One view of the new film:  Cellular

Cellular , the new movie directed by David Ellis is a delight.    It stars a newcomer (to me at least) named Chris Evans, the established actress Kim Basinger, and the incomparable William H. Macy.   I am particularly fond of films which transcend the genres of film.   This is a thriller, something of a love story, and also a film with some delightful comic lines and sight gags.   (My personal favorite involves the goldfish in the Ziploc bag, but you may find others.)  

This film made me think about a unifying principal of social evaluation.   I wonder if it could be said that our cultural eras are defined by the tools we use.   I think of the revolutionary war as the era of the musket and the fife and drum.   I think of the old west as the era of the six-gun and the horse.   Could we agree that the twenties might have been the era of the jazz piano and the radio?   Because my father built a house, with the help of my mother and even me, in the fifties, I think of the fifties as the age of the hammer and the saw—and if you think of all the homebuilding that went on at that time, those are likely symbolic tools for that age.  

This is the age of   the car and the cell phone.   Especially the car, if your life is set in Los Angeles as this film is.  

And this movie is all about the cell phone and the car.   Accordingly, I think that it is a profoundly symbolic movie about our age.  

A woman is brutally kidnapped from her home.   For reasons that are unclear for several reels, she is spirited away to a strange house and thrown into the attic.   Her hopes soar for a moment when she spies an old-fashioned wall phone on the wall.   (Who keeps a telephone in her attic , anyway?   We are asked to accept this at face value, and we do, thinking that perhaps the previous owner was a compulsive housecleaner and communicator, never allowing a phone call to be missed, even when she was storing old furniture in the attic.   In a sense the previous owner might have been the spiritual precursor of today's cell phone addicts, never content to be out of touch.   But, I digress.)   Her hopes are shattered when the phone is—the kidnapper rips it from the wall throws in on the floor and stomps it into fibreoptic fragments.  

This film is about personal inventiveness, energy and heroism.   The kidnapped woman patches together the telephone enough to send out a dialing signal and reaches a hunky young lad at Venice Beach.   And the story unfolds as she tries to convince him of her predicament and talk him into helping her to freedom.  

The young rescuer uses (and destroys) about $300,000.00 in automobiles which he puts to all manner of odd purposes.   Cars are symbols of sex, influence, personal style,   and brute force.   Cars are thrust into lines of traffic, dividing medians, oncoming traffic, and, almost, into an electronics store.   It is at that moment that the two tools, the car and the phone, become as one.  

This is another movie about icons of popular culture, in this case not so much sending them up, but pummeling them into the writer's purpose and using them to shape story line, plot, and character.   It is a finely directed piece, sure to appeal to anyone who wants to see an interesting mixture of thriller, action film, and comedy.  

One final note:   Do not come late for this movie.   If you forget your popcorn, do without.   You do not want to miss even the first forty-five seconds of Cellular.

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The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City