SUPERMAN BE DAMNED: AN ARGUMENT AGAINST A PHONE BOOTH

So Friday was my last day at the “old” job, which is really a misnomer since I will be returning to the “old” job in mid-May, which I suppose simply supports (oooh alliteration … fun) the adage whatever is old becomes new again. (Is that it? Whatever … serves my purposes.) But I digress …

The “old” job is not one that often keeps me at work late, but since I was to be gone for two-plus months and a long-term temp would be covering for everything I do, I wanted to make sure there were as few loose ends as possible, and everything would be relatively straightforward for her. As usual, I left much of the work I needed to do until the last minute, and suddenly, it’s after 10 PM on Friday and I’m still at the office. I had intended to see a movie Friday night because for someone who intended to have a blog with a major focus on film, I’ve seen woefully little … scratch that … I’ve seen nil since catching Russell Crowe and Mr. Jennifer Connelly on a boat and a Brit and an Aussie living and loving through the Civil War the weekend of the Oscars. Two weeks and not even a DVD … that’s gotta be unhealthy.

So when I finally got home Friday night and turned on the TV, I started watching Real Time With Bill Maher, and while scanning the listings I noticed that Phone Booth was starting next. I’m not sure why I thought I wanted to see this movie. I mean, I guess the idea of watching Colin Farrell stuck in a phone booth for 90 minutes while a sniper trains his gun on him isn’t completely unpleasant — live or die, it’s win-win — but I should have known that with Joel Schumacher directing with a reasonably free hand and more money necessary for a one set shoot, things had a good shot of going to crap.

The weird thing about Schumacher is that he’s not always a bad director, but when he makes a bad movie, he doesn’t fuck around. That sucker is a likely Razzie nominee. He singlehandedly destroyed the Batman franchise. (OK, to be fair, the overrated Akiva Goldsman — A Beautiful Mind Oscar not withstanding — is at least as much to blame.) He’s directed brilliant actors such as Robert DeNiro, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins to simply bad performances in just awful films. In fact, in Bad Company, not only does he shoot possibly the most drab and dull performance Hopkins has ever given on-screen, but he goes a step further and makes Chris Rock legitimately unfunny.

To be fair, not everything Schumacher has made completely sucks. Tigerland — the film that made Farrell into a star, at least in the eyes of Hollywood if not yet the general public — was actually a very good film. And while I haven’t seen it, I’ve heard decent things about last year’s Veronica Guerin. The Client and A Time to Kill were perfectly serviceable adaptations of their respective John Grisham novels, and both St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys, while not exactly subtle, are classic examples of late-80s pop cinema. Hell, he even made D.C. Cab. Not a great film, but it had it’s funny moments, and more importantly, it had Mr. T.

I think I figured out what the problem is. If you want Joel Schumacher to make a good film, don’t give him any money. Don’t give him lots of special effects. Don’t give him a big studio backing him, and don’t let him try to make a comedy or a straight-forward action movie. Make him give you a relatively small, issue-oriented drama on a limited budget. For some reason, when he makes those, they turn out well.

While Phone Booth certainly isn’t a big action movie, it is the epitome of what Hollywood types like to call “high concept.” How does one tell a story when your main character has to be on-screen virtually the entire time and is stuck in a phone booth for fear of being killed? I don’t presume to think this would not be an incredibly difficult film to make, however if that’s the case, rather than masking the limited plot and trying to heighten the drama with simple camera trickery in screen inserts, a director might want to try to find a really interesting way to bring us into that phone booth with Farrell and really experience his fear. But not Joel!

Additionally, it might help if the character wasn’t a completely one-dimensional cliche — a hotshot, lying, womanizing PR flack who thinks he’s the shit, ordering around his young lacky assistant, who he of course treats like crap, while talking on multiple cell phones walking through Times Square. But oh look, he’s really just a loving husband and insecure little fuck … as long as a sniper’s rifle is trained on him. And while I’m not one who always likes, needs or even wants everything tied up with a nice little bow at the end, you’ve got to give me something, some reason why this madman played (although seen only briefly, he’s mostly just heard) by the Kiefer is doing this or at least knows have the information he uses to freak out Farrell. Basically, there is absolutely no “why” presented in this film.

I can’t say for sure that much of the problem doesn’t come from the script by cult writer/director Larry Cohen, but knowing the history of Schumacher films, I’ll bet you there are some pages or strips of film on the cutting room floor that probably wouldn’t fix everything but might make the picture somewhat coherent. And I suppose the end is supposed to be a little twist, except for the fact that you can see it from the moment the extra who got his SAG card playing a pizza man takes his absurd and awkward leave of the phone booth before the “tension” starts to rise.

The cheesy situation and developing story (which ebbs and flows for no reason whatsoever other than, Oh look, we’re 40 minutes in … we better make something happen!) are not helped by Farrell’s over-the-top performance and piss-poor New York accent. I’ve heard him do American accents well before, but he needed more time with the speech coach on this one. I’m not even sure where he was supposed to be from, but my guess is somewhere with a heavy Irish community because his natural accent kept slipping through at the most inopportune moments.

But you know what actually bugged me the most about this film? Something so small, that most people probably don’t even think about it. However, with all the other problems here, this nagging consistent flaw just kept stabbing me in the ear. As I mentioned, through most of the movie, Kiefer’s sniper is simply a voice which Farrell hears over the phone, however the audience hears Kief as the voice-of-God. It’s a very clean soundtrack, with no ambient noise (certainly not the street below the window out of which he aims his rifle at Kiefer, a street which just happens to be the incredibly busy 8th Avenue in Manhattan!), and most definitely not sounding anything like what we as moviegoers are used to when we hear the other side of a phone call. I’m sure using this specific sound was a deliberate choice — maybe because hearing the other end of the line would be too distracting for an hour straight, or maybe because they thought it might work better to give the voice that disconnection from reality and more of a sense of an all-powerful deity.

Unfortunately, if that’s what they’re going for, it just doesn’t work. To me, all it does is reinforce that Kiefer was not there, on location, trading lines with Farrell. That was also all-too-apparent in the weird editing that included strange short pauses where Farrell looks like he’s still listening even though Kiefer has stopped talking. Since they could never really cut away from Farrell, and there are only so many times you can show the phone booth from afar, they had to time the gaps between lines. Kiefer’s voice being so disconnected from everything only reminded me that he was sitting in some comfortable studio, reading from a script, probably 3000 miles away, several weeks after (or maybe before) they shot the actual footage. And by the way … if they weren’t trying to do anything deliberate with his incredibly clean track, well they should be even more ashamed for simply being lazy as hell.

There’s probably an interesting movie to be made from the original Phone Booth script, although we sure as hell didn’t get it. And next up for Schumacher? He’s in post on a filmed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s long-running sappy musical spectacular (as opposed to spectacular musical) The Phantom of the Opera, which should be released later this year. Oy … I’ve got a headache already. I’ll bet you he’s spent $20-Million on the chandelier crash alone.