So, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s new movie, The Box, comes out November 6, and is currently the beneficiary of a crazy-expensive promo campaign. It looks a little more action-oriented than his previous stuff, but otherwise appropriately austere and slightly off-kilter and generally, erm, Kelly-esque. (Disclosure: I thought Donnie Darko was pretty OK, but I don’t understand all the cult-worship hoopla – its murky surrealism and fractured narrative remind me a bit of Gregg Araki, a filmmaker whose work I actively loathe – and I didn’t see Southland Tales.) But you’ve got to wonder, how is The Box going to take a Richard Matheson short story that barely stretched out to fill a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone, and fill a couple of hours without a ton of incidental filler? Matheson’s “Button, Button” is a psychologically gripping update of the classic horror tale “The Monkey’s Paw,” which is surely one of the two or three best examples of macabre irony ever handed down. The Twilight Zone episode of the same name changes Matheson’s ending just a bit – who knows why, the original is every inch the sort of perfectly appropriate twist that defines the Zone‘s vibe – and The Box will necessarily change it further, for length and format and modernity and demographics and whatever the hell else.
My point is, in the vast majority of cases, each step taken away from the original creative work, be it a story, a song or a screenplay, seems to lessen the intent and impact of the original. And Kelly, whose Southland Tales tanked, probably labored under much closer studio scrutiny than he’s been used to. Maybe the movie will be great; Kelly is a gifted filmmaker. But the odds are stacked against it, and those computer-altered shots of Frank Langella’s face don’t freakin’ help. (Am I the only one who gets a weirdly cross-referential Vanilla Sky vibe from the trailer?) If both the Twilight Zone episode and Matheson’s story are unfamiliar to you, the simple, universal idea behind The Box will likely grab your attention. But, you know, seriously – seek out Matheson’s original vision of how that idea plays out.
Almost completely unrelated anecdote: On one of our first dates, my wife and I were talking film, and after a lull in the conversation, she asked me, “have you seen The Hole?” I immediately responded, “are you coming on to me?” She thought that was some extremely funny shite. Yeah, we were made for each other.
