phone booth | the m0vie blog

Negotiating Potential Hazards: The Art of Movie Negotiation…

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Darren

I’m kinda looking forward to Man on a Ledge, if only because it looks like the sort of high-concept thriller that could be fascinating viewing – I’m hoping for something similar to Phone Booth or Buried or other movies that take a fairly simple situation and centre a thriller around it. I’m a sucker for a good negotiation thriller. There’s something about that sort of film that just intrigues me. Whether it’s a hostage situation, a botched bank robbery or something else entirely, I think that those kinds of movies that manages to combine large-scale epic drama with a more intimate personal conflict. I think that’s a dynamic that’s somewhat hard to mess up, there’s just something inherently compelling about such a small-scale interaction with such large-scale consequences that it’s very hard not to get sucked up in the drama of it all.

High stakes game...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: al pacino, Chris Sarandon, Clarice Starling, Dog Day Afternoon, elizabeth banks, Man on a Ledge, Negotiator, new york, New York City, phone booth, Sam Worthington, samuel l. jackson, Sidney Lumet, Taking of Pelham 123 | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Phone Booth

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Darren

Phone Booth is proof that the high-concept thriller isn’t quite dead yet. A concept that had been floating around Hollywood for decades (with the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, lined up to direct at one point), it seemed that – with the decline of the phone booth and the rise of mobile phones – perhaps the window in which to tell the tale might be closing. Of all the directors to bring the tale to the screen, I don’t think I ever would have expected Joel Schumacher to make one of the most intense and superbly intimate little thrillers ever written to the screen.

There's a lot on the line...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: alfred hitchcock, colin farrell, film, joel schumacher, Katie Holmes, kiefer sutherland, Movies, non-review review, phone booth, phone booth (film), phone booth (movie), Radha Mitchell, review, Woody Allen | 3 Comments »

My Top 50 Movies of the Decade…

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Darren

Alright here it is, my top fifty films of the decade. I’ve decided to stop complaining about Donal Clarke’s list in the Irish Times and just let rip myself. There’s more than a few crazy choices down there, but – after a week in the works – I’m happy with it. I doubt that a lot of other people will be.