Richard Kelly's 'The Box' trailer..

Basq · 25-06-2009 6:03pm #1

Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger, delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. But, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world; someone they don't know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity.

Well.. it certainly looks better than 'Southland Tales'.

It actually looks like it could be a well constructed little thriller - well, apart from the usual revealing faaaar too much in the trailer.

Looks like it'll be released here in December.

Download here (High Quality Quicktime - 66MB)

johnny_ultimate · 25-06-2009 6:37pm

Trailer makes it look very cheesy, and don't know if Kelly is reliable after the Southland fiasco. Cameron Diaz's accent is pretty awful too!

But Win Butler (Arcade Fire) and Owen Pallett (the brilliant Final Fantasy) are involved with the soundtrack, which means I'll probably be going to see it! And I do love the concept of mystery boxes with obtuse rules.

Basq · 25-06-2009 8:35pm

Forgot Win was involved in the soundtrack.

Could be fantastic!

jill_valentine · 26-06-2009 2:13am

Win & Régine - much as I do love them so - are kind of unknown quantities, scorewise, there is another eight people in the band of theirs, after all. Owen Pallett, on the other hand, has no such problem. They've done 80 minutes, which is just comfortably album sized, too.

Everything I've heard about the score gets me giddier about it, and I'm madly curious to hear what Arcade Fire think the 70s sounded like. On the other hand...

Everything I've seen and heard about the film itself makes me cringe. The trailer is actually alright, but the script is terrible.

For example (only mild spoilers):

Basically, one of the characters sits down and reads No Exit. And that's in the script. All of No Exit, is in the script, as the character reads it.

I eagerly look forward to finding out whether he's actually included it in it's entirety, as the script suggests, or whether he'll take fifteen minutes or so to show us James Marsden quietly reading it at a table in a library while all the other bat**** lunacy happens around him.

Surreal.

What I love is that, while he wants us to know that he knows what No Exit is, at the same time, he doesn't trust us to have read it ourselves. So he lays it out there, to help us keep up. Generous of him.

And that's not even the most ridiculously incongruous element of it.

jill_valentine · 23-07-2009 10:57pm

New trailer to surface over the next few days at Comic Con, along with the first airing of some of Win, Régine and Owen's score.

Sleazus · 24-07-2009 10:33am

What really worries me is that the movie looks to be full of all manner of crazy running around and conspiracy-orientated bullplop while the central issue of the whole short story/Twilight Zone episode is: would you do something that would kill someone you don't know if it gave you loads of money?

That's a great concept and an interesting question - but the trailer (and possibly the movie) seems to have decided to run around and start chasing things and do everything except wonder whether these two people will push the button.

jill_valentine · 24-07-2009 12:39pm

Definitely. The button is just sort of used as a springboard. Kelly goes to great pains to give the box and the characters a backstory, and it all just seems like a silly thing to do with such a tidy little moral dilemma.

speedboatchase · 24-07-2009 3:15pm

How is it even a dilemma? I'd push the button straight away

jill_valentine · 25-07-2009 3:16am

Supposedly Diaz blew the whole movie's twist at the press conference at Comic Con.

Swish.

jill_valentine · 09-10-2009 11:38pm

The website for this has gone live, looks pretty cool. You can also get your ears around the first bit of the score, which is quite lovingly Twilight Zone-y.

http://thebox-movie.warnerbros.com/