The Box

[modage]

That actually makes me want to see it.

Yeah I don't want to knock the movie and I'm not rooting for Kelly to fail.  I appreciate that it's different and clearly Kelly is striving for greatness.  It just doesn't entirely work and comes off a little campy.

[MacGuffin]

Richard Kelly Talks The Box
Donnie Darko filmmaker talks about his latest.
Source: IGN

WARNING: There are some vague spoilers in the following interview with filmmaker Richard Kelly about the conclusion of The Box. Anybody who has yet to experience the film may want to check back after they've seen it...

That said, Kelly is certainly no stranger to creating enigmatic films that are heavy in tone and filled with mystery. While The Box is, at least outwardly, his most commercial film, it's a strange tale that even Kelly admits requires a little digging to figure out. A married couple, Arthur and Norma, are offered a horrifying choice -- push a button that will cause the death of a stranger and received a million dollars. But adapted from a story that was originally only a few pages long, how exactly does one craft a tense, suspenseful mystery?

"I didn't want to just do a half-ass adaptation...I wanted to thoroughly explore the mystery," says Kelly. "The short story is only six pages. It's very cryptic. You don't know who Mr. Steward is, or who he works for, or why they built the button. I desperately wanted to know more. But there was one line where they do ask about who he works for and he says, 'I can assure you that the organization is large and international in scope.' Perhaps it's our government tied to something beyond our world, like a conspiracy film. And then it's just about thinking of NASA and Viking and 1976 and the NSA and the CIA and all those governmental power structures in one place. And so it becomes this story about a married couple who are exposed to this massive international, inter-galactic conspiracy, or experiment...."

Of course, Kelly's never been one for giving too much information, and for as possible as it may be to piece together a reasonable explanation behind the mystery, the writer/director certainly never hands it to you.

"It's a very delicate process when you're editing a film to maintain the most essential information," replies Kelly to the point. "I feel that we were able to hit the right balance in the sense that we provided suspenseful narrative exposition, but also to leave clues along the way – not only for Arthur and Norma to discover, but for the audience to discover. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the film does come back to a spiritual place where it comes down to a husband, a wife and a gun. And a massive decision that must be made. All the layers hopefully fall back into your memory and you're left with an emotionally naked reality."

But thereis a solution insists Kelly, who even goes so far as to name it as we speak.

"I feel like I have this entire movie figured out. In my mind, I think it's a higher intelligence ultimately conducting a test before Earth is disposed of. At the same time, it's about trying to not present the material by telegraphing everything. Otherwise, you sacrifice at lot of the suspense. A movie being a couple steps ahead of you keeps you searching around every corner."

The film's most obvious criticism, however, is that the moral test of whether or not to push the button at the center of the story is only ever truly about morality if the couple believes in the consequences. Which they don't. So how, then, in Kelly's mind, does the premise stay strong?

"Norma pushes the button almost because her husband convinces her that there's no technology that could ever, ever physically cause another person's death," muses the director. "Certainly, we would never be accountable in a court of law. She pushes it almost out of curiosity or to call the bluff on this person, or this creature. It doesn't become a true moral test until Act Two and Act Three when the experiment goes to an entirely new level...And the end becomes the ultimate moral test that leaves the audience questioning...Because they've both been baptized in this supernatural liquid of a sort; they've both been exposed to some sort of higher consciousness, and that gives them the courage, or the faith, to consider pulling the trigger at the end."

Audiences will no doubt wonder if Frank Langella's turn as Mr. Steward holds any sympathy for his victims, as the middle portion of the film can be read as something of a warning between this mysterious figure and the couple whose lives he's affecting.

"I think he's rooting for them," says Kelly boldly. "I think he likes them. I think he's a little bummed out by the fact that they were somehow selected, but at the same time, his employers are selecting couples who are the cream of the crop – the best, nicest, most decent people. He has a crummy job he has to do, but at the same time, I think he gives them special treatment by the end of the film. He tries to give them hints."

Finally, in perhaps the most spoiler-filled portion of the conversation, Kelly discusses the film's end sequence – in which another couple's decision seems, as if by magic, to effect what ultimately happens between Norma and Arthur.

"It's a challenging question for me, still. It makes you wonder what the relationship is between the button on the trigger of the gun. Is there, in fact, some magic happening when that button presses that has an effect, has a purpose? You wonder about the chicken and the egg. Which came first? These are questions that ultimately have everything to do with cause and effect, with yin and yang, with the co-dependence of events that take place far away, in different states. One couple is in Massachusetts, one is in Virginia. I don't necessarily have an answer to that. But it was important for us to show the symmetry of events. It makes you think about free will and cause and effect and the magic of the button unit. At the end of the day, it was a much more dramatic, tension-filled way of presenting the conclusion. It tries to prove to the audience that the button unit has a higher intelligence somewhere buried inside of it."

[john]

"A bit muddled, a bit boring, bizarre and ambitious."

That was my reaction to this film. It also can be attributed to everything Kelly has made so far, and is probably a fair summation of whatever project he does next. Also, like Kelly's previous films, his influences are on full display. He seems to appropriate visual and emotional cues from Lynch and Kubrick, which are admirable, but only remind you that Kelly isn't in their league.

What Kelly does have a command of - in this and in Donnie Darko - is an impeccably detailed sense of the suburbs. He is really great at detailing specific, somewhat homogenized, neighborhoods with obvious affection without miring it in nostalgia. The fact that it takes place in a Virginian suburb full of NASA and Government employees is almost more interest than any metaphysical turn the plot could take.

It also reminded me a lot of Proyas' Knowing... which, I guess is appropriate considering Kelly's early involvement in that project. There's nothing as visually arresting here as there was in that film... but it is another film that subverts it's genre in unexpected directions and is more ambitious than you might expect.

Also, the Win Butler/Regine Chassagne score is pretty terrific. Classic and restrained... not what I expected.

[modage]

[polkablues]

Perfection. 

[tpfkabi]

Also, the Win Butler/Regine Chassagne score is pretty terrific. Classic and restrained... not what I expected.

I forgot about this. Are there any song-y songs (aka something you'd expect from Arcade Fire)?

[MacGuffin]

'The Box': The movie audiences truly love to hate
Source: Los Angeles Times

It's no secret that "The Box" is a flop. The Cameron Diaz-starring horror thriller, released by Warner Bros. last weekend, barely eked out $7.5 million at the box office, which alone ensures that it only has one way to go (down) in terms of its box-office future.

But the real shocker is the grade it received from CinemaScore, the Las Vegas-based market research company that compiles Friday-night audience reaction to all of Hollywood's big new movie releases. The CinemaScore grade matters, since it's culled not from a bunch of snooty critics but from real paying moviegoers. Even more importantly, there's a very strong correlation between the grade a film gets and its future commercial prospects. An A signals a long happy life while even a C is pretty much of a death sentence.

Even though "The Box" got a not entirely embarrassing 48 from Rotten Tomatoes, the film has gone where few movies have ever gone before -- it earned a big fat F from CinemaScore. In fact, of the 33 demographic categories measured by the service, "The Box" got an F in 29 of the 33 -- and earned a D-minus in three of the four others. Males and females under 18 gave it an F as did 25-and-up males and 35-and-up females and virtually everyone in between. Its only demographic "sweet spot" was with 25-34 and 35-49 men, who gave it a D-minus. 

I called up Ed Mintz, who runs CinemaScore, to ask if he's ever seen a movie get such bad grades. "Not in a while," he says. "People really thought this was a stinker." The only three movies he could recall that scored as many Fs were all basically horror thrillers: "The Bug," a 2006 Ashley Judd horror film; "Wolf Creek," a 2005 backpackers-in-peril thriller; and "Darkness," a 2002 haunted house scarefest.

Since Mintz actually saw the film, I asked him why audiences hated it so much. Simple, he said. They hated the ending. It turns out that the film's ostensible storyline -- a married couple are given a box containing a button that, if pushed, will bring you a million dollars but simultaneously take a stranger's life -- was just the beginning when it came to the film's assortment of horrible moral choices. Since thousands of unhappy people have already Twittered about the movie's bizarre finale, I don't think I'm giving away any state secrets to say that Diaz -- who should begin a serious reappraisal of her career choices right now -- doesn't make it to the end of the film.

"It's like a horror movie version of 'Sophie's Choice,' " Mintz says. "I have to admit that I was sitting there, going 'That's the choice? They're going to kill off a movie star? Who'd want to pay $10 to see that?' I'd love to hear how they thought they were going to get good word-of-mouth from that ending. But that's the reason why the movie got an F. The public acted in vengeance. They got angry about where the story went and the grade definitely reflects that anger."

[john]

Also, the Win Butler/Regine Chassagne score is pretty terrific. Classic and restrained... not what I expected.

I forgot about this. Are there any song-y songs (aka something you'd expect from Arcade Fire)?

Not at all. In fact, there's nothing about the score that would lead an unfamiliar viewer to presume Arcade Fire had anything to do with it.

It's still quite good, though.

[samsong]

the three-arcade-fire-members score is a perfect bernard herrmann homage.  by far the best part of this movie, which is a fucking mess but i found myself entertained.  kelly's naive perspective and "idiosyncrasies"--none of which are of any particular worth but admirable for being uninhibitedly and sincerely expressed--are on full display, packaged in a very glossy 70s pastiche that when grouped with the film's narrative grandstanding and self-induction into the tradition of Great Science Fiction Films (note: this does not mean i consider it to be anywhere near worthy of said title) make for a  compulsively watchable movie.