Film
Ed Park
Tuesday, March 3 2005
-
Dreamworks Pictures
Dead, bath, and beyond: Watts
Details:
Directed by Hideo Nakata
DreamWorks, in release
Most Popular
-
Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein Juicy details plucked from the garbage of a movie mogul
-
Rap's 2008, Beyond Lil Wayne Praising outstanding new hip-hop records sadly subsumed by Weezymania
-
Scientology's Crushing Defeat A previously unpublished saga of an $8 million check
-
Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem There's still no culprit for a notorious noose at Teachers College—but plenty of evidence behind the firing of Madonna Constantine
-
The Houses That Ruthlessness Built Welcome to middling baseball in sleek new cathedrals
Will the circle be unbroken? Let's hope not. This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's The Ring ditches that film's scariest conceit—people die a week after watching . . . an avant-garde video!—for a watery possession plot. Fleeing the gnarliness unleashed in the first movie's Seattle for small-town life, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her weird little son (David Dorfman) have to fend off bad plumbing, angry deer, and the unshowered ghost girl who keeps ruining his digital photos. Postpartum depression is invoked several times; if the name of the game is to be the unheimlich maneuvers of the mother-child bond, one wishes Hideo Nakata (director of the Japanese Ringu films) could have nudged the proceedings toward the Rosemary's Baby-Birth axis. (Indeed, there's a brief, wordless melody intended to evoke RB.) Sissy Spacek, as the would-be Andrea Yates now in the loony bin, is thankfully obscured by a long wig. The let's-travel-through-the-TV-screen sequence was better in Fat Albert. Next time we'll try call-waiting.
Recent Articles
More by Ed Park
Breaking the Waves
In the Pond
Mr. Happy
In a law professor's debut novel, Homo academicus meets pseudologia fantastica
Final Fantasy
Dungeons and dollars: raising an electronic cash cow
You Delete Me
Hey Nostradamus: Soccer riots and secret islands in superbly cynical debut
Village Voice Insiders
- Weekly villagevoice.com
- Weekly freebies and Special Offers
- Daily "What To Do in NYC" E-mail
- Information on the Performing Arts
| buy, sell, trade 3,434 | musician 2,745 |
| rentals 18,798 | jobs 5,757 |
| adult entertainment 9,581 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|
