The Ring Two

Directed by Hideo Nakata
Written by Ehren Kruger, Hiroshi Takahashi (Ring, 1998), Koji Suzuki (novel)

Before I start, let's clear up some things: Hideo Nakata is the director of the original Japanese Ring and Ring 2, as well as the writer of the original Ring 2 (but not of the first Ring), and though he did not direct the American remake of Ring, he is the director of the American version of The Ring Two (and was apparently fourth choice after Gore Verbinski, Richard Kelly, and forthcoming All Families are Psychotic director Noam Murro all Pasadena'd on the project), which is NOT a remake of the original Ring 2 (he's also been tasked to direct the American remake of the Pang Brothers' The Eye, which I find odd, as well as an American remake of the creepy early '80s The Entity, which could go either way, depending).

Glad I could clear that up for you. Though to a lesser extent than I had with Takashi Shimizu's American remake of The Grudge or George Sluizer's American remake of The Vanishing, the biggest problem I had with The Ring Two was that it unspooled very much as what it in fact was: the outsider's version of what he thinks would cater to the stereotypical American audience. You know, like when your boss buys you a heinous Cosby sweater for the office Secret Santa, or when you're driving with this girl who wants to be your girlfriend but you have no interest in her, and she pops in a tape that she "thought you would like," and it always turns out to be, like, the Cranberries or Veruca Salt or some shit, and you think to yourself, Geez, is this what people think of me?

And that's The Ring Two, in a nutshell: a tape of the Cranberries that you traded with your sister for a bag of cornnuts. Face it, people who are not you just don't get you. Period. No matter how hard they think they've studied you, memorized your past work, the best they can hope to expect is a pat on the back for the effort. More often than not, what they will in fact get is a stunned, perhaps even disgusted, "Geez, is this what people think of me?"

The movie starts how you would expect a sequel to start, with the reintroduction of that whole watch-the-creepy-video-tape-and-Samara's-gonna-kill-you-unless-you-make-a-copy-and-show-it-to-someone-within-seven-days thing but, strangely, the conceit is abandoned right away, and pretty much everything that made the first movie so creepy and weird is suddenly replaced by...I guess a different sort of creepiness. Poor Rachel (Naomi Watts) and young Aidan (creepy David Dorfman) are plagued by, in no particular order, bad dreams, spirit possession, Sissy Spacek, the undramatic deaths of a couple pointless supporting characters, lots of water, and a herd of badly CG'ed deer (wouldn't horses have made more sense, storywise?).

It's almost enough to understand Rachel's climactic supreme sacrifice at the end: poor Samara wants a mother, Rachel decides, and since there are no other viable candidates in the room, Rachel will have to do. Until you realize that it wasn't a sacrifice, but a trick - or was it? Was her trickery completely premeditated, or did she just see an eleventh-hour opportunity and take it? If her action was a simple redemption of the fact that she pretty much doomed humanity at the end of the first movie, then the question is irrelevant - live or die, she had to end the cycle. She, like you or I would, simply chose to live. But then, what's the deal with the final, symbolic act of suicide? It doesn't make sense. The pieces do not add up. This movie is crap.

Okay, so there's no "...OR IS IT !?" ending, though as Rachel tells Aidan that it's finally over, that Samara won't be coming back, I half-expected her to go on to tell him that there will not be another sequel, the well (pun intended) was dry, Dreamworks will not commit to continuing this franchise.

Huh. If you liked the first one, don't waste your time. If you didn't like the first one, don't waste your time. You're better off watching the original (that's the Japanese) Ring. But not the original Ring 2 - now, THAT movie was crap.

Glad I could clear that up for you.

Somebody please hook me up with some Lily Chou-Chou MP3s!

*Steamboy

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
Written by Sadayuki Murai, Katsuhiro Otomo

A scrappy young boy in industrial Victorian England is entrusted with an all-powerful artifact and, along with a young princess, is relentlessly pursued by mysterious MIB-types intent on possessing said artifact (which they view as the key to powering the ultimate weapon), eventually journeying far from his provincial home where he dramatically battles for control of a flying fortress and, by extension, the fate of the entire human race.

The story of which I speak is, of course, Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful 1986 fantasy adventure epic, Laputa (that's Castle in the Sky to all you Vanderbeekers out there). But, Steamboy is no slouch, either. It's gorgeous. It's just that the dork-boy in me couldn't get past the parallels. Both take place in an incredibly sumptuous Jules Verne-ish, H.G. Wells-ian world. The Scrappy Boy here is Ray Steam, who we see in an early scene beating a boy about the head with a brass pipe (now that's scrappy!). The Young Princess here is a girl named Scarlett O'Hara (no joke, and don't even get me started on the guy named Robert Stephenson), of the enigmatic O'Hara Foundation, which funds the invention by Ray's father and grandfather of the All-Powerful Artifact, the titular Steamboy, a surprisingly light iron ball that, through a combination of pure water and incredibly high pressure, provides limitless steam energy.

There are two marked ways in which Steamboy differs from Laputa: philosophy and tone. While Laputa's philosophy was limited to the decidedly Disneyesque be-nice-to-animals-and-the-environment, Steamboy is concerned with a discussion of technology itself - its purposes, the responsibility of its creators, its users. The answers, as in life, are ambiguous - it's in the questioning that humanity is found.

Fittingly, Steamboy retains an appropriately dark tone throughout. Almost the entire second act (which felt drawn out to me, and maybe this is why) takes place in the dark confines of the abovementioned fortress - all pipes and, of course, steam. The entire third act (again, a bit drawn out) is an extended action sequence where lots of people die. I mean, people died in Laputa, but never quite on-screen. Things exploded and people fell of cliffs, but you never really saw any bodies or blood. Not so here. Corpses, both innocent and guilty, bleed and fly all over the extended third act of Steamboy.

One smaller side-difference from Laputa is that, while Miyazaki's hero and heroine play Disneyesque ideals, Otomo makes the daring miscalculation (and make no mistake, it is a miscalculation, albeit a daring one) of having his female lead unrelenting in her snobbish brattiness to the very end (speaking of which, don't be fooled when the credits start rolling, as the story is very much continuing behind the silhouettes of ignorant theatergoers and, in my case, no less than three custodians who felt the need to sweep the row directly in front of me).

No written description of Steamboy could ever do it justice, as its main strengths are in its visuals and the steam-technology presented (the CG cuts, though extensive, are pretty low key until almost the very end, where the appearance of carousel horses and other carnival rides seemed designed specifically to annoy me. Well, good job). Steamboy's many cogs, wheels, zeppelins, and steam-powered suits of armor were certainly enough to make the otakus sitting in front of me cream their pants, repeatedly (is this why the custodians kept coming back?). And in the end, isn't that what a good cinematic experience is all about? And so, for this, Steamboy gets the coveted asterisk from moviesofmike. But I'm going to be watching Laputa again. Tonight.

Please to note that this film is being shown in theaters in both English and Japanese. The undubbed, subtitled Japanese cut runs roughly 26 minutes longer than the English dub, which features the voices of Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart, and Alfred Molina. While I can't personally vouch for the English version, it is possible that the edits could help with some of the pacing issues I mentioned, and I generally find dubs performed by actual actors to be more nuanced than the generally histrionic and overenunciated performances of most American voice actors. No dub, however, can solve the biggest problem of having to add extra words just so the actors have some noises to make while the character's mouths keep moving (e.g. "What have you done with my father?" invariable becomes "What have you done with my father? Tell me now! I need to know right now! Tell me, tell me what have you done with him?") Just my thoughts. Didn't see the dub, can't vouch for it. Check with your theater before leaving the house.

P.S. I get bonus points for writing this whole thing without once mentioning the word "steampunk" (ugh).

The Jacket

Directed by John Maybury
Written by Tom Bleecker (story), Marc Rocco (story), Massy Tadjedin

If you were wondering what Adrien Brody could possibly do as a followup to his sensitive portrayal of the retarded Noah Percy in The Village (and really, what normal moviegoer wouldn't be?), the answer would appear to be to star in a very, very retarded movie.

Brody plays Jack Starks, a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and probably brain damage after being shot in the head by a little kid during the first Gulf War. A few months later, he's back in the States, apparently living as some sort of drifter (this is never explained, though I guess it happens). He helps a little girl and her apparently-deranged mother start their truck. This scene is important because we meet the girl again (now Deeply Troubled) several years on in her life. We know she is Deeply Troubled because she drinks a lot, she smokes a lot, she appears to have bought all of her home furnishings from Urban Outfitters (you gotta watch out for those Urban Outfitters chicks, seriously), and she wears black nail polish. Hey, her mother wore black nail polish! Important character detail here!

Meanwhile, Jack gets falsely accused of a cop killing (Damn you, Brad Renfro!) and is sent to a mental institution where he undergoes a super-secret, radical therapy (presided over by a waxy Kris Kristofferson) involving...ahem...being pumped full of drugs, getting tied up in the titular jacket, and being locked in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Some combination of the above, along with the PTSD or the brain damage causes Jack to...ahem...travel into the future. This is never explained. I'm guessing it's the jacket, it must be some sort of a magic jacket. Otherwise, the movie would be called, say, The Drugs, or possibly The Drawer, or maybe even The Brain Damage.

So he goes into the future and...that's basically it. He's not there to clear his name, or to save anybody, or to help mankind, or anything. The fact that he learns of his own death is basically an afterthought, and the subplot involving his trying to solve his own (possible) murder sort of loses steam and is abandoned partway.

I guess in this way, it is attempting at some sort of realism, or as close to realism as you can get in a movie involving time travel. If you woke up one morning and discovered that you could travel through time, face it, you wouldn't do it to save humanity, you'd probably do it just to make out with the hot chick (here, Keira Knightley, who was always just a blonde Winona Ryder, but here is just plain Winona Ryder).

There's a lot more plot involving another inmate who tried to kill his wife and Jennifer Jason Leigh curing an autistic boy, none of which really goes anywhere, makes much sense, or is worth detailing, except...under what possible circumstance would a doctor let a patient (whom she knows that a court of law has judged to be criminally insane) out of hospital grounds, LET ALONE let wander about unsupervised, LET ALONE let him go into a stranger's house (again, unsupervised) that she knows has a kid in it, LET ALONE ask HIM if HE'S okay by HIMself, if SHE should just wait by the fekking truck?

Like I said, none of this really matters, as the focus of the movie is on the time travel, but as the focus of the movie, it here simply signifies nothing. If you saw the not-completely-dissimilar The Butterfly Effect, you saw how incredibly narcissistic and simple-minded that movie was in its judgments of which past actions effect which present person at whatever moment is most convenient to them, and have absolutely no effect on anyone (or anywhen??) else. Well, at least Ashton was trying to protect his girlfriend from becoming some cut-up four-dollar crack whore. The Jacket goes one level of narcissism further by not having any actual reason for the act other than the act itself. Yes, certain things come up, and a Signficant Letter is written (albeit on Asylum for the Criminally Insane letterhead - probably wanted to tear that off before delivering that letter there, sport), but again, mere afterthoughts. Like, not only is it narcissistic, it's like being narcissistic for narcissism's sake, which I suppose would be the very definition of narcissism (I hope no one is trying to read this review aloud).

The movie you should be watching, of course, is Twelve Monkeys, which had all manner of things this movie did not, not least of which is a sense of humor.

The 77th Annual Academy Awards

I wasn't going to comment on this year's Oscars, was just hoping that they'd be quickly forgotten in favor of all the exciting new stuff coming out this year (what were they again? I can only think of two, and neither one of them is Episode 3). But, since you asked (if you asked), here's what I think:

Just about everything about this year's ceremony was wrong.

The treatment of the nominees of the quote unquote lesser categories was reprehensible, offensive even. Yeah, tonight isn't about achievement or recognition, it's all about star power. No one cares about costume designers, make-up artists, production designers, or the people who make those little movies that no one cares about, like docs or shorts. Just give us our Tom Hankses, our Julia Robertses, our Robin Williamses, our Tom Cruises.

Here's an idea for next year's ceremony: for the Best Actor nominees, let's let the Big Stars have their triumphant walk to the stage, but make all the "lesser" actors sit together so that, on the off-chance that they win, we can toss them their Award like a bag of peanuts and let them take all of four steps to a microphone stand where they can make their speech to the back of the heads of people that we've decided are more important than they are. Let's see, figuring that that would shave about four seconds for each of the major categories, that's another, what, twenty seconds of the viewer's life that they can take back? (Assuming that none of the Big Stars win, of course.)

Or better yet, let's parade them all on stage like cattle at a 4-H auction. That way, you don't get the triumphant walk to the stage if you win, but you do get a nice loser's walk back to your empty seat when you lose. Charming. I'd like to see them do that to Tom Hanks.

There's a lot more that goes into movies than actors and directors. Yes, I know that actors and directors are the big box-office (and Nielsen rating) draws, but the Oscars aren't supposed to be like that. The Oscars are supposed to be about recognition and achievement in all the aspects of movie-making. The producers of this program, who are in the business, should know better. How could they not know that these people deserve better? How could they not know that there are actually people out there aspiring to get into the movies, NOT as actors, NOT as directors, but AS make-up artists, set designers, costume designers, sound engineers, visual effects artists, animators, documentarians? How could they pass up a once-a-year chance to actually explain what exactly a production designer does, why a cinematographer deserves an award, how the quality of sound editing can absolutely make or break a picture?

How could they not understand that in a culture so obsessed with celebrity and weekend numbers, that for many of these people, this is the one night when they get not only industry-wide, but virtually world-wide recognition for all the things that the general public, though they go by the thousands to ooh and ahh at their work, don't even consciously realize whose work they are oohing and ahhing?

This year, not only did the producers decline to educate, they all but denied that these "other" aspects even exist. This, I find unforgiveable.

I couldn't even enjoy Charlie Kaufman's much-deserved win (Eternal Sunshine was the movie of the year, as far as I'm concerned) and non-speech. No, the only purely enjoyable moment I found in Sunday's proceedings was Jorge Drexler's acceptance speech for his win for best song ("Al Otro Lado del Rio", The Motorcycle Diaries). While struggling to hear a hint of melody or rhythm in Antonio Banderas' voice underneath Carlos Santana ceaselessly being CARLOS SANTANA (TM), my head just about burst. Drexler's speech was the perfect fuck-you - to Banderas, to Santana, to Beyonce, and to all the show's producers who chose a vision of glitz over substance. I turned to my friend and said, "How cool would it be if he just finished singing, said thank you, and walked off the stage?" And just then, turning back to the TV, I watched Drexler do exactly that. Perfect.