Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

05 Apr 2003, 19:12 p.m.

Divine Intervention: I liked it even less than Leonard did.…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Divine Intervention: I liked it even less than Leonard did. If you have the chance to either see Divine Intervention for free or see Phone Booth for money, I say see Phone Booth. And this is even though Phone Booth wasn't very good. A Salon critic (registration required, or watch an ad):

I guess this won't matter to people who don't live in New York or who never go there, but the "Manhattan block" where most of "Phone Booth" is set is thoroughly bogus. (It was shot in downtown Los Angeles, and I kept hoping that in some shot they'd forget to mask the palm trees.) More to the point, it's bogus in a way that appeals to the audience's worst prejudices about what urban life is really like, much as "Falling Down," Schumacher's white-man-in-multiculti-L.A. nightmare, did. "Phone Booth" is supposed to take place at 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue, in actual fact a mixed-to-middle-class neighborhood of placid shops, restaurants and condo towers. Here, though, it's a desolate zone of sex shops, skanky hookers and conniving street merchants, where a brutal midday brawl involving five people and a baseball bat attracts almost no attention. This was made by people whose ideas about New York come, at best, from "Taxi Driver" and "Bonfire of the Vanities," if not from mid-'70s Charles Bronson movies.