Hacker Cinema
Phone Booth
2003 · Film · 81 min
Directed by Joel Schumacher
A slick New York publicist who picks up a ringing receiver in a phone booth is told that if he hangs up, he'll be killed... and the little red light from a laser rifle sight is proof that the caller isn't kidding.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Definitely one of the downsides of aging is the shock of realizing that movies that you vaguely remember as being fairly new are now old. (I was expecting a movie from the '40s, not 2003.)
Also, to save a click, the movie is Phone Booth.
Haha a lot like the flick where the guy is trapped in a phone booth for the entire movie.
Two films that got that right, in a creative and almost realistic way, are Cellular and Phone Booth. The exceptions that proof the rule?
i always appreciate a bone collector reference. what a ridiculous silly amazing movie.
for me the quintessential example is "Phone Booth." starring Kiefer Sutherland, you say? i wonder what role he plays.
i think the movie "Seven" (Se7en) managed to keep the surprise bad guy out of the trailer and unbilled until the end credits. that was badass.
I think the movie was Phone Booth that begins with the line
"A ringing phone demands to be answered"
Technology projects a form of authority (disconnected from any real power) in the same way that written words were synonymous to truth for illiterate 13th century peasants.
To follow your logic, which I am not criticising as it's a valid approach given how dysfunctional cellphones are as trustable systems, I would say it's better not to have a phone. But there's the road to living in a woodland shack and eating spider and squirrel broth.
> Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan.
I don't know, I might. You don't even see Finch for half the film, only hear him, and the villain left an impression on me not unlike Kiefer Sutherland's villain in Phone Booth (an otherwise unremarkable film). I can't think of another villain role that Robin Williams performed, probably because nobody was brave enough to take that kind of risk with a heavyweight positive actor -- Insomnia came out a few years after Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society, which helped establish his mastery of drama, but nobody wanted to make him the bad guy. Nolan did, and it was very satisfying to watch.
(I take that back, One Hour Photo was great, too. I knew I was forgetting one.)