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The Cell - New Line Platinum Series

The Cell - New Line Platinum Series

List Price: $14.97
Your Price: $7.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: One Of The Worst I've Seen In A Long Time
Review: Now, I'm quite a generous guy when it comes to reviewing films, sometimes too generous but this film just... There was no point to it at all. You see, one night I was supposed to be going out with a bunch of mates but that fell through so we went to our second home (the video store) and we rented "Chopper" (which was a fantastically gritty film, 5 stars). We also rented "The Cell" since it looked cool and none of us got round to seeing it during its cinema release. We watched "Chopper" first and loved it, had a break, had some Chinese take-out, had some drinks, then we watched "The Cell"...and fell asleep! It was so boring! Nothing interesting really happened. We fast forwarded most of it cause it was "that bad". And every time the stupid, fat, murderer Carl guy changed into one of those weird Demon Carls he didn't look scary...he looked like Boy George!!! Also, Vince Vaughn is a pretty good actor so what was he doing in this piece of horse...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Outstanding Movie with cool bonus material
Review: I absolutely LOVE this movie. However, if you don't like creepy, psychological stuff (e.g. Silence of the Lambs), then you won't want to watch this one. If you do like that type of stuff, this movie is an excellent choice. I bought it because I am a big Jennifer Lopez fan, but I was surprised to see how good this movie really is--even if it had a different lead actress. The visuals in the movie are the best I have ever seen, and the whole story-line is terrific. I rented this one first, and I liked it so much that I bought it. The DVD is cool to have because it has a lot of good bonus material. Some of it can be seen on the movie's website, but the director's comments really add a lot to your understanding of the film as a whole. Good stuff. This one is worth owning.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Visuals a good movie do not make.
Review: While films are a visual medium, the look of a movie needs to be placed within a set context for it to be effective. The Cell does nothing of the sort. A friend and I sat laughing through most of it, jokingly putting forth stupid plot twists and inane, cliched dialog only to bust out into braying laughter when the movie actually did what we had been mercilessly ragging it for. Do not waste your time or money with this garbage, see The Silence of the Lambs instead.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I am so disappointed in Jennifer Lopez!!!!!!!
Review: The movie is one the most terrible concotions I have ever had the pleasure of viewing. That whole "going inside the mind of a killer" plot was a crock. I thought "The Cell" was a stupid movie, and Jennifer Lopez was acting way below her potential.To top it off I was bored most of the time anyway.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A dark but NOT deep movie...
Review: Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine, who is a psychologist. She volunteers to try to, literally, enter the mind of a serial killer (who is in the state of coma), in order to find his latest victim. If she stays in his mind too long, his world could become all to "real" to her and she could become trapped in it (which is what happens for a time being).

Vincent D'Onofrio (the actor who played Carl Stargher-the serial killer) was very convincing. I give his acting, in this movie, 5 stars.

I enjoyed it, it was different and new. It is not a deep movie, it is, however, a dark movie. The visual effects were creative. Lopez's acting, well as another reviewer stated, more or less, whomever played "Catherine" needed to be beautiful and sensual...Lopez has both.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Are We Having any Funambulism Yet?
Review: Anyone who has ever worked with renowned psychodramatist, psychologist and art therapist Dr. Gong Shu of China will be able to resonate with this germane film. Because "The Cell" is psychodrama played out at its best -- written large, swift and powerful. Most importantly-- healing! And real! Far from being psychobabble, this "reel world" reality is where the best work in psychiatry and psychology merge with the ageold art of the medicine man or, in this case, woman. Like "Altered States" only more so, "The Cell" should be required viewing in every psych department across America.

Leave it to the East to shake the West awake once again, as dawn-fresh director Singh does just this and infinitely more. Everything about this movie relates to the balance or funambulism required betwixt extremes in order for life to perdure, and Jennifer Lopez gives the performance of a lifetime as a Gong-Shu-like doctor challenged to "heal the split" of damaged hearts and minds. Fractured souls requiring the tender loving touch of a strong but compassionate woman.

Not since "Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer" has there been a film with more insight into the turbulence, unbearable paradoxes and chronic pain extant in a tortured human psyche cyclically haunted by its cumulative past.

The innocent little boy Karl is counterbalanced, nay completely thrown off balance, by his larger-than-demonic-life "father-figure," intermixed with dolls, beloved farm animals and pets, and toys turned into tools of terror - a totally destroyed childhood, innocence raped, then flourishing into full-throttle sexual overdrive combined: the inability of the middle self to reconcile unconscionably negative karma with (as opposed to against) futurepresent hope and redemption, shattered peace/[] equanimity, greenhouse aggression resulting in flowering sociopathy. This is Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" for the 21st century.

Singh uses technology expertly, like a loaded gun, which is moot to say whether that is good or evil in and of itself, but loaded nonetheless. Technology is technology and is always catastrophically numbing in its inaugural effects, which is why Jennifer Lopez provides just the right anaesthesia for this complicated and dicey surgery. Water both gives life and can drown. Pleasure and pain are interchangeable to the damaged soul. In this sense "The Cell" is McLuhanesque because Karl the Serial Killer, the ultimate "enfant terrible," uses all kinds of extensions of himself, including actual hooks and wires embedded into and extended from his flesh, to amplify, heighten, speed up and store, electrify, restore to utter and by so doing outer his enraged statements about his childhood unjustly wrecked, his creative infrastructure cracked, his adult orgasm realized and then exploded out of the child-man whose childhood was triturated, bleached out like one of his poor "dolls," leaving only the monster in the man. But of course the innocent child yet remains, the Buddha core endures, buried deep deep inside, where Lopez excavates, finds and nurtures it. Even if she can't save it.

A mesmerizing musical score transmigrates the audience into the inner realm of what can only be described indescribably as the soul of the human heart (soulscape?), or the entire human system, sine qua non. Each of us is a package deal, a box of quirks, past present and future. Only the subtlety and yin-sensibility of Eastern suprapantheism could give this movie what it earns however-- credibility as a working metaphor for healing creatures damaged enmasse by genocidal speed-of-light change, stuff put out long before it's thought out, tragic misunderstandings of the mass Medea.

Great understated acting from everyone leaves Singh to work his magic as directorial shaman seamlessly. A greater humanist could not be conceived of, and by the end of this seminal psychodrama (which resolves itself courageously, realistically, and on chords of irridescent hope), all are left with the sense that each one of us must treat himelf or herself and all other creatures on this planet with care and tenderness and utmost gentleness constantly; watching what we do moment by moment, in order that we not damage one another further. Life after all is damaging enough in and of itself; life lives on life axiomatically. Yet if we are to survive as a species, cell for cell, humans must somehow surcease, somehow overcome, somehow come to grips with (with the metasoul of a compassionate being like Lopez's archetypal social worker) our internecine ways. Kay Redfield Jamison says, "in order to conquer a monster, first it must be beautified." Francis Ford Coppola echoes: "there is much to be learned from beasts." Singh it!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Enough plot to make a great movie
Review: Most of the complaints I have seen here are about the plot. The plot is superb when compared to movies sich as Jurassic Park 3 and other movies. The key element of this movie is to provoke emotion. The plot gives the movie a solid enough base to build on emotions, feelings and insight that the director is trying to get across. The artistic qualities of the movie reverberate the emotions and psychological aspects of the id, and other freudian terms. The movie is painted with metaphors that allow you to induce what the psyche of each character is and what they are experiencing and what they have experienced. The machine that allows the characters to communicate directly through neurological input is what provides the basis of the movie. The ability to stomp through the backwaters of the mind and explore the architecture of the mind, provides the element of movie greatness. To take a fairly original idea and exploit it the best of current technology is what makes Starwars, The Matrix, and then this movie. However all the things that make this great must be experienced in order to fully appreciate the movie. So let yourself feel, and not be too cynical about it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: No Substance, horrible effects
Review: Haven't you noticed that for the last three years Jennifer Lopez's movies have had terrible scripts.

Her last good movie was Out Of Sight, in my opinion her best movie to date.

The Cell is just a collage of nightmarish scenes compiled together trying to make a movie. Simple and short review.

Vince Vaughn in underused and Jennifer Lopez wears too much makeup even when she's not inside the killer's mind.

I don't get all the fuss about the special effects, they are terrible they look similar to those of Mortal Kombat from 1995. There's also a very weird color scene when Vince Vaughn enters the killer's mind, what's that??

This director is as bad as Joel Schumacher.

If you don't get movies like The Silence Of The Lambs or Seven stick with The Cell, The Bone Collector and Kiss The Girls.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Horrendous Delirium
Review: "Do you believe there is a part of yourself, deep inside in your mind, with things you don't want other people to see? During a session when I'm inside, I get to see those things," says dogged therapist Catherine Deane early on in the film. Unfortunately, this is the only forewarning we get before director Tarsem Singh presents us with a sensory overload in the mind of a schizophrenic killer.

"The Cell" is a grotesquely perplexing movie, one that contains graphic imagery and surreal topography from an award-winning music video director (REM's "Losing My Religion"). The plot cauldron begins to bubble when FBI agent Peter Novak (Vaughn) and crew discover the bleached body of a young woman discarded beneath an overpass. The cadaver has the eerie exposé of a porcelain doll, complete with a personalized collar around her blanched neck and lungs flooded with water. The agents have tracked the killer for months, and have deciphered his MO: he abducts young women, imprisoning them in a cistern equipped with a cot and toilet and videotapes their terror at all hours. The pipes leading into the cistern are programmed to occasionally douse the terrified women with a shower of ice cold water and after forty hours, the faucets turns on full blast, filling the tank to the brim as the victim screams in terror, her lungs flooding with water. Forensic evidence from the latest kidnapping of one Julia Hickson (Tara Subkoff) has led the FBI to the home of Carl Stargher (D'Onofrio), one very messed-up individual. Unfortunately, Carl has a rare neurological disease that puts him into a coma only minutes before a SWAT team breaks down his front door and Julia's location remains a mystery. Enter Catherine Deane (Lopez), an empathetic psychiatrist who administers therapy by entering her patient's proverbial ids to make a progressive connection. The FBI hears of Deane and her abilities, asking her to retrieve the information they cannot. This will mean that Catherine must brave the dark and perverse subconscious of the murderous Stargher in order to get info on the location of his lethal aquarium AND inform the police before the hapless Julia starts sleeping with the fishes.

I can imagine because of the overall content of "The Cell" that the movie contained some very off-putting scenes. However, the MPAA has a refined prudence when it comes to deconstructing films and I'm willing to bet that a good ten minutes of footage ended up on the cutting room floor due to its overt explicitness. The sweeping panoramas of Namibian dunes, musty caves and black chasms are attention-grabbing and a bit overstated, but the movie gains points with its ethereal cinematography where it is lacking in a well-formulated story/intelligent script and dramatic performances.

Lopez is ever the celestial and almost matronly tourist in her patients' foreign psyches, often dressed in what appears to be a succession of haute couture wedding gowns; only when she enters Carl Stargher's mind does she cease to be an au courant shrink, dawning a simple ensemble of white blouse, black skirt and white veil draped over her face. Vince Vaughn barely gets a chance to show some grit, his limited screen time making his character all the more useless. The only standout here is Vincent D'Onofrio as the twisted Carl. He makes the most of his character's peculiarities and lends a stark realism to the warped majesty of Stargher's mind.

Surprisingly, "The Cell" gained a thumbs-up from Roger Ebert and his new partner, both critics raving about the film's visual charisma. Of course, coming from a movie critic this renowned, a lot of people were misled, thinking "The Cell" had more to offer than just clever camera tricks. Because of the Ebert fallacy, there is a mixed bag of opinions on the film. My final summation is this: "The Cell" is a film to be appreciated for its garish artistry - NOT its substance. MTV magnates will be more than satisfied with its exuberant creepiness and slap shot production, for after all, how much more could it resemble a severely extended buzz clip?

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: dreramscape
Review: i dont know maybe it was just me but right from the begining of the movie with the little kid afraid of the boogie man and then freakin j-hoe with the whole dream thing i got a dreamscape vibe bigtime other than neat colors and cool costumes this movie [is not so good] i've seen better straight to video movies


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