The Cell - 2000

 Sometimes when a movie like The Cell comes out and casts popular actors, and is hugely budgeted, and succeeds, I wonder how the hell the director did it.  Often it seems the answer is they came from music videos.  Reading about Tarsem Singh, I discovered that was also true of him.

The Cell made quite a lot of waves when it came out.  I remember people comparing it to Silence of the Lambs, and it's weird to retrospectively think this was less than 10 years after Lambs.  I saw it when it was new-ish, and I liked it, and I think I've maybe only seen it once since then.  It joins the annals of the Oxygen's, the Bone Collectors, the Seven's, in a weird subcategory of turn of the century bizarre ultra-horror, but a psychological one mainly.

The Cell stars Jennifer Lopez, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Vince Vaughn.  Remember when Jennifer Lopez was an actor?  Anyhow, she's a psychologist of some sort with a new technology that lets her enter her patients minds.  D'Onofrio, in one of his trademark insane roles, is serial killer Carl Stargher, and he is reaching the sloppy peak of his string of murders of young women.  Vince Vaughn is the detective that tracks him down, and Jennifer Lopez is going to enter his head with the tech.  But what will the twisted mind of a psychotic hold?!

The scenes in this film were very memorable when I first saw them, and they look awesome even now.  There's a lot of surreal imagery, inspired by artwork and offbeat artists.  There's a bisected horse, there's crazy costumes, there's colorful tricky cinematography, it's a insane mishmash of anything and everything in this film.  The actors back it up, and a lot of this film really works.

In terms of aging, I'd say The Cell has aged very well.  Nothing jumps out at you as bad, and in fact it's a film where the absence of cell phones isn't even noticed.  D'Onofrio really helps make the film, and damnit, why was he not in more movies?  I mean, we need to make roles specifically for actors like him.  He has maybe 5 of these awesome performances, and we needs more!

I give it a 4.