The Box Presents a Muddled But Intriguing Social Experiment

I avoid horror movies as a general rule. However, I was killing time with my cousin during a visit to my grandparents’, and the 2009 Richard Kelly thriller The Box came on after Date Night, the comedy we’d been watching, so we decided to stick it out even though my uncle warned us it was “freaky”. I figured with a PG-13 rating, it couldn’t be too traumatizing. And really, it wasn’t, though I still was a little nervous about going to sleep that night for fear a nightmare might creep in…

Cameron Diaz is Norma Lewis, a sweet, pretty Southern schoolteacher with a mangled foot. She and her husband Arthur (James Marsden), who works for NASA, enjoy a comfortable, if rather fiscally shaky, life with their pre-teen son Walter (Sam Oz Stone). Christmas is on the horizon when a mysterious package arrives on the porch. Inside the plain brown box is a contraption and a calling card. The Lewises are about to receive a visit from the enigmatic Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a polite but ominous man with a deformed face. His task is to inform them of the “financial opportunity” presented by the box that they have been given. If they press the button, someone they don’t know will die, and they will receive a million dollars. They can’t tell anyone else about the offer or the deal is off. They have a day to decide.

Norma and Arthur are decent, salt-of-the-earth people, and it’s a little hard to believe that they would seriously consider this long-distance homicide. But a combination of disbelief that it will actually work and a sudden downturn in their fortunes making the money seem particularly palatable pushes them to accept the deal. And then the trouble really begins.

This is a mostly psychological thriller that asks its audience to consider whether they would accept such an offer and what the ramifications might be of a society filled with people who would do such a thing. It’s not an especially violent movie; we hear rumblings of a string of homicides but don’t really see much. It reminded me a bit of Stephen King’s Needful Things, only here, the temptation is far less personalized, and most of the terrible things that happen are a result of people being forced to make a difficult decision. It’s a sick experiment, and whoever is pulling the strings has incredible power.

Langella gives the most compelling performance as the serene but incredibly creepy courier. Is he behind all of this, or is he too caught up in something bigger than himself? While he is the one continually setting events into motion, it is difficult to determine whether he is truly a villain. Diaz and Marsden also deliver solid performances and are very believable as a couple. The Lewises are flawed but likable, and it’s disturbing to watch them descend into near-madness in the aftermath of their fateful decision.

Aside from the main three, I was most interested in Arthur’s colleague Norm Cahill (James Rebhorn) and the eerie family babysitter. I wasn’t too impressed with Stone’s performance, but he wasn’t really in the movie all that much. More than the side characters, the pop culture references caught my attention. The movie includes several clips of shows from the 1970s, which roots us in a very particular time, and the search for alien life is a major thread throughout the film. In some ways, I was also reminded of The Day the Earth Stood Still, as I got the impression that some sort of advanced civilization was observing humanity and unsure of whether it deserved to remain in existence.

The movie does get pretty weird toward the end, and there are at least a couple of sequences that seem confusing and out of place. At times it seemed to me as though it was trying to be two different movies. Ultimately, though, it’s an interesting rumination on human nature. The particulars of the experiment don’t always make a lot of sense, but the general idea behind it is compelling. It’s a make-you-think kind of movie, and if nothing else, I expect that those who watch it may think twice the next time they are tempted to do something that would benefit themselves and hurt someone else.

Hairspray Exuberantly Examines the Notion of Otherness

I've been hearing a lot about Hairspray over the last couple years thanks to the enthusiasm of my young cousins, who were such fans of the show that they went to see it on Broadway. Aside from hearing the effervescent opening number, Good Morning, Baltimore - a grand hello to a bustling city that reminds me a lot of our beautifully boisterous introduction to Belle and her little town in Beauty and the Beast - on late-night and early-morning television, in the Macy's Parade and on Ugly Betty, I was pretty unfamiliar with the play, but all the buzz about it was enough to get me pretty pumped up for the movie when I heard that director Adam Shankman would be bringing it to the big screen.

Yesterday, my parents, my friend Libbie and I decided to see for ourselves what all the hype was about. What we got was a joyous kaleidoscope of slightly over-the-top early-sixties eye candy, with the darker edges of that era bubbling beneath the surface until they are brought into the full light of scrutiny when Queen Latifah's matronly Motormouth Maybelle leads a soulful march protesting the segregationist policies of The Corny Collins Show, the American Bandstand-esque television program that turns Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky), a starry-eyed teen with a heart as oversized as her pudgy frame, into an overnight sensation.

Blonsky is absolutely infectious in the lead role. The girl is a ray of sunshine, undeterred by all the obstacles that stand in the way of her dream of dancing on her favorite TV show, while also unwilling to compromise her principles for the sake of her ambition. As the film progresses, she becomes acutely aware of how the black students from whom she learns her best dance moves are oppressed, and she yearns to create an environment in which race need no longer be a barrier to opportunities. Just as she has broken down conventional societal expectations of beauty, she strives to show everyone that integration is the wave of the future.

Along the way, she dances her heart out and takes a few time-outs to sigh dreamily over Ricky Nelson-esque Link Larkin (Zac Efron), who gradually comes to see Tracy as a young woman of such substance that she overshadows his perfectly coiffed girlfriend Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow), whose conniving mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), the manager of the station on which the dance show airs, undermines the new girl every step of the way despite opposition from host Corny (James Marsden), whose dazzling smile gleams all the brighter whenever Tracy takes to the stage.

Her best friend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes), a wisp of a girl with an omnipresent lollipop, ducks out from under the icy repression of her puritanical mother Prudy (Allison Janney) when she falls head over heels for Maybelle's exuberant son Seaweed (Elijah Kelley). Tracy, meanwhile, aims to bring her mother Edna (John Travolta), a frumpy laundress whose crippling self-image has long led her to eschew the outside world, into contemporary society. She's not an unreasonable woman; she's just insecure and set in her ways, and with a little nudging she is ready to support her daughter in her endeavors, though perhaps not as whole-heartedly as Tracy's gentle, eccentric father Wilbur (Christopher Walken), who achieved his own long-held goal when he opened a novelty shop, which enjoys an upsurge in business in the wake of Tracy's newfound celebrity.

Much was made of Travolta's gender-bending performance here, and he certainly immersed himself in the part, though I was never quite able to forget that she was actually a he, and neither was the rest of the audience, judging by the nervous titters that rippled whenever Walken edged in for a kiss. After his over-the-top performance in High School Musical, I wasn't sure what I would think of Efron, but he was much more nuanced here, even though he was in a similar role as a dreamboat who is startled into self-awareness by the arrival of an unconventional gal. I didn't think there was a weak link in the cast, and I give special kudos to Janney for making such a simultaneously humorous and terrifying impression in her brief appearances.

As someone with limited familiarity with the songs in this film, I was impressed by their energy and complexity. The lyrics in particular are very clever, perfectly capturing the various speech patterns of characters and often riddled with sly innuendoes that indicate this was not such an innocent time after all. Most of these are subtle enough that they would probably go right over the heads of youngsters, and there's little else in the movie that could be considered objectionable. Indeed, Hairspray is an ideal film for the family to see together, as the bouncy dance numbers and likable characters reel audiences in for a poignant lesson in the importance of accepting other people's differences. Don't miss out!