fine whine

Here's an interesting tidbit for you: Ehren Kruger, screenwriter for the American remake of Japan's Ringu, better known as The ring, also wrote screenplays for three other movies: Scream 3, Reindeer games and Arlington road. Talk about inconsistent. Scream 3 was the necessary-but-not finish to a series that lost steam almost before ever getting any, but it was workmanlike and adequate—suitable, maybe, but nothing exceptional. Reindeer games was an overly twisty action flick that was anything but adequate, though not in a good way. Despite a prominent Ben Affleck I still wanted to like that movie, but as I saw it that just wasn't possible. I just now placed a reserve for the DVD of the director's cut, though, and I haven't completely given up hope yet. That said, I'm not exactly keeping my fingers crossed. And giving up on crossings and double-crossings all together brings us to Arlington road, by far the superior film of the three. Can three have a superior? Is it just superior or most superior? For some reason I'm thinking that superior is one of a digital relationship, but as I type this that sounds silly. Going back, far past silly and ludicrous and into serious, Arlington road is a good thriller, though the final ending drags on a bit. The action is well paced and nothing is revealed unnecessarily or too soon. It is, I will admit, a little unconventional but that wouldn't stop me from recommending it to anybody with more than a shred of intellect. So Kruger's batting .333 in my book, one hit and two misses. And then comes The ring which likely won't knock a film out of a future AFI 100 best horror films but probably should. For what I had expected to be a through-the-motions (don't-go-in-the-basement, ooh-a-scary-monster) flick, it turned out hauntingly beautiful and even pretty good (By "pretty good" I mean "I rather liked it"). Now, three weeks after watching that I have watched its Japanese predecessor (and lived to tell the tale).

Though the (film snob) buzz would lead me to believe otherwise, it wasn't really better than its progeny across the Pacific. The effects were, well, worse, though the understated faces of death was not to its detriment but actually a good thing—Verbinki and company may have taken that one further than necessary to get just a little more jump out of the audience. Understatement was the watchword for the visuals, though a lot of plot was spoken and verbally worked through, whereas Verbinski and pals left more to be seen and absorbed by the audience rather than beating them across the ears with it like a trout. Score one for the Americans. Another point for the Americans is the deeper story and reengineering of who does what—the reporter's considerably less independent (though more vulnerable) in Japanese. There are more character changes, too, with a more fleshed out son back in America. Hell, the video is only four scenes long in Ringu, none of them particularly disturbing.

On the whole it is almost as though the Japanese version is the more conventional of the two, though by conventional I am referring to the conventions of the Hollywood horror flick. Perhaps it is something of a modern-day Seven samurai (Akira Kurosawa's love letter to the American—and to some degree Italian—Western, which was remade as an American Western). To be an American with very little exposure to the Japanese language of film, I know I missed subtleties and framings that any Tamagotchi and Pokemon graduate in Osaka would immediately recognize. I think I noticed where some would be, but again I could not understand them. I have every intent to learn the written and spoken language, but to learn its cinematic equivalent could well be a tougher proposition. But if it takes watching every Godzilla film ever made (over there) I'll do it, gosh darn it.

To sum it all up, (and I know that this will get me drummed out of armchair film school) if you're going to see only one Ring, watch Verbinski's. I can't really come up with an ideal way to watch both, having done so myself. Watching Ringu first would take much of the bite out of Ring's "ending" and give away too much of the plot, but to do it in reverse, as I have done, takes too much away from the not so horrible Japanese version. To have seen Naomi Watts play the reporter first sets a standard that just can't be met by the earlier, lower budget film. Seeing the American film's video first makes the Japanese one cheesy, almost laughable in comparison. The imagery's altogether better given that they had something of a first draft to expand and extend. Yeah, the AllMovieGuide calls the shorter video "obscurely menacing" but the images that haunt me after a movie ends are the ones that I see, not the ones that menace me obscurely (see also the creepy stick figures in The Blair witch project twisting in the wind in haunting black and white). I also disagree with AMG's praise of the Kabuki stylings of Sadako, being too unnatural as to call attention to it and not just to make it frightening. Verbinski's trick photography is no better, I will concede, but it has the edge of being a little girl on screen and not whoever was used in Ringu, with the gawkishly long and skinny arms and rubber glove fingers. Maybe it's my preference for the stylized, but I still give the edge to the USA on this one and let AMG and its highfaluting opinions be damned. But this is a decision everybody needs to make for oneself, not one to be decided by some site or beret wearing film geek and then set in stone. So watch one, or both. Just not neither.

About the best thing to do, short of inducing amnesia (a la Zaphod Beeblebrox), would be to watch the two of them at the exact same time. Unfortunately that too wouldn't work well as the movies have different runtimes, and who has two TVs beside each other? Moreover the watching of a subtitled movie demands somewhat more attention than is devoted to one with understandably spoken dialogue, so one would definitely be shortchanged whether it be to a viewer transfixed by the visuals or merely a slow reader. This whole paragraph is utter nonsense, so skip it and instead rent The ring and watch it, though you might want to do it early on in the day and with other people around you. Just trust me on that.