Mojave Phone Booth (2006)
In the middle of the Mojave desert rests an abandoned phone booth, riddled with bullet holes, graffiti, its windows broken, but otherwise functioning. Its identity was born on the Internet and for years, travelers would make the trek down a lonely dirt road and camp next to the booth, in the hopes that it might suddenly ring, and they could connect with a stranger (often from another country) on the other end of the line. This is the story of four disparate people whose lives intersect with this mystical outpost, and the comfort they seek from a stranger's voice: There is Beth, a troubled woman facing dilemmas with her love-life and a recurring, baffling crime; Mary, a young South African, who is contemplating selling her body for the funds to escape her dreadful existence; Alex, a woman who is losing her lover, Glory, to the belief she is plagued by aliens, and Richard, driven into desperation by a separation from his wife, who happens upon the booth after his failed suicide attempt.
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Memorable, crazy movie
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Categorized as drama, Mojave Phone Booth is the most tragically comic film I've ever seen. A showing at the Boise International Film Festival was punctuated with loud laughter as audience members connected with the painfully funny moments of space-alien paranoia, a botched suicide, an out-of-work administrative assistant sucked in to a lucrative menage a trois, and a desperate man who breaks into his girlfriend's car and steals her stereo system (four times) in an attempt to convince her that she'll be safer living with him. It's not that people in Boise, Idaho, are weird enough to have shared similar experiences. Instead, these impossibly strange scenarios perfectly illustrate the common American phenomenon in which we long for intimacy while resisting commitment. The phone booth in the desert -- a kind of secular confessional -- gives many of these characters their only meaningful (and vulnerable) human connection. Of course, the woman on the other end -- an older, English-accented lady with a fondness for Canada -- is no better off than those she counsels. She started calling the phone booth seven years earlier, seeking to connect with someone, anyone. Instead, she discovers her calling in listening to the problems of those on the other end.
I saw this movie at the Palm Springs International Film Festival a few days ago and really enjoyed the experience. The film offered everything I hoped to enjoy during my first film fest experience. It was creative, well thought out, featured phenomenal acting and complicated characters, and it tied together the multiple stories in a very natural way. Thanks to the producer, director, and cast for a memorable experience and for taking the time to speak with the audience in more depth about their vision and the process! (Thanks also to Christine Elise McCarthy for graciously taking a picture!)
In a time where the corporations of the motion picture industry give the public rehashes of films already made, this film rises above the studio mentality and gives you something that is......original. Not only is the that, but it makes you think about the modes of communication that todays technology offer the public and how these modes have hindered true intimacy, as well as the comfortability (or lack thereof) that people have with intimacy. The stories in this film are gently insane, but only as insane as real life stories in real people's lives. The writing, is wonderful, the story is excellent, the editing is superb, and the acting is quite good.
I have been going over MPB in my mind on a fairly regular basis since I saw it at the FirstGlance Hollywood Film Fest and I again commend director/writer John Putch for really capturing in such a raw and gentle way the extremes of need and outreach. When I find myself actually believing that the guy is going to get rid of the alien bugs (on that wonderfully created zany, hopelessly neurotic woman), I know the casting and writing are doing their jobs very well. I also thought the "sane" half of the lesbian couple was amazing. Also, the scene where the real estate lie was revealed had such an unexpected punch to it. Every single actor was off the dial. Not one wrong note and hundreds of great choices. Having it on the outskirts of Vegas creates such a symbiosis between 2 emptiness-es, we realize there is nowhere to hide. We are all drowning in the wide open vacuum of our own disconnection, no matter how we try to dress it up. It is really a phenomenal indictment of what happens to the American Dreamer when the roots of the soul have atrophied and only the unnourished surface is left.