Boys -

First of all, you gotta start talking to each other again. I don’t like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Second of all, I know you already have an assload of THE RING (american remake) reviews. But I think you need to use mine also, as a sign of gratitude toward me, the man who first told you about the japanese RINGU series and the impending remake back in July of 2000. So look at this as the highly anticipated sequel to the article “Vern Steals A Look At THE RING Part I and II!!” CLICK HERE

Of course, I got one thing wrong back then. I said it was New Line Cinema doing the remake, turned out to be Dreamworks. I think the rights might’ve been passed around though, I remember Moriarty told me at the time that he talked to somebody at New Line and they swore they were gonna re-release it and not remake it.

Anyway I was real skeptical about the remake and I wrote an open letter to New Line that started like this:

“Now listen up you sons of bitches. I hope you have sat down and thought this through, and not just at a meeting with a bunch of marketing freakos who know alot less about what people want than they think they do. If you’re gonna remake this picture DO NOT FUCK IT UP. You BETTER know what you’re doing. These movies don’t work only because they are about this curse where you watch a video and the phone rings and a week later you die. They work because of the whole creepy tone — the way the actors talk, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, the quiet pauses and subtle but eerie cine-mato-graphicry. This is some SOLID fucking direction so you can’t just go hire some music video fuckwad and tell him to run with it. ”

Well I don’t want to take too much credit, but. Well, obviously, CLEARLY, the director Mr. Gore Verbinski read my letter. If not literally sat down and read it, then he must’ve soaked it up subconsciously, through his interactions with people who interacted with people who read the letter. (people at New Line, I guess.) Or better yet, maybe he’s just a good guy, and he knew that maybe he should, like, not fuck this one up. So what’s really so great about this movie, again, is the restraint and subtlety and what not. The tone. They didn’t american it up any more than changing the setting. The feel is all RINGU and no SCREAM or BLAIR WITCH or ATTACK OF CHUCKY or any other trendy american horror.

It makes you want to have faith in hollywood when you see something like this. Sure, it’s still the old american imperialism, buying up the movie and remaking it instead of releasing it. I don’t understand why they want to do that type of shit. But for that type of shit, THE RING (american remake) is pretty great, very faithful to the spirit of the original (which to me means the movie by Hideo Nakata, even though it was based on a book and came after a mini-series).

Like the original, this is a serious horror movie. Only one or two small jokes. No wackiness. No references to horror movies, not even Bride of Frankenstein. No modern cultural references or songs to date the movie. No rock music at all! They even gave the girls in the opening private school uniforms, like the japanese girls in the original. They didn’t turn them into “goths” or anything.

It’s a little more gruesome than the japanese version, but not in a way that ruins anything. It’s very quiet and atmospheric and the photographicry is beautiful. The cursed video itself is more show offy, with some real music video images. But there are also some creepy additions to it (a pile of maggots that becomes something else), and some of the old classics straight off the Nakata shelf.

They even avoided two of my biggest movie peeves. Somehow, Verbinski kept Hans Zimmer on a leash! Most american filmatists these days, hell, most filmatists period, they think they gotta hammer you in the balls with the music. Like in that movie WINDTALKERS, poor old John Woo let Jerry Goldsmith take a huge shit all over the war scenes.

Oh that’s right, talkbackers love grammar. what I mean to say is WINDTALKERS, that movie in which John Woo allowed the shatting upon by Jerry Goldsmith…. no, that’s not right. On which a huge crap was taken upon by Jerry Goldsmith aided by John Woo, or I mean with John Woo acting as bathroom attendant, and he didn’t even tip. He meaning Jerry, not John… Oh, fuck you guys anyway. I’m writing for the other fellas.

The point is that in WINDTALKERS you have no chance to get involved in the realism of the scene because DAH DAHDAH DUUUUUHHHHHHMMMMMM… that fucker keeps telling you how triumphant everything is. I see this all the time now, they gotta tell you which parts are scary and which parts are sad and especially which parts are funny or delightful. This is real dangerous in horror movies, because they substitute loud violins for scary scenes. In THE RING (american remake) Mr. Zimmer knows how to wait his god damn turn. He throws in some music here and there but he’s mostly doing the ol’ ambient sounds, and even keeps his fuckin mouth shut long enough for there to be long scenes with no music at all, just rain pouring on the roof. ‘Cause it takes place in Seattle.

Oh yeah, and my second pet peeve which this movie triumphantly avoids. This is the only movie I can think of off the top of my head where the characters use computers realistically. Somehow, every movie director in hollywood thinks that the viewing audience has never used a computer before. They expect us not to be distracted to see a character type “cursed videotape” into the computer, and it fills up the screen with giant letters, and then it goes BLIP BLIP BLOOP and a fancy 3-D animation hurtles us through a literal information superhighway as a voice says “searching internet for cursed videotape information” and then it gives us another animation of a videotape spinning around and gives a perfect scan of a newspaper article explaining the whole history of the tape. (extreme examples: THE NET, HACKERS, COPYCAT.) In THE RING (american remake) Naomi Watts uses a search engine, and a mouse, and she clicks on underlined text, and she has to click more than once, and there are no beeps. It’s beautiful! It’s like seeing a toilet in a movie for the first time in PSYCHO.

The story is fairly close to the original. But there are plenty of changes here and there – the tape gets an origin, the backstory to the curse is a little different. It’s kind of like somebody saw the movie a while back and tried to re-write it from memory. There are some real good bits that they added. One takes place on a ferry, another involves choking. Usually I like to give things away, like the guy from Felicity is the killer in SCREAM PART 3. But these are too good to ruin. When you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These are very inspired, surreal bits good enough to have been in the original.

I still like the whole Nancy Drew mystery angle. Our heroine, this time a reporter for the Seattle PI (a real newspaper!) hears about the tape, watches it, and then spends the whole movie researching everything she can about it, following leads until she either dies or finds out What Exactly The Deal Is Here. (Note: Most modern reporters would just accept the police press release version of what happened, and wouldn’t ever find out about the tape. If she was a shitty reporter, she wouldn’t've had all this trouble.)

The structure is a little different and I think this throws the pacing off a little. I didn’t get the same death march feeling as it counted down the days until she’s supposed to die. It seemed to me like the first days passed by a little too fast, so you didn’t get the same drawn out sense of dread. On the other hand, the last day is handled real nice, and managed to surprise me even though I knew pretty much everything that was coming.

I liked it better in the japanese version that you heard just scratching over the phone. It made it more ambiguous whether it was really a curse, and made it more satisfying what she found later in that, you know, in that one place. But oh well.

Note to Seattle natives. This movie takes place in the area and you might get a few mild chuckles out of it. There is one scene where two monorails pass her, one after another. Not possible – yet! There are references to a Kirkland University. And it seems that the residents of some non-existent San Juanish island have that generic rural accent that all the country folk have in movies. Otherwise, nothing is too distracting, and they show a monorail, a bus, and a ferry – hooray for public transportation!

Anyway boys, I was real impressed with this movie, and glad that my gut feelings two years ago were wrong. If I had a scariness measuring machine, I think I would find that it was a little less scary than the original, but only by about two or three scariness measuring units. I can’t really be sure, because scariness measuring machines haven’t been invented yet, and even when they are I bet it will take a while for the prices to go down to a consumer level. Point is it’s a good picture. Now if the fuckers would just let somebody release the original on an NTSC dvd region code 1 (or better yet, 0) we can all be happy.

thanks dreamworks,

Vern

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=13472

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