There's a video so mind searing that if you watch it you will die. It's the Star Wars Holiday Special, which I cannot in good conscience link for you here. Or you could watch The Ring, which takes seven days to kill you.

This is one of those movies you need to not know much about for maximum mind blowage, so I'm just going to say it's about some really scary business going on and it's worth a watch and sequester yourself away humming with your fingers in your ears until you see it. For god's sake don't read this!

First I want to say something that has nothing to do with the movie. I'm really getting sick of DVDs making me sit through some big long sequence before showing the disc menu. Cut it out. Yeah I know you want to be artsy but save it for the movie. That's my DVD player and when I push a button I want what I pushed to happen right now. Don't hyjack my device.
And now, The Ring.

I always feel a bit sad watching these big scare 'em movies, because as a non movie scare-able person I know I'm never receiving all their love. But even if I'm not given the jitters I can still appreciate a good spook scene. Gives me the sensation of seeing something really pretty. It has to be done just so though or I'll turn my nose right up at it like Morris the cat.

For me The Ring has a fair amount of both. There are some lovely chill scenes in the movie: down in the well pulling up a handful of hair, holding the little skeleton, the horse was jaw dropping, the scared to death people were suitably shocking, and a mother throttling her own daughter and dumping her still alive down there is pure kiddie nightmare stuff. It's a nice looking movie too, full of sad rainy day shots of the Pacific Northwest. But, there's also a lot of phones bleeding and TVs flickering and centipedes crawling out of things and all that sort of such. One starts expecting some sort of scaryness tacked onto every shot, and I think it diminishes the impact of what is at times a genuinely dark story.

A perfect example is the fake video itself. It's like an artsy French perfume commercial with random disturbing images of maggots and deformed animals spliced in. It's just pushing a little too hard.

So the movie wanted to show the tape of Samara (great name by the way) in the psycho ward and have the dad bite the bit as it were, but to set up those scenes they have the mom basically perpetrate a home invasion and chase the man around his own house screaming at him. Then the ex boyfriend shows up in there out of nowhere while the guy's just trying to electrocute himself in peace and I couldn't help but think of that Mary Tyler Moore episode where they all come in while she's taking a bath. That's the whole point of this paragraph, to remind you how incredibly funny that was. Remember when Ted came in there?

Damn this is one of those movies that I really did like but when I sit down to write about it only snotty things seem to come out. The movie did thoroughly interest me the first time I saw it. When it's fresh the mystery and story can effectively blind one to its pickable nits. It's sort of like the chicken pox - a trip for a while and then you're immune. I can enjoy a movie once just for its story, but only the telling will bring me back again and again. The second time I saw it I felt rather bludgeoned by the plot. Lines like "she was still alive" and "you weren't supposed to help her" seemed like going a step too far and explaining the joke.

I'm going to go ahead and not bellyache today about there being a kid and an ex couple as the main characters, as the movie doesn't really rub all that in my face too badly. The kid is of the troubled creepy crayon picture drawing sort who doesn't say much, and we only have to endure one brief scene of the couple fighting over why their relationship didn't work out. I can't say I found the characters in any way memorable either though. I know I never seem to care about anyone in movies but I'm really not some sort of sociopath. If anything I'm whatever the exact opposite of a sociopath is, but my life has so little commonality with something like a single mom newspaper reporter that I might as well be watching Blue Man Group. I mean I just saw this last night and I can form no image whatsoever in my mind of the movie's guy.

But again that's probably just me. I can't blame a movie for not catering its characters for shut-ins, 'cause we don't so much go to movies. I don't know what they could have reasonably done to make the characters more interesting to me other than making them killer clowns or something, which probably would have compromised the story somewhat.

Not going to talk about the Japanese movie here. I have seen it, and yes believe it or not I have all sorts of big important comparing and contrasting opinions about it. But that's for another day.