Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Ring 2


I have been revving myself up for the last week for The Ring 2 so today at work I was all ready to split early and catch the 4:00pm session. I walk over to the boss and say, 'Boss, here I am to let you know I aim to get the hell out of here at 3:45 today.' Boss make some strange sound and I walk back to my desk. I already know I'm gonna leave early, but just in case I've forgotten something, which I know I haven't, but just in case, you know, I write on a small yellow Post-It note: 'YOU ARE STAYING BACK UNTIL 5:00 TODAY, RIGHT?' and jam it against glass of COLLEAGUE's workstation. COLLEAGUE look at it squinting and start shaking her head. Then it all comes back to me. Last week we arranged to flip around so I would stay back on Tuesday this week. Ah. Well. OK. I'm a big boy, no need to throw a tantrum. I will just go to the 5:45 session.
I stayed back until 5:00, then got the hell outta there. Outside it was interesting. Daylight saving finished a couple days ago so it is much darker out there now. I threw my arms out, flapped them around a bit, enjoying the new darkness. I walked up to George Street then along to the cinema. There were a lot of people in the lines, and I gave a lot of them the Evil Eye. Goddam lines. Goddam lines of people. And what a surprise! I found myself in the line that was NOT MOVING. At the beginning I was looking at a cute Asian girl in the line next to me. (I could not take my eyes off her mouth: the small, thoughtful movements of her bottom lip as she watched the video screen showing movie previews. Ah!) A few minutes later she was buying her ticket and I was still in the same place. My head spun around a few times like Linda Blair, I stamped my feet, wobbled my head from side to side, and muttered darkly. Those mutterings seem to be getting louder. A cranky old man at 37! HA! Pretty amusing. So what. Lately if I feel cranky I don't worry about covering it up. After that I calmed down, the line moved again and I got my ticket. $7.40! SUPER BARGAIN! (Although for the past month Tuesdays have been $5.00. Bring it, punk.)
I went out to the street again and had a cigarette, read some of my book and walked back inside, got a vanilla choc-top and went to Cinema 11.
Cinema 11 does not have an enormous screen, but it does not have one of the tiny screens, either. There were a lot of people in there already and my favourite positions had gone, so I had to sit a little closer to the screen than I would usually, but it was OK. No need for tantrum, or hair-pulling.
Time for the previews. For the past six weeks or so I have been seeing the preview for War of the Worlds. I am positively VIBRATING with RABID DESIRE to see this movie. Anyway, after about half a million other boring previews the movie got started.
Maybe I revved myself up too much for Ring 2, because it really disappointed me. It was boring, the characters were dumb and annoying (Naomi Watts needs to be rescued again by David Lynch), it seemed to go on forever, it wasn't very scary, there was a dumb scene with buck deer with big antlers going nuts and ramming a car (actually, come to think of it, that was one of the highlights!), there was a lot of dumb water that wasn't scary, the sound was not used effectively (unlike in The Grudge), some of the music was OK but not loud enough, one scene was very good which was the scene of Samara running up the side of the well, I kept looking at my watch, kept rolling my eyes, shaking my head, groaning, jerking around in my seat. Did I rev myself up too much or was the movie simply average?
Well, at least it was nowhere near as lame as Seed of Chucky. *vomit*

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, the original japanese sequel pretty much sucked balls so it kind of stands to reason that the remake is going to lick even harder... the lesson? Never have faith in a sequel... especially a sequel of a remake!

Stratu said...

I haven't seen the Japanese sequel, but I heard that the US sequel wasn't even based on the Japanese sequel. But the Japanese director of the Japanese Ringu I and II directed the US sequel. If this is true, what did he think of it? Did it bother him? Maybe he just looked at all the zeroes and said, What the fuck. Cool.

Anonymous said...

mmm,

but even in the Japanese saga, the first one was the only real corker! The sequels (and prequel) were restricted to a couple of moments, but overall pretty weak... shame... i liked to be surprised by a sequel as much as the next guy!