Phone Booth
Picture: B
Sound: B Extras: C+ Film: B
The better sensibilities of two capable filmmakers come
together in the thriller Phone Booth, a 2002 film that became a 2003
release due to the parallel between what turned out to be two real-life snipers
and a sniper in this film. Now that it
is out, it has been a critical and commercial hit in the theaters, then on DVD
and other video outlets. This can be
attributed to its cast, director Joel Schumacher, and writer Larry Cohen.
Cohen originally was a writer for fifteen years, then he
got noticed for his 1972 film Bone.
That led to one of the best of all the films from the Blaxploitation
cycle, Black Caesar and its sequel Hell Up in Harlem, both a year
later. After a flashback to his work on
police procedurals with The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), he
was back into the Horror genre for an amazing stretch, beginning with the
remarkable It’s Alive (1974), two sequels in 1978 & 1987, God
Told Me To (1976, aka Demon), and others. He also wrote the Able Ferrara version of Body Snatchers,
the cut-up 1994 third version of Don Siegal’s 1956 Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. He wrote Phone Booth based
on a conversation with no less than Alfred Hitchcock. A nearly a quarter century after the passing of The Master of
Suspense, the film has arrived.
Schumacher reteams with the man he helped make a star,
Colin Farrell. Though he has become a
commercially successful actor, he got his big break with Schumacher on the
grossly underseen Tigerland, a 2000 Vietnam film with a difference. This time, Farrell plays a dishonest,
hustling con artist in the world of New York entertainment, who is not as big
as he purports to be. Someone has been
watching, and when he makes his routine trip to the city’s last phone booth to
two-time on his wife, he will be there for more than a few calls.
Though Schumacher and cinematographer Mathew Libatique,
A.S.C., do not try to duplicate Hitchcockian camerawork, their past experience
with edgy films serves them supremely here.
Schumacher’s best work includes 8mm, The Client, and
especially Falling Down, while Libatique shot Pi and Requiem
for a Dream for Darren Aranofsky.
The result is something with a different sense of the kinetic, including
various uses of split-screen, something more in the Brian De Palma mode. Either way, it is welcome to both see it and
see it used so well.
The anamorphically enhanced image is good, but not up to
how good it looked on film, with some color and definition problems. This DVD has the full-screen version on the
flipside of the disc, but there is no telling if that somehow still affected
the better wide image. The film has
also been issued in the D-VHS D-Theater format, where no DVD can touch it, but
this presentation is still not awful.
Compare to the trailer, and you can see a few qualities that are
missing.
The 5.1 sound is only in Dolby Digital AC-3, which is a
shame, because DTS would have brought out the clever sound design’s impact
better. This is not awful, but simply
does not capture how good this was theatrically. As was the case with the basic DVD of 8mm, there is
another well-recorded commentary by Schumacher in Dolby 2.0, even if it is not
as outstanding as that one was in content.
It is still up to his usually exceptional levels of telling it like it
is and is one of the rare times you will hear about the industry as it stands.
Outside of that and the trailer for this film and Alex
Proyas’ new film Garage Days, there are no other extras. Despite that and the 81-minutes-long length
of the film, this is a DVD everyone should catch, including those who have
already seen the film. Good thrillers
are fewer than ever, but Phone Booth works most effectively, even in
second viewings.
- Nicholas Sheffo
