Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/27/24

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, November 27, 2024

Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

Megumi Okina in Ju-on: The Grudge

Cast: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kayoko Shibata, Yukako Kukuri, Suri Matsuda, Yoji Tanaka, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Hideo Sakaki, Takashi Matsuyama. Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Toshiharu Tokiwa. Film editing: Nobuyuki Takahashi. Music: Shiro Sato.

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge didn't scare me much, partly because I go to horror movies to watch the techniques used to scare people, but also because its major effect is simple creepiness. Some of that comes from the nonlinear narrative technique: We spend so much of our attention on sorting out when things happened and to whom that the story doesn't build the suspense it might. This is a feature, not a bug in Shimizu's scheme of things. The essential point is that a murder took place in a house, which then became haunted by the victims, and that the evil infecting the house is spread by anyone who visits it. In fact, it's spread so widely that there's a hint -- shots of empty streets -- that it has begun to infect the entire city. While the movie is undoubtedly unsettling, I think it needs better character development to have its best effect.