Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/02/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)

Cast: Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rikiya Otaka, Miki Nakatani, Yuko Takeuchi, Hitomi Sato, Daisuke Ban, Rie Ino, Masako, Yoichi Numata, Yutaka Matsushige, Katsumi Muramatsu. Screenplay: Hiroshi Takahashi, based on a novel by Koji Suzuki. Cinematography: Jun'ichiro Hayashi. Production design: Iwao Saito. Film editing: Noboyuki Takahashi. Music: Kenji Kawai.

Hideo Nakata's Ring is a film with nicely creepy images and a neat premise that imbues modern technology with ancient dread: an ordinary and (at the time) familiar item like a videocassette that carries a deadly curse giving its victim a few days of torture and fear. The supernatural by definition has no rules, so the best anyone investigating a supernatural occurrence like a haunted videotape can do is find out what's causing it, which constitutes the film's plot. Of course, it helps if the investigator has supernatural powers like extrasensory perception, which is why I think the screenplay cheats a little, depriving the film of some of the menace it would have had if the tape's victims had less of an advantage.