Latex Movie Review: The Cell

In the early days of MTV no one ever bothered to question who the director of the music videos were. They were just fun commercials for singles, and that was that. The change came with Bob Giraldi. He had been lucky enough to have been picked by Michael Jackson to direct the second video of Michael Jackson's Thriller album for the single Beat It. Up til then MTV had neglected to air videos by African American recording artists claiming that they genre was Rock and Roll and not Soul. Protests and bad press lead to a behind the door deal with record labels to begin airing videos by the top African American artists, and it was agreed that the first would be the second video of Jackson's Thriller album. Jackson's record label decided to give Beat It a bigger budget than the usual music video, and Jackson shopped around for a director. The initial one he picked pitched a story board where Jackson was a pirate captain aboard a ship with a scantily clad crew of hot women. The story board was submitted to MTV who then rejected it. Jackson chose a second director, Giraldi, who in turn submitted a story board about Jackson breaking up a gang fight and getting them to dance together. MTV accepted it, the video was shot, the song and album became huge hits, Michael Jackson's stardom skyrocketed, and the video went on to get major airplay everywhere. Giraldi was able to take advantage the media's intense interest in anything Michael Jackson and began promoting himself as the director of the Beat It video. This lead to other recording artists seeking him out and record labels agreeing to give him above average budgets. Geraldi went on to pick the biggest recording artists and direct them long overblown videos such as Love is a Battlefield and Hello. Inevitably this lead to Geraldi landing a job directing a real theatrical motion picture, the 1987 potboiler comedy Hiding Out. It bombed at the box office and immediately deflated his career. He would not get the opportunity to direct another movie until 2001 with the surprisingly critically acclaimed Dinner Rush.

While Giraldi had initially failed to make a dent in the movie industry, he did changed the music video industry. Having been such a high profile director, MTV and VH1 began adding directors to the cyron introducing the music videos. With directors finally getting credit, the ones responsible for the more entertaining clips began getting notoriety. Michel Gondry, David Fincher and Spike Jonze all were able to graduate to successful careers as movie directors. Tarsem Singh was a strange case. Unlike the other directors who had several popular music videos under their belts before they graduated to film, Tarsem had only one, R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion. On the strength of that single video New Line Cinema took a chance on him to direct their ultra expensive Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell. Written and produced by Mark Protosevich who's only other credit at the time was the script for Batman Triumphant, the follow up to the disaster Batman and Robin which would have starred Howard Stern as the Scarecrow but ended up never being filmed. Both New Line and Protosevich felt that Tarsem was perfect for directing the fantastical and horrific imagery the script called for even though it had been a decade since the R.E.M. video. The pay off, a very expensive Jennifer Lopez video where she does not sing.

Lopez plays Dr. Catherine Deane, a psychiatrist working for an institute that has invented pioneering technology that allows Deane to enter the mind of coma patients and attempt to cure them from within. Elsewhere a serial killer named Carl Rudolph Stargher ( Vincent D'Onofrio ) has just been tracked down by the police and during the arrest ends up injured and turned comatose. The police realize that his latest victim is still not accountable, and after looking at video tapes he keeps in his home, that he had killed his victims in a tank timed to gradually fill with water every few hours until the tank is full and the victim drowns. This gives them hours to find that tank before the last girl he kidnapped drowns. Enough of a plot device to have them convince Dr. Deane that she must enter the mind of an insane serial killer and try to extract information that will lead the police to the missing girl. Vince Vaughn plays detective Peter Novak, a character that exists mainly as a possible romantic interest for Lopez. Predictably when Dr. Deane becomes trapped inside the nightmare world of Stargher's mind with no way for the institute to get her out without burning out her brain, it is Novak who agrees to go in himself for the rescue.

The Cell offers the same sort of overblown imagery that is usually seen in music videos, only on a bigger budget. It is not really as groundbreaking as the films publicity would lead you to believe. If you watched music videos regularly in the late '80s and early to mid '90s then the world portrayed in this video will seem very familiar. Still, The Cell moves along fast enough that it is never boring. And the real world countdown and race to save a girl from a killer water tank is very effective. The Cell fails to reach the level that Inception would a decade later, but is reasonably entertaining enough to watch when nothing else is on. Although much like any dream world, the film becomes forgettable once it has been watched.

THE SCENE:
Despite the opportunity to clad Jennifer Lopez in a multitude of fetish outfits in the dreamworld, she only wears one outfit worth renting this movie for. It is a red ribbed rubber catsuit. And it is not even worn in the dreamworld. For some reason, the only way to invade the mind of others requires both participants wear the rubber catsuit while hanging from several wires and with a blanket over the face. Nice form fitting outfit though. Jennifer can first be seen wearing it 4 minutes into the movie, and again at 32 minutes, 48 minutes, 56 minutes, very briefly at 1 hour 7 minutes and 1 hour 8 minutes, at 1 hour 9 minutes, 1 hour 21 minutes, 1 hour 23 minutes, 1 hour 24 minutes, 1 hour 25 minutes and 1 hour 27 minutes. She does wear body armor beginning at 1 hour 30 minutes that looks to be made from leather, but that scene is shot through a blurry filter. The only other outfit she wears worth mentioning is a black sheer and laced dress that fits like a bodysuit with a large red metallic neck brace, the one she is usually seen wearing on publicity photos and the cover of the DVD box. There is one other fetish outfit. At 45 minutes a bound girl can be seen wearing a white latex shirt-dress that resembles a nurse uniform. It is on screen very briefly, and the way the girl is bound is disturbing enough that it is impossible to find the scene sexy.