THE BOX

Guy’s spinning review...

I’m starting to think that Richard Kelly just sits down and writes random sentences when he comes up with his scripts. This movie might not be as confusing as “Donnie Darko” but it has some weird element... very weird one.

So Cameron Diaz lives in a suburban neighborhood. Her husband works at NASA and she’s a teacher with one toe on her right foot. One day a man shows up at her front step with a box. In the box is a red button. The man tells her that if she pushes the button a person which she doesn’t know will die and in doing this she’ll make a million dollars. If not the button will be reprogrammed and given to someone else. She mauls this over with her husband and decides to press the button. She gets the money and after the button is removed from the house all shit breaks loose. Weird doorways though the universes are opened. People starts stalking the family with their mouths open. Apparently the button was designed to test humanity.

I was a big fan of “Donnie Darko” but this movie and his previous one “Southland Tales” makes me think that that accomplishment was just a weird fluke. I found myself enjoying this movie while watching it but now two days afterwards I think that it just annoyed me.

Guy’s Rating: Stick with “Donnie Darko”.

Girl’s blech!

Awful! So bad, it went past the “so bad it’s good” line to just the “so bad” area, again. I have no idea what anyone was thinking when they wanted to make this movie. They went wrong in a number of ways.

A premise like this should be shot in a manner that leaves a lot of questions left unanswered, in that slow, progressively both horrific and thrilling way. However, with two B actors, I guess they couldn’t expect them to perform half as well as would be needed to pull that off... So, they created a script and a film that was straight forward, left little to the imagination, and only had one or two good scenes (none of which had the leading characters in) that were of note.

There was nothing compelling about this story, save the premise. It’s too bad, because they could have made an interesting, fantastical horror movie with it, but they didn’t...

Oh! And every time that button was pushed, it was pushed by a woman! Seriously, stop pushing the Pandora thing. We did it once in mythology - that doesn’t mean we have to be the ones to do it every time.

Girl’s Rating: Boo! Two thumbs way way down, and David Kelly is a misogynist.