What's a DVD that we have in the house, that would look great on the HDTV, and that I haven't seen yet?

That was my question for Chris last night, and he quickly picked out "The Cell."



If you enjoy seeing people suspended from the ceiling in a horizontal position, trekking across sand dunes in glamorous gowns, and watching their own intestines being twirled onto a rotisserie held up by statues of seahorses, this is the film for you.

Is it good? Well, I didn't expect it to be good. I just wanted to watch some images, and it delivered. At one point, I paused to talk to someone and happened to stop at an image of Jennifer Lopez exhaling a neat little cloud of smoke. It looked great. (And I'm not one who finds Lopez especially interesting to stare at.) The overwhelming sadism of the images -- not that smoke cloud one, but many others -- is really too much.

Perhaps I'll finish watching this thing some time, but I ended up turning it off. Oddly, it wasn't because I was so deeply offended by all the sadism. I just got bored after a while. All the images are interesting, but the story is actually rather dull. A woman is trapped somewhere, and the police need to find out where to save her life. They have the criminal and just need to extract the information. Then there's the absurdity of Jennifer Lopez being able to run around inside his dreams to try to find the answer.

UPDATE: Watched to the end the following night. The ending was very predictable, but I was disappointed by how little was discovered in the journeys into the mind of the murderer. Vince Vaughan found one little clue, then left the dream world to do ordinary police work. Jennifer Lopez then continued in the dream world doing something unrelated to saving the man's victim. There should have been a complex and amazing secret to be unraveled in the dream world, something only comprehensible inside the mind, which was intricately tied to finding the victim.