Perhaps I watch too much TV but here are some more from the past.
Dark Skies (1996)
Noah’s Castle (1979)
Category Archives: Media
Some of our recent viewings
Headhunters (2011)
Utopia (2014)
A single man (2009)
TV
Not technically a classic as such but it will be with time… Fargo.
Fargo (2014)
An old tv series…(update Oct 2014: I watched the first 3 episodes of Dark Skies via Amazon Prime subscription service. Then all of a sudden the series was no longer available – not for free and not to pay for. No idea why. I have since talked to another who has experienced the same thing with other shows. Screw you Amazon.)
Dark Skies (1996)
Journalists and Spies
A couple from ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976) staring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman…
And again with ‘Person of Interest’ (season 2, episode 22, 2014) – where even in today’s world of mobile phones the pay phone plays an integral part in the plot (and pay phones in Manhattan are guarded by g-men)…
Film and tv
I hadn’t realised that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) involved using a phone box as a time machine. More recent tv has a phone being used as … a phone, in True Detective:
An old one from the X-files (‘Pusher’, Season 2):
Classic tv
The scene itself might not be classic but the series certainly is. Here is one scene from ‘The X Files’, an episode from season 2 called ‘F.Emasculata’:
(must try to get with Scully…)
Phone box in film and ficton
Just saw ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’. Fabulous movie by one of my favourite directors. I really do love Wes Anderson’s way of looking at the world. Anyway there is a lovely shot of a telephone box on stilts, pained with black and yellow zig-zags, in the middle of a snow covered field.
I am currently reading Morrissey’s ‘Autobiogrpahy’ and enjoying it. He has a very descriptive, evocative prose style. p. 179 says…”The realities of each northern day at the turn of the 1980s played out against a hardened backdrop in late repentance, because the north is a separate country – one of wild night landscapes of affectionate affliction. There are no known technological links apart from the telephone box on the corner, and this can always be relied upon to be out of order.”
Murder in a phone box
Spoiler alert if you have seen ‘Stoker’. (The second shot stars the great Australian actress Jackie Weaver.)
TV
Here is one from the third series of Mad Men 3 – we are a little behind in watching our box sets…
and some more…
Ok so I understand why I see phone boxes in older tv shows and films, but they are still a feature in many current plots such as The Blacklist (USA), The Code (Australia) and Being Human (USA). You’d be forgiven for thinking that the popularity of the mobile phone would mean that the phone box would disappear from many cultural products, but not so.
The Blacklist (S2)
The Code
Being Human (USA, S3)
The X-Files – The Amazing Maleeni
The X-Files – Trevor
The X-Files – Roadrunners
The X-Files – Surekill
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Posted in Comment, Media
Tagged sci-fi, television, UK, USA