searching for the cell. You need to bump up the Stargher/Lopez stuff, and you need to make it seem like Vaughn is desperate as hell to find the last victim. Vaughn basically comes off like he’s lollygaging.
Part of the problem is in what Lopez’s character does. Why in fuck would she go back into Stargher’s mind? Sure she’s compassionate—and why the hell did you cut the scene where it’s revealed that Lopez’s character is so good at going into people’s minds?—but she’s not an idiot. She goes back into Stargher’s mind to cure him? Baaa. She goes back into his mind so you guys can finish this off with a big set piece. Only problem is you go and fuck up the set piece and make what should be beautiful and rocking boring and blah.
This is hurting like a motherfucker, guys. Sure, the dreamworld looks fine. Some of it is pretty incredible, and a few of the sets are jaw dropping. But Tarsem shoots the thing like he’s a budding commercial director who’s always trying to get a neat shot for his demo reel. It leaves the story with no pulse. There is no life to this thing. You can fix it, you will give it a trailer that looks great, you’ll promote the hell out of it. Even if it’s fixed, though, you’re still stuck with a movie that’s boredom livened by a few scenes of unintentional camp.
…and not even one joke about J-lo’s booty.
John Robie, climbing off the roof
And then... here's Gregor Samsa's low-angle look at THE CELL, where he seems to be in complete agreement with Robie....
Hi Harry….I just got back from the first screening of New Line’s serial killer blunder….”The Cell.”
Well, let me first say that I have a friend that worked on the production of this film and I even like this person a lot…but this movie, well I hope I don’t hurt his feelings here.
I can’t imagine what the hell was going through Tarsem’s giant head when he filmed this movie, but if I had to guess I would imagine nothing except his inflated ego and any way he could sprawl it all out on the screen. From the opening scene to the last god awful minute of the movie there are only a few good things worth mentioning besides the special visual effects.
The movie stars Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, and Vincent D’Onofrio all in less than memorable performances. I have to say though that it isn’t completely their fault. I can see Tarsem directing this movie and probably not giving a damn about working with his actors. Don’t misunderstand me, I really like Vince Vaughn. I really like D’Onofrio. I have less than a high opinion of Lopez. But they all come off about the same in this movie…mediocre. So now that I got that out of the way…on to the juicy stuff.
The movie lacks depth. It lacks a story. People have been comparing it Seven, and Silence of The Lambs, which is probably the easiest and most benign thing to say about this movie. I also think its completely off base. Yes, they all deal with serial killers and so do a lot of movies, but this film hardly lives up to the standards of either of the two comparisons. If I had to compare it to anything it would probably be Tarsem’s most famous undertaking, the R.E.M. video, “Losing My Religion”. I was actually expecting to hear it chime in in a few of the scenes. But it didn’t, leaving me singing the words to myself (I had to do something to keep myself entertained).
The plot summed up in one sentence is this: A brilliant beautiful psychologist designed some sort of psychic machine and uses it to question a serial killer and help out a down on his luck FBI agent. And that’s all that this movie ever does. Over and over again we are subjected to pointless scenes involving Vaughn’s partner, played by Jake Weber, rambling on about his wife or evil stepmother or some sort of equally worthless crap. Weber probably gives the best performance of the bunch, even though his character has really no business in the movie. And, as far as I can tell, if he was removed from the movie you wouldn’t have any reason to miss him. But I like the guy and his lines are the only ones in the movie that don’t sound like they came from some cheesy action drama from the mid-eighties.
Now, about these great visual effects…It’s true, there are some pretty rad visuals going in this flic and they really helped keep me from being completely bored. But they miss the mark when it comes to relevance and giving us what we want to see. I want to see more shots of Starger (D’Onofrio) in his King garb and less of the floor, and the wall, and the stairs. Sure the wall looks cool over hanging out over there, all mysterious and such…and the floor and the stairs, well they worked really well together but god, come ON! Give me a badass Starger King to get me excited about something! Give me a fight sequence that doesn’t just fall back on the environment and show me something with some cajones!
And Tarsem’s idea of suspense? How about a digital clock ticking down from forty hours? Yeah, that really had me on the edge of my seat. And what is Tarsem’s idea of originality? Well aperantly, its got something to do with ripping off his own videos and commericals, and even worse, ripping off famous Catholic works of art. It seemed like at points he just threw some Catholic references in so we would know he took an art history course at some point in the past. I mean, if he put the Catholic stuff in to fulfill some plot point or if it had anything to do with the movie I wouldn’t mind it all. But alas, his ego gets the better of him here, and he has to show how artistic he is. But what he fails to understand is that it is not artistic to cram a bunch of random religious references into a movie when they have nothing to do with the plot or even the general theme.
Yeah, so maybe you are saying to yourself that I am being too harsh and too critical. Well, try to imagine the last movie you saw that was so bad it was funny, and take out the funny. Uhg. That’s it. It was bad. Sorry Vince and Vincent, but hey it was a nice paycheck, right?
Gregor Samsa, signing off, from a cardboard box near you.
