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I’m still super unclear about the role, Bayback, Jason Statham’s female accomplice, was playing at Kim Basinger’s house. I get cleaning up evidence. I get searching the house for additional tapes. And I get being there in case the husband came home or something. What I don’t get is why she was cosplaying as Mrs Ricky Martin Sr. I mean, when Bill Macy knocks on the door, she really has no idea who he is. For all she knows, he could be a neighbor, a relative, or a friend of the family. And I get that he initiates the conversation by asking her if she’s Mrs Martin, thereby tipping his hand that he doesn’t know who she is, but why take the risk and open the door at all? If it’s nobody, they’ll just leave. And, being a cop herself, she should know that if the plain clothes gentleman at the door is a police officer, he won’t be able to enter without a search warrant. Answering the door just puts the whole operation at risk. I mean, had Macy been someone who could identify her as a fraud, what was her plan? Shoot him on the stoop in broad daylight? However, the dumbest part of the scene is after Macy leaves, Bayback tells Statham that a cop was asking questions, but she’s “taken care of it.” What she neglects to tell prominent Angeleno Jason Statham is that the cop told her that a woman named Jess Martin called the cops and said she was kidnapped!!!! If you were the leader of a band of rogue cop/kidnappers, I think knowing that the person you kidnapped has made a successful outbound call to the police might be a tiny detail you’d want to investigate.

Paul seemed confused by why the school’s security guard had his car parked out front of the school. The reason for that is simple: parents were parked out front to pick up their kids. The security guard was parked where he was to keep the parents to one lane and prevent people in the back of queue from cutting ahead if they picked up their child first. As a group, parents can be a bunch of self-centered jack offs with little concern for the safety and concern of other people’s children, and if left to their capricious whims, will 100% create confusion and delay (and danger) in an effort to shave two extra minutes off their commute. What you were witnessing in Cellular, Paul, was an orderly car line! And trust me, it’s something you’ll appreciate when your kids are ready for elementary school.

I honestly just want to see a sitcom about ex cop WHM running a spa. Make it the next Mike Schur project and a B99 spinoff! Perhaps it's co-owned by one Adrian Pimento?

Paul mentioned it a bit on the show, but the biggest parenting “win” in Cellular has to be when Ricky Martin Sr. tells Junior to “look at him” so Basinger can choke a motherfucker to death. It was a brilliant, unspoken moment between partners that underscored the rich intimacy these two individuals obviously shared. Clearly, they knew each other inside and out. I think the biggest parenting “fail” is when Basinger has successfully liberated her child and is getting away when she gets herself and her son recaptured because Statham stands in front of her getaway car with a gun to her husband’s head. I’m sorry, if it’s ever a choice between my life and my kid’s, 100% you better mow my ass down and get my kid the fuck out of there.

Apparently Macy rewrote his character in this movie (according to an IGN interview). It was originally written as an older fatter character with characters telling him to take it easy or he'd have another heart attack. So he himself floated the idea of the day spa and wrote a few scenes and sent to them to the writer! So that's why his part is so good. It was written by him! Link to the interview.

The Criterion Channel is launching a stand-alone service this spring. That might be a good time for a Kurosawa binge.

This is what I was thinking. Cellular could be a much better movie if it were entirely from Chris Evans perspective which is what Phone Booth basically is. Imagine the movie starts with the scene of Chris Evans on the beach. We haven't seen Kim Basinger get attacked so we are right there with Chris Evans from the beginning. Is this a joke? Should we take her seriously? This puts us in Chris Evans shoes. It's immediately a better movie and that's just chopping off the first five minutes of the movie. I think a little bit of rewriting to keep it focused on Chris Evans (even just editing out the existing scenes with side characters) could make a solid action thriller. More like Phone Booth or Sorry, Wrong Number where is much more psychological from the person on the phone.

It's weird hearing that the same guy made both this and Phone Booth as it seemed he didn't know which version of this story would work, protagonist talking to hostage or protagonist talking to antagonist. Phone booth works in that it's basically a morality discussion between Colin Farrell and Keifer Sutherland with some people popping in sporadically, along with it being just slightly longer than Chopping Mall so there's no feeling of extra fat being put into the film. Cellular on the other hand feels bloated at 90 minutes and is ridiculous with the amount of people they put into he gang of dirty cops and their over complicated plot to get a video camera.

I'm confused as to how WHM didn't recognize that female cop hiding out in KB's house. I understand that the LAPD must be large and not everyone could possibly know everyone, however he seems to know Emmerich and everyone on the fourth floor. That would be her department, no? Didn't they all work together or were they a little more spread throughout LAPD in order to cover all bases? It just doesn't make sense to me that Emmerich would continuously offer a job to WHM and WHM have no clue who is on his squad.

For archiving purposes:

Exactly. He's the "observer" character, and by nature a passive person. That's why he's still in town at the end. I remember also being "not impressed" by this movie the first time I watched it (must have been in my early 20s?), but this time it played much better. Maybe it was more about knowing what to expect: there's no central plot and no major incident, and that's the point. It's giving us a true "slice of life" in a dull, decaying small town. This time I was able to take that as a given and see how Bogdanovich used it to comment on other things, like the transition from movies to TV (he doesn't like it), or a tribute to black-and-white cinema, or how one generation of kids interacts with the prior generation of parents. On that last point, it's interesting how Bogdanovich doesn't portray his "coming of age" as a pure rejection of the past, like plenty of other filmmakers were doing at the time (compare this to Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider or The Graduate) -- it's more elegiac about things that were lost while also acknowledging that the past can't continue. Given that, it's not surprising to hear Bogdanovich in his interview still pining for the great stars of the past.

This movie was dumb and I feel dumber having watched it.

I also thought KB was in her attic for about half of the movie and I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just give an address. Then I thought she was in on it. I definitely thought the husband HAD to be a bad guy. Nope, everyone is good except 99% of the police force, apparently.

This sounds like a much worse movie. It's weird because I've seen this before and I still thought Kim Basinger was in on it for most of the movie.

I disagree with the Sonny hate. I think he was terrific. I found him to be a relatively unique character for a film, a quiet non-vocal type. What was interesting, and perhaps disorienting for most, was that he wasn't given any sort of desires. Like we connect with Jacy's experimentation and trying to stop herself from this boring town and find some excitement and life experiences. Duane we could see his goal was trying to impress Jacy. But Sonny was just there. Oh sure he found some occasional moments of life - that's what the Mexico trip was - but I found him a great comparison with those other two, and frankly it is probably realistic to a lot of kids. Not everyone strives. I liked seeing that.

Personally, even without the amount that I've seen, it's the people that think an opinion or a way someone (who am I kidding - Amy) sees the movie is wrong because that's not what they see or that's not the wording they would choose to describe the feeling. This indignation and justification that Amy is lazy and not up to par is fucking ridiculous and I'm so tired of seeing her every word nitpicked to death. I said this in one of the "ZOMG SHE SAID INCEL AGAIN" threads that she is human like the rest of us and it's completely fascinating to see that Paul never gets even 1% of the shit that she does. Shit that neither one of them ever deserve. These are two friends having conversations together while trying to pull out research that they may not have known before, and I would even argue that the entire point of this show is to take a look at these movies in a modern lens to see if they even hold up and continue to deserve a place on this list once it gets updated. But somehow people have a fucking problem with Amy and the way she talks about male characters... shocker... So while the layout of the group is in fact a problem and the amount of the same kind of posts does become the problem as well, my issue is completely with the content of these posts and how many people have an issue with Amy specifically.

re: the idea that Kim Basinger or her husband would be involved in the crime and yet they turned out to be totally innocent, the original script did call for Kim's character to be involved. Larry Cohen, screenwriter of the 2002 thriller film Phone Booth, conceived of Cellular while working for Sony Pictures. It followed a 30- or 40-year-old man named Theo Novak who obtains a call from a woman named Lenore, who tells him that she and her husband have been abducted in a safehouse by a group of bank robbers. It is then revealed that Novak is an art thief who becomes wracked with guilt after unsuccessfully rescuing a friend from committing suicide in the past; he agrees to make a detour from a criminal undertaking and rescue Lenore. During the rescue Novak is unsuccessful, but later discovers a conspiracy involving Lenore and her accomplices over another crime they are involved with—ultimately, Novak gains the upper hand, killing Lenore and her accomplices and obtains their loot in the process, which leaves him therefore a wealthy man. Fast & Furious writer Chris Morgan was brought on by Dean Devlin to rewrite the script. Morgan wanted to tell a story of a normal person who does something heroic, but he also wanted to incorporate humor, specifically humor similar to that in Indiana Jones. "I'm a big fan of situational humor and I feel like comedy plays best when it's the right thing at the right time and not just somebody trying to make a joke. For example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is faced with fighting the swordsman and he just pulls out a gun and shoots him. That’s not really a joke, but it got a huge laugh. That's the kind of humor we tried to work." Also, re: LORD OF THE RINGS, Return of the King came out in December of 2003 and won Best Picture a couple of months later. Fellowship Of The Ring came out in 2001.

Phenomenal. Wengert is so fucking good.

I'd rank Johnny Guitar (1954) above all of the Westerns we've covered so far, although I'm not sure fans of the genre would even consider it a Western. Yes, it features cowboys and horses and gorgeous vistas and stagecoach robberies and bar room brawls and crooked lawmen and tense showdowns with menacing villains, but the protagonist is played by Joan Crawford and its dialog is as snappy as the best film noir and its theme is a torch song performed by Peggy Lee. All I know is, if Karina Longworth (host of You Must Remember This) and Millie De Chirico (TCM and FilmStruck programmer) and Fresh Air's Terry Gross have all independently recommended a film, it's a guaranteed classic. Here's a trailer that arguably gives away too much of the plot:

This is why I’m not on Facebook, and I am seriously thinking of dropping Twitter altogether. It’s all so toxic. I like my Earwolf forums where the only people who sign up (or at least stick around) are chill, intelligent, non-racist/sexist/bigoted/etc people. @DanEngler and @Shannon make this the best place on the Internet.

In Halloween 2010 all the kids were going to the party. The person I wanted to kiss told me to make sure I was there IN COSTUME. At that age you would do anything for the one you wanted to kiss*. I had work before the party and when it was time to leave work the door fell off. i had to hold the door up so that the alarm didn’t go off, while my coworker looked for a new hinge. It was hours before I left work.** Got home, got showered, got dressed in my makeshift matrix gear, got going. When I arrived at the party the person I wanted to kiss had already left and no one else was dressed up. so I drank a lot of vodka and kept doing the matrix bullet-limbo thing. The last matrix movie had come out 7 years prior. I don’t think I could have predicted then the way the golden globes turned out this year, so it’s impressive these guys did *Not judging, I would too. **It normally was, but this time it was even more hours

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