103: The Box with Jude Ellison Doyle
Phil and Emily are joined by writer Jude Ellison Doyle to open up Richard Kelly's The Box (2009). Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a cash-strapped 1976 couple handed a simple, horrible deal by a scarred stranger (Frank Langella): press the button on the box, collect a million dollars, and somebody you don't know dies. What starts as a Twilight Zone morality test (via Richard Matheson's "Button, Button") spirals into NASA, Mars, and a very literary sense of damnation.
The three dig into Kelly's whole deranged sensibility after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, whether he's fully in on his own material, how he writes women, and why a studio thriller this strange even got made. There's a real case here for reading The Box as a big, glossy panic attack about being broke in America. Heady, funny, and a little unhinged same as the movie.
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