THE CELL
The Cell has got to be one of the absolute strangest mainstream movies out there. Jennifer Lopez is a psychologist who enters her patients' minds to communicate with them in a dreamscape. Vince Vaughn is an FBI agent who asks Lopez to enter the mind of a serial killer, Vincent D’Onorfio, to help locate the last person he kidnapped. This leads to, amongst other things, us seeing a horse be sliced up like bread but not in a gruesome bloody way but in a way where we can see its heart beating and all of the insides of the horse are showcased like in a children’s science book showing how bodies work.
This movie was in cinemas at the same time as Bring It On, Jim Carrey was in the middle of promotion for his upcoming Grinch movie, people were still yukking it up over Big Momma’s House and then in this movie Vincent D’Whathisface's back is pierced with rings that allows him to hook himself to chains that hang from the ceiling so he can hang there naked and jack off above a lifeless corpse, his skin stretched, while watching a video of his victim drown. And this made more money than Shanghai Noon.
Jennifer Lopez is great. In a lot of stuff. Not really in this. Vince Vaughn is great. In not as much stuff as Jennifer Lopez is. Also not in this. J-Lo plays Dr. Deane who enters people’s minds using a “Neurological Cartography and Synaptic Transfer System.” She’s in their dreamworld and communicates with them in there. All of the dream spaces in this movie look like music videos from the early 2000s. Which makes sense, the director Tarsem Singh started his career making music videos. He did the Losing My Religion video for R.E.M. Probably chatting to Michael Stipe on set, the whole time daydreaming about making a movie where he dissects a horse.
Where would I fit into The Cell? It’s hard to imagine myself getting involved with the FBI on either side of this case, or getting to work as any kind of doctor, or appear as an image in somebody’s nightmare realm that looks like Creed’s With Arms Wide Open. But, there’s a bit of technology in this movie, and I’ve worked in IT before, and this sort of technology would need somebody to assist in fixing it occasionally.
IF I WERE IN ‘THE CELL’ I WOULD: MAKE $26 AN HOUR AND WORK THERE FOR ANOTHER THREE YEARS AND ABSOLUTELY NOT FIND OUT ABOUT THE SERIAL KILLER THING UNTIL SIX YEARS AFTER I LEAVE WHEN SOMEBODY ASKS ME ABOUT IT AND I SAY “WHAT? SERIOUSLY? MAN, I HAD NO IDEA.”
