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Phone Booth

Phone Booth

List Price: $14.98
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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not the best, but good
Review: I thought this was a good movie. The acting was great,(in my opinion, Colin Farrell's best performace.) The plot was too predictable though;it reminded me of the movie Joy Ride(especially the ending).If you liked this movie, I recommend the movie Joy Ride.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: 1-800-Colin-Farrell.....
Review: You're stuck in a phone booth with a psychotic sniper giving you instructions---he's killed a man in front of you and he's says you'll be next if you leave the booth. This is the horrific dilemma facing an arrogant celebrity publicist named Stu, played by Colin Farrell. Stu becomes the center of attention with all eyes of the media focused on him as a madman (Keifer Sutherland in an evil turn) tortures him with terrible decisions, forcing him to look at the superficiality of his life and the selfish and hurtful things he has done to people that care about him. Katie Holmes plays a very small role and Forest Whitaker doesn't do a great deal either but the story is really centered around the two men sharing a phone line. Colin Farrell gives a good performance (as well as being very easy on the eye!) and Keifer Sutherland makes a very convincing villain though we see him for maybe less than 5 minutes in the film. Not a great movie but worth renting. If you are a Colin Farrell fan you'll enjoy this movie for sure.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Tense Thriller
Review: Phone Booth will keep you at the edge of your seat for it's entire hour-and-a-half running time. From the interesting voice-over in the very beginning to the very cool (though sadly predictable) ending, you'll be caught up in the action.
And that's the remarkable thing about this movie. There is only one set. (You guessed it) a phone booth, on a street in New York City. (This one-set idea feels a lot like the film 'Speed' in this movie.) All the action takes place either in or on the streets surrounding the phone booth that Colin Farrel finds himself trapped in, (threatened by a hidden sniper.) Keifer Sutherland's performance is outstanding, although you'll only hear his voice until the very, very end.
Director Joel Schumacher makes the single-set movie work remarkably well, by directing it almost like a music video. Quick, shaky camera pans, dramatic slow motion, sepearte shots playing out all over the screen in their own little boxes... While I was watching it, it really didn't feel like a movie. It felt like a television commercial or something along those lines. But it works.
Yes, there are flaws, namely its predictability, but i's such a thrill to watch both visually and through sound, (its very dialogue heavy) that you likely won't notice any of them.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Colin Farrell acts all emotions in the Phone Booth.
Review: Released by 20th Century Fox and presented by Fox 2000 Pictures, "Phone Booth". Colin Farrell stars as a man in New York City on 53rd Street. He uses this payphone booth everyday to call his girlfriend. This phone booth is the last glass-enclosed with a door (like the one's used in the 1970's) that exists and the only one working in the area. So Colin uses the phone booth to place a call like he always does. Then the phone rings for him. It is a sniper. If he leaves the booth he would be killed. The sniper (voice of Kiefer Sutherland) can even make a three-way call and try to destroy the relationship Colin has with his girlfriend. The laser-rifle is pointed at Colin. One wrong move, one wrong phone call.../ Yet another film that is off-tint. I dislike this color process of film where the color is altered. Color-bleaching, I dislike this too. The outside scenes with Colin are all off-tint or color faded. When he makes a phone call, we see a little "window" of who he is talking to in full color. Plays better on television. Actually mostly filmed on 5th Street in Los Angeles. Filmed in 10 days. DVD offer audio commentary by Joel Schumacher.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Scumacher screws up yet again.
Review: Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2003)

I got suckered again. I admit it. I watched yet another recent Joel Schumacher film. This time, I figured, Schumacher has himself a fantastic cast, it can't be any worse than Liberty Stands Still, and, really, it's less than eighty minutes long. How bad can it be?

To answer that question, I will say that my first comment after the movie was over was "the best thing about it was that it was less than eighty minutes long."

Colin Farrell (who is finally breaking out of the "I'm a soldier" stereotype) stars as Stu, a very not-nice guy who lies for a living. (He's a media publicist.) Stu makes a phone call from the same phone booth in New York City every day. On the last day before Verizon (nice product placement, there) is set to tear down the phone booth, while Stu is making his daily call, a guy tries to deliver him a pizza in the phone booth. Stu gets rid of the guy, then the phone starts to ring. He answers it and finds himself in conversation with another very not-nice guy (Kiefer Sutherland), who just happens to have a sniper rifle, and it's trained on the phone booth. If Stu hangs up, he dies. The sniper spends the rest of the film doing various things to put Stu into uncomfortable situations.

Sound like the kind of thing a mean, well-armed teenager would do? Well, yeah. Wesley Snipes, in Liberty Stands Still, at least had himself a cause (even if it was a misguided one). This guy is just there for the fun of it, really, unless you believe his story about wanting to make Stu a better person by making him confess his sins in public. There's not really enough here to make it buyable. The sniper comes off like a sadistic juvenile. Stu comes off like someone who's perfectly content to be emotionally manipulated, and his gradual transformation into said Better Person is completely unbelievable. (This is not to take away from Farrell's acting job, which on its own might have pulled this off, had he not been handed such an awful script.)

Schumacher, who decides about halfway through that you can't turn My Dinner with Andre into a suspense film, brings in the big guns. The police arrive on the scene, captained by Forest Whitaker, a man who needs no introduction, but has suddenly found himself in a number of roles that do no justice at all to his magnificent talent. Ghost Dog, phone home, we miss you. Stu's wife and would-be girlfriend are played by the wonderful Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black, High Art) and the decent Katie Holmes (Go, The Gift) respectively, and their parts are painful to watch. Mitchell, one of the great underrated actresses of our time, is given sharkbait to work with, and to her credit treats the material with the respect it deserves, zilch. Holmes' part actually has some potential, early on. (Of course, his conversation with Holmes' character in the first few minutes is long enough to have some meat to it, whereas his conversation with Mitchell is obviously of the "we need to introduce this character, how will we do it?" variety.) Unfortunately, when Holmes turns up again halfway through the movie, her entire part consists of standing in a crowd with a pained look on her face.

Given a cast like this, a proven situation, and even the barest competency in scriptwriting, camerawork, and direction, you've got a surefire winner. But the script was written by the inconsistent Larry Cohen, who turns out the odd script that fires (Best Seller, The Stuff) now and again, and the rest of the time turns out, well, the Maniac Cop movies and the third It's Alive movie, Island of the Alive. (If you haven't seen it, you've spared yourself a good deal of trauma.) Cinematographer Matthew Libatique provides hard evidence that good cinematography doesn't always outperform bad direction; the man who single-handedly made Tigerland barely watchable falters here with almost every step, which is extremely out of character (he's also Darren Aronofsky's preferred cinematographer. Nuff said.) And then there is Joel Schumacher, who has completely forgotten how to make a good film since 1990. The guy who made Flatliners could have pulled this off without a second thought. But Joel Schumacher is no longer the guy who made Flatliners. He's the guy who made the last two Batman flops. * ½

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Phone Booth's sound is JUST FINE!
Review: This is to Jerry from NJ who put up a review on 7-17-03, who is obviously not educated on dvd.

When you play dvd's it's always best to select your audio choice. In this case, 5.1 is always the best default to choose, unless you have DTS. But that's another story.

The 5.1 allows for the sound to be split into 5 seperate sound channels. When you are watching the film and the split screen conversations happen, those other audio tracks are going to your other speakers! If you aren't hearing them, it's not the dvd's fault. More likely your home theater, or lack thereof, isn't set up correctly. Best way to test a disc? Take it to an electronics store and demo it. 99 out of 100 times you'll find that your equipment is faulty or not able to play the disc, or you were a bonehead and didn't set up your theater right.

Next time don't be so quit to point the finger at the dvd. Rather, ask around, and educate yourself. You'll end up happier about the product!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: farrell is definitely a rising star
Review: the whole movie actually [bad] but farrell made it pretty watchable and turned it into a quite interesting movie. at least, you won't fall asleep and let your saliva run down from your chin. farrell so far proved himself a very versatile and very very talented performer. i am very happy that after alpacino, deniro, nicholson, these great actors turned so old now, finally, there's a guy out there to let viewers still get some hope out of hollywood.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Don't Buy This DVD!
Review: I'm sorry if my title made the movie sound bad, that wasn't my intention. I really enjoyed the movie alot, Colin Farrel and Kiefer Sutherland are great in it. I give the movie 4 out of 5 stars, I am refering to the DVD itself. At the very begining when Stu (Farrell) is on the phone there are split-screens of the people he is talking to, and the split-screens have no audio! They obviously should, but the dialogue is missing. If you turn on the subtitles you can read what the people are saying, but there is no sound. Because of this some important plot points and a few good jokes can be missed.

I found out that all the DVD's are like this, I exchanged it three times before I just decided to get my money back. So if you want to see it, I recommend renting it and reading the subtitles. FOX rushed the release of this DVD and they shouldn't have. Wait until they release a Special Edition with the audio and a few more features, like they did with Speed and Die Hard.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: ok, but not great
Review: worht a rental but I wouldnt own it or watch it again. Had a made for tv feel to it, als very inacurate. Seems liek this never could happen. Not much scare or gore either.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What a bad movie
Review: it gets a star cause of orginality. This movie was completely boring, the parts when he was on the phone talking and you couldn't hear what the other people were saying was so stupid. Joel disappoints me again. About half way through the movie i completly lost interest in it, and the way it ended was horrible, i had nothing to say when it ended. Don't but this you'll be mad at yourself if you do, just rent it, even tho i don't recommend that.


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