Ringu is a lot like The Ring. They're both based on a book, but the Japanese version invented some plot points which The Ring kept. The US Ring also nabbed some color choices, set designs, and camera setups from Ringu. Ringu focuses more on the supposed psychic powers of the girl and her parents. In fact, whereas the spooky backstory of Ringu deals largely with psychic powers, the US Ring jettisons most of this, its only concession to the possibility of ESP a semi-psychic little kid a la The Sixth Sense, itself a one note ripoff of The Shining. Ringu has a college professor who has some psychic sensibility and who boasts of his ESP awareness. Which is fucking retarded, of course, but hey. The American film, since it dumps most of the Japanese backstory, instead invents an elaborate tale of child abuse to fill out the story of the evil videotape. What this says about American psychology is left as an exercise for the reader. I offer only this: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Blue Crush is a cool surfing movie. Man, that surfing looks cool. Oh, and there's an apple used by a 14 year old for smoking herb. And that surfing looks great. Nowhere does the movie use the Beach Boys song "Little Surfer Girl," but I can excuse that. Nice surfing scenes.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - Not as good as the first, very different in tone. It's a lot more of a comedy, this one. Dennis Hopper is the uncle of two of the kids from the first film, and he's out for justice, which means that, once he finds the killers, he buys a few chainsaws, puts on an ammo belt holding extra chains, and goes after the cannibal clan. Some notable points - the opening kill is of two yuppie dudes drinking and shooting out road signs as they speed down the highway in a convertable with the license plate "FAH Q." This is my favorite joke in the movie. The main thematic advancement over part 1 has Leatherface falling in love with the female victim. He performs a perverse little courtship ritual with her which is quite amusing - he cuts off the face of her coworker, makes her wear his face and cowboy hat as they line dance. This film is probably the finest Golan-Globus film I've ever seen, but I think that I've only ever seen other Golan-Globus films on MST3K. Anyway, TCM2 was directed by Tobe Hooper, is pretty good, but not as good as the original, which is a very different type of film - much scarier.
The Kid Stays in the Picture - Robert Evans produced a bunch of films for Paramount in the 70's, including Love Story, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Godfather. Eventually got busted for coke, had some hard times, came back to film production to a mixed record (Sliver and Jade are two of his), wrote a book that people found entertaining, and then they went and made a documentary-ish film out of it. The thing is essentially Evans reading his book while slightly animated still pictures move across the screen. It's basically a Flash movie. Very much like those Salon tv commercials back in the day, where they used pictures of famous people and scooted them around the screen. Howard Stern was one of them. Anyway, shitty film in the "film" sense of the word, but Evans has enough charm to make it entertaining. His book is probably better. Best is probably the audiobook reading he did of it, which was supposed to be quite popular in certain circles.
Beyond the Mat - I had thought this was a WWF-approved wankfest and so avoided it, but now that I've seen it I know it's not and it's pretty good. Well, in the "film" sense, it's kinda shitty and has this retarded 1st person perspective from the filmmaker's POV...."Gee, I loved wrestling as a kid and I love it today, let's all go watch this film I make about it!" Not surprisingly, El Douchebag here is a writer. Anyway, the film transcends this by virtue of the wacky characters in wrestling. By far the best is the crack-addicted Jake The Snake who has a tearful (for the audience and the participants) reunion with his daughter on screen, from which he recovers by...you guessed it...smoking crack! Intriguing guy.
Posted by mattb at September 02, 2003 04:07 AM