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Something I still can’t work out is why the crooked cops need to bring William H Macy, a man recently wounded in a gunfight, with them to the pier. Ostensibly, he’s there to help them identify Evans, but once they get there, they don’t really need or use him. At best, he’s just going to get in the way; at worst, he’s going to just be another loose end they’ll need to “clean up.” Furthermore, having already dealt with Evans before, corroborated his kidnapping claims, and already witnessed police corruption firsthand, in all of Los Angeles, he’s probably the one person most likely to listen and to believe anything Evans has to say. Maybe it would be better for them to just let Macy retire peacefully to his day spa than go through the hassle of having to explain how the suspect he helped ID at the beach mysteriously “disappeared.” Then again, this is a plan cooked up by the same people who think it’s okay to loudly coordinate a murder over an open walki-talkie channel while the one honest cop among them is clearly still within earshot.

I think it all took place during a government shutdown

The airport scene is further proof Jason StL.A.tham and crew are terrible at their jobs. Now his partner was not carrying a weapon when going through security and must have been aware that he didn't put a gun in the x-ray machine tub. I mean you think as a law enforcement office trained in firearms and their safety and handling you'd recall information like that. So upon being stopped by the TSA and identifying as a cop his first recourse was not figuring out who was ahead or behind him in line and could have done that but rather just go about their business. Don't you think he would remember Chris Evans cutting in front of him and do you think the TSA would just let him on his way without having to check why armed cops are going through security? Cop or not I think a gun would shut everything down for awhile.

I love it when the dialogue in shitty movies is clearly speaking to the audience because it doesn't trust them to pick up on visual cues. This movie had an overabundance of this sort of gap-filling. My favorite example of this is when Kim Basinger's Mrs. Ricky Martin cuts the cop/goon/professional wrestler's arm with a shard of glass after he discovers that she's found a way to use the phone in the attic. She slices the inside of his arm and he gets all shaky and asks her what she did to him. She then proceeds to give this dying man a "science biology" lesson on the brachial artery and how he will bleed-out and 30 minutes. Time is of the essence and she needs to rescue her kid and get the hell out of there... and she's lecturing this dying goon on arterial blood flow?!? Had she skipped this One to Grow On, she would have had ample time to bust Ricky Martin Jr. out of the garage and escape before Angelino-American Jason Statham and his crew returned. Then I read this comment on the movie's IMDB Goofs page: When Jessica cuts the goon's arm she tells him that he will bleed 30 liters/minute. The blood flow through a brachial artery is nowhere near that much. During vigorous exercise the entire heart puts out a total of 30 L/min, but that's the sum total flow through every artery of the body. The flow though a single brachial artery is fraction of that. In addition, the goon was not vigorously exercising. At rest, the cardiac output is about 5 L/min.

I'm totally behind P-Mac becoming Bon Iver

I was called out (not by name but I am the one that mapped Escape From L.A.) to map this movie but I've had a busy weekend and didn't have time to do it. I did a brief searching from a few of the locations I remembered in the movie and sadly it seems to be not as crazy as they think. Here's the catch though. If we go by what the movie says it's not that crazy if we go by where actual scenes take place then it gets crazy. For example the school is in Brentwood(ish) area and the chase is suppose to be down Sunset Blvd but in reality it is down by LAX. As I am no Jason Statham and haven't been to Los Angeles since I was 13 so I'm not sure if the route this time is as interesting. My next two nights are free so if there is actual interest in the maps I'll do them.

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.

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.

I am still confused. Wouldn't his phone have shown the phone number KB called from? Unless it was blocked? Also, what about fucking *69? More thoughts on this one: When Captain America was in the stairwell in the police station and was about to lose the signal, why not just put the phone down somewhere and go up the stairs to find someone? I'm fully convinced WHM is the main character. He's the only person we learn anything about (other than that KB is a "science biology" teacher). We see him living his life, dealing with the nitty gritty of opening a day spa and testing products with his wife. He gets the "save the cat" moment, even if it's a fish. He's the one I wasrooting for the whole time to figure it out and finally get Captain America some help. He was the only good thing about this movie. He was everything. This was only marginally better than Perfect Stranger. Only just.

Just like Abraham Lincoln said when he swallowed his molar, "This tooth shall pass."

There is a movie where a victim calls a 911 operator. It's called The Call. The victim is kidnapped by a serial killer and calls from the trunk en route to his murder dungeon. Halle Berry is the 911 operator and she works with the victim to find her location. I can't remember why but Halle Berry has to be the one to save her instead of the police. I remember the first half being okay and the second half being pretty ridiculous.

What if we switch all this phone shenanigans around so Chris Evans is someone who's supposed to be getting an emergency phone call: a 911 operator! Kim Basinger can still manipulate the pulses of the smashed phone, but DOES call 911 and it's Chris Evans who answers. 911 operators are obviously people who are supposed to be responsible and punctual, etc., qualities that Evans has been accused of not having. So you automatically connect his personal and professional life. Maybe his unreliability has put him in hot water with his boss as well as his ex-girlfriend, so he is close to being fired. When he gets a call from Basigner, his immediate supervisor tells him it is a prank and to not waste time and resources following it up and to GET BACK TO WORK. But Evans takes note of the number and decides to call it himself on his CELLULAR phone when he shift ends (maybe he just pulled a 3rd shift so he is getting off work right around the time kids are being taken to school, thus adding an element of lack of sleep and therefore stress to his character). When he calls the 911 switchboard after discovering that the kidnapping is, in fact, real, we discover that his boss is ALSO in the pocket of the dirty cops, who recruited him/her to curtail any possible incoming 911 calls in case Basinger, her son, or her husband were reported missing (or if anyone saw them capture the husband in broad daylight). I realize this takes away some of the point of the movie, that it's a random stranger who gets a call and has to decide to help that person, but we still get a random 911 dispatcher getting the call and having to step-up, defy authority, and become a hero. Plus, it gives us an opportunity to either defy stereotypes of phone operators being women OR cast a woman in the lead role who immediately connects with another woman in peril, even if her male supervisors (and male police officers) are telling her to forget about it.

To me one of the craziest parts of their plan was why lock Kim Basinger in an attic with a phone in the first place. They are in a large house and not every room has a phone in it right? So why pick a room with a phone in it? Why not a bathroom or kids room that would be phoneless. That way you wouldn't have to worry about these things. Or why even put her in a room alone? Nobody is around, why not just tie her to a chair in the living room with everyone else? This also begs the question why even move her to a second location. Why not tie her up in her own house? That way you can search it and keep an eye on her. Also if you search the house you might be able to find where their kid goes to school in the first place and not have to worry about her not telling you. Clearly these cops turn to shaking down drug dealers because they are terrible at their jobs if they missed all this.

The most ludicrous thing about this entire movie isn’t that Basinger was somehow able to place an outbound call from a demolished telephone, but that after all her random futzing, almost right off the bat, she somehow managed to connect to a local number. I mean, damn. That sure is lucky. And the truly insane thing is that it had to be random. If her character possessed the deftness and alacrity required to manipulate the phone’s copper lines so that she was only placing local calls, then there would have been absolutely nothing stopping her from calling the police herself, or at the very least, a family friend or relative. But, no, out of the 250 million plus active telephone numbers in America, she somehow managed to reach a the one dude currently traveling within her local pizza parlor’s delivery radius.

This was actually an episode of Law & Order SVU where the detectives were getting a call from a child who claimed to be in the process of a kidnapping, but when they trace the call it's bouncing all over the city and the girl's answers to their questions are creating a lot of doubt about the reality of her claims. It's a tense as hell episode because you the viewer are starting to get the same questions and wondering if this isn't some kind of scam.

I got the impression WHM was more of a desk jockey and the dirty cops seemed to be in narcotics so it's possible he wouldn't have known her especially if she was from a different precinct. I do love how WHM is much older, had not seen much action in his years on the force, and was very much thinking about retirement, but he's a perfect shot. Is able to leap through the air and aim and fire his gun perfectly, he beats up a guy at least 15 years his junior, and even knows how he can distract Bayback in the house by knocking over the fish bowl and he's able to slide out from cover to do it. For having never needed to even draw his weapon in 27 years, he displayed skills that John Wick would be impressed by. Also, I could listen to Los Angelino Jason Statham for hours!

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.

Oh, well yeah I knew he was in it cause it got this big announcement, but I thought you meant he was in the trailer lol! Clearly I think the shot of the clock will be from his scene considering his name, but I was REALLY looking forward to a beard man lol.

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.

I had to search out the script to find out if the nipples scene was actually something that someone sat down and wrote. Thankfully it appears no one did because that isn't in the script http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/cellular.pdf . But then that means that is something they found on the day? That really isn't any better. Although Noah Emmerich was a dick to William H. Macy about his day spa I thought he was being sincere about trying to get him to join his squad. Did Noah think the one missing piece from his corrupt vice squad was a clean cop who'd never seen any action and was on the verge of retirement?

Yeah. The dad was a real idiot. He did probably the worst thing he could have done. He didn't tell anyone he got this footage. Not even his family. It would have been safer for him to just give notable LA resident Jason Statham the phone. They would have probably left him alone. I like that the dad didn't really fight them though. He saw police officers murder a guy and steal his drugs. They are basically Training Day without Denzel's charisma. I'm not fighting them. At most, I'd unsuccessfully try to fend them off before they either beat me up or killed me. I'd probably do whatever they asked.

Just hearing the boys (sean and hayes) are considering doing an extra episode of hollywood handbook a week for people subscribed to a particular service. more to come, stay tuned

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

Honestly, why does Conan need Earwolf? I feel the ADs are so intrusive and overbearing, plus it gets edited down to even less time so its literally like half Ads and 25 minutes of interviews.

Nobody needs a friend that badly.