One of our recent date night movies was RINGU (1998), the Japanese movie Americanized into THE RING. A reporter investigating a teenage relative’s death learns of a crazy legend that an accursed videotape kills people a week after they watch it. Hmm, wouldn’t this make a great article? Maybe she should watch the tape herself —though in fairness, the tape seems draw people’s attention magically so it’s not the reporter being an idiot.
This and the American version stick pretty close to the same story but this one struck me as more rational in its explanation (revenge-curse of murderered psychic) and a different method of beating the curse. Well worth seeing in any case — but man, it’s startling to realize how much video has changed in the past 25 years. “Frolic in brine, goblins be thine.”
It took a few weeks but I eventually rewatched THE RING (2002) which stars Naomi Watts as the reporter struggling to break the curse before she, her ex and their son buy the farm. This one amps up the random weirdness to about 11 and makes the murdered girl more sinner than sinned against (“My wife was never supposed to have a baby.”); recovering her body apparently just liberates her to wreak even more havoc. Still, the movie works very well even with the original fresh in my mind — how often does it happen that the foreign film and the remake are both good? “She said she didn’t have enough time — good night, Rachel.”
SHADOW ON THE CLOUDS (2020) stars Chloe Grace Moretz as a WAF commandeering space on a military plane for herself and her top secret passage. This leaves her having to contend with the crew’s leering sexism plus the presence of a gremlin ripping off the engines. Outside of one massively ridiculous moment, this is a solid nail-biter; I’d assume it’s a remake of Twlight Zone‘s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” but these days I’d expect more Easter eggs if that were so (e.g., a Captain Serling flying the plane or the like). “Well, everything’s eventually going to break.”
EL CONDE (2023) is a Chilean black comedy in which infamous dictator General Pinochet turns out to be a 200-year-old vampire growing tired of unlife; he’s ready to cash in his chips but his flesh-and-blood kind want to learn where his hidden wealth is hidden first (it reminds me of the scheming unleashed by The Death of Stalin). Will Pinochet’s lust for a nun with a hidden agenda turn him around? And what role does Margaret Thatcher play in all this? I certainly enjoyed it but I’m curious what Chileans made of it (I’m sure they enjoyed skewering Thatcher, who supported Pinochet after he helped out the UK in the Falklands War). “It’s said that once one samples the still-palpitating muscle of a heart, it’s hard to go back to being normal.”
The horror in MATILDA (2022) is the more mundane one that the eponymous protagonist has utterly awful parents — uncaring, uninterested, unable to remember they have a daughter and not a son — which made me wonder if this film (based on the stage musical version of the Roald Dahl book) would piss me off more than please me. Once Matilda (Alisha Weir) enters the oppressive school of Miss Trunchbull (Emma Thompson, unrecognizable under heavy makeup), she has no qualms about fighting back against the oppressor and, as the bookish girl puts it, changing the ending of the story. Enjoyable overall but the parents are way hard to take (and get off surprisingly lightly).“A storm can begin with the flap of a wing/The tiniest mite packs the mightiest sting.”
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