Freddy vs. Jason, Jason X, The Ring, and more!

Freddy vs. Jason - generally entertaining, tho Elvis Mitchell in the NYT is right in noting that the middle bit is dull. A lot of time is spent running around with the kids and it's not all that great. Also, the Destiny's Child chick is awful, sucks some fetid, smelly ass. On the plus side, the movie top loads its silicone tits, so you get hot juggery early on. Directed by The Bride with White Hair's Ronnie Yu, it's about as good as his Bride of Chucky, which is to say not quite as good as TBWWH, but still pretty hot. FvJ, however, does not feature the most gorgeous, amazingly hot woman ever to walk the face of the earth - Jennifer Tilly - who was typically brilliant if not particularly naked in Bride of Chucky. Eh, what can you do.

Jason X is Jason in space and oh my god does it suck. It has the production values of Emmanuelle in Space and none of the naked Krista "credited as Busty Woman in Elevator in Liar Liar, also featuring the delightful Jennifer Tilly" Allen. The film has a short cameo by David Cronenberg, and he does die violently, so that's a plus. There's also a cute scene involving virtual reality and a couple of topless campers (one with an oddly mannish voice) getting beaten to death by sleeping bag. Otherwise, titless shit! The DVD has a short history of the Friday the 13th series, explaining that the whole series started as a shitty Halloween ripoff and just kept limping along from there. The idea of the hockey masked killer didn't even show up until the third flick.

Ugh, counting FvJ, I've seen 3 F13 movies. The first one, which is unbearably dull (and I like fucking Tarkovsky's Solaris and would blow Stanley Kubrick if he weren't, you know, dead), is fucking horrible, not at all scary, and pales (pales! I say!) in comparison to Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, two contemporary cut em ups. Jason X is just fucking awful, and FvJ is pretty decent. Fucking Friday the 13th. The TV series was better than this shit.

Oh, at the showing of FvJ, I got to see a bunch of horror-themed trailers. I saw the trailer for the Michael Bay-produced remake of Texas Chainsaw, which looks slick and has Lee Ermey in the "Look what your brother did to the door!" role. I'll probably see that. I also saw a trailer for a film called Underworld, which looks to be a movie about Matrix fighting between vampires and werewolves (there wolves! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha), which looked pretty and pretty fucking retarded. I'll probably see that shit, too.

So then there's also The Ring, which is a remake of a Japanese horror flick called Ringu. The Ring was pretty popular, and it's not a bad film. Website about all them fucking ring shits. Anyway, Naomi Watts is totally hysterical throughout the movie, which makes one think of Lost High...I mean Mulholland Drive, which is a better film, not exclusively but certainly partially due to Ms. Watts' angry, depressed, violent and, as a result of these emotions, extremely hot masturbation sequence. Anyway, it's pretty creepy, until the big twist and resolution, which is awful and apparently a concession to the novel that the movies are based on.

Ok, I only know this from visiting the website, and these things do spoil the movie, so read on at your own risk. So the idea behind the ring is that you watch a videotape and then you die. First of all, this shit is going to be outdated just as soon as fucking recordable dvds or whatever digital (doo doo do) technology comes about, but anyway. So as they reveal in the movie, the tape is the psychic death cry of this poor girl who got thrown down a well to die but didn't die and instead got pissed off. So the big twist to the movie is that the girl's actually evil, and when the protagonists help her out, she gets more powerful and that's bad. That's the fucking twist.

Now, the movie's pretty good up until this point, creepy and evocative. Unlike Mulholland Drive, the movie has to fucking make sense (fucking split infinitive), so they give this backstory of the girl in the well. Here's where the movie starts to fall apart, cos it's no longer mysterious and ooky, it's specific and goofy. But anyway, in The Ring, Naomi Watts figures out that the way to keep from dying once seeing the film is to - get this - copy the videotape.

So the movie ends with her desperately getting her Sixth Senselike (and therefore Danny from The Shining-derivative) to copy a fucking videotape. This is utterly retarded, and is, according to the above-linked website, explained thus:

So the videotape is really a virus, which is attempting to infect the viewer with a disease that will create a human form for the evil wet bitch to live in. And since viruses have to survive, if you copy the tape, the virus recognizes this spread as beneficial to its survival and doesn't kill you. Now, this kind of science makes sense only if you a-are a creation scientist, or b-play a whole lotta Japanese RPGs. Which is to say, it's complete bullshit and really fucking stupid. It's like Midichlorians in Star Wars, tossing pseudoscience onto a completely unscientific concept to give it a kind of logical drag (as in queen). BULLSHIT! But the movie's pretty good on the whole, really spooky, and Brian Cox is great and the horses are haunting.

So the cd player the other day started playing something I didn't recognize. I started getting into it and suddenly realized that I was listening to Air's 10000 Hz Legend. This prompted me to give the disc another shot, and I've decided that I now like the record.

So I downloaded their most recent deal, City Reading - Tre Storie Western with Alessandro Baricco. Here's the concept - Alessandro Baricco wrote three short stories which are westerns, and he reads them over Air's music. The stories, translated here, are nice and the music, being Air, is well-suited to soundtrack music. A very nice little record.

Oh, and I want a copy of the Steak n Shake photo and I'm disappointed that "St. Louis #2" didn't make the cut.

Posted by mattb at August 25, 2003 11:39 PM