Roll-M: Movie Reviews

by Susan Sackett

The Ring (starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox, David Dorfman; written by Ehren Kruger.  Based on the novel by Koji Suzuki; directed by Gore Verbinski; Rated PG-13).

There are some downright scary moments in The Ring (a remake of a recent Japanese film, Ringu), but most of this movie is just plain silliness.  The horror film’s plot is promising: a mysterious video casts a spell of doom on anyone who watches it.  That’s basically it.  A reporter (Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts) investigates what happened to her kid’s babysitter, who died right after watching the video.  Naturally, she has to watch it to see what’s on the tape (which plays like a surrealistic student film project).  Right on cue, as she finishes viewing it, the telephone rings, signaling the bad news that she now has seven days to live. (The same thing has happened to all the video’s viewers.)

With time running out as the onscreen countdown ticks off her remaining days, pieces of the puzzle begin to fall neatly into place, inviting the audience to play detective along with Watts’ character.  So far, so good.  But somewhere in the last act, the story loses its cohesiveness and eventually dissolves into nonsense that is totally untenable.  And, of course, there is the traditional horror genre false ending.  “It ain’t over, folks!  Gotcha!”  Ho hum. Admittedly, the resolution is totally unanticipated, but it’s also unbelievable as well as ambiguous.  When a story creates its own world with its own set of physical laws, it must be true to those laws for it to succeed.  This one just tosses in an off-the-wall ending, and it doesn’t work.

Rated 2/5

Punch-Drunk Love (starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman; written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; rated R).     I’ve got a confession to make.  I had never seen an Adam Sandler movie until now.  My impression of him, from the few glimpses I’d seen of trailers from his films, was that he is the Jerry Lewis of our time – but that even the French would find him offensive. So I finally bit the bullet and went to see Punch-Drunk Love, curious to learn what so many critics were raving about.  And I learned something:  This Sandler fellow isn’t so bad.  In Punch-Drunk Love, as weird as a movie can be, he’s a likeable loser, cuddly almost… except when he’s putting his fist through a wall.  Okay, so his character, Barry Egan, is a bit bi-polar.  But Sandler, in his “dramatic” debut, does a decent job. No, the problem is not with Sandler.  It’s with the wacky story line.  Is Fall the silly season?  Or are movies just getting stranger these days?  This picture is quirky as can be, from the strange opening car crash and harmonium drop-off scene without explanation, to his shopping for pudding to collect frequent flyer mileage when he doesn’t even fly, to his “office” in a storage rental facility, to his fleeing hired thugs who are out to get him when he gets involved with a crooked phone sex company, and other bizarre episodes that barely add up to a cohesive whole.

Yet there is always something happening onscreen that holds your attention.  Perhaps it’s because you keep waiting for a payoff, something that will explain what makes Barry Egan tick.  This never happens.  Barry is Barry; what you see is what you get.  And Sandler fans who can’t get enough of their man will definitely eat this up like so much chocolate pudding.

Rated 3/5