Posts Tagged 'David Loucka'
RICHARD'S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS & MORE FOR FEB 03.
Tuesday, February 7th, 2017
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Erin Paul to have a look at the big weekend movies, the horror sequel "Rings" and Robert De Niro making funny in "The Comedian."
Tags: Aimee Teegarden, Alex Roe, Art Linson, Bonnie Morgan, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Danny DeVito, David Loucka, Edie Falco, F. Javier Gutiérrez, Harvey Keitel, Jacob Estes and Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Ross, Johnny Galecki, Laurie MacDonald, Leslie Mann, Lewis Friedman, Matilda Lutz, Patti LuPone, Richard LaGravenese, Rings, Robert De Niro, Taylor Hackford, The Comedian, THE RING, The Ring Two, Veronica Ferres, Vincent D'Onofrio, Walter Parkes
Posted in Film Review	| Comments Off on RICHARD'S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS & MORE FOR FEB 03.
RINGS: 1 STAR. "can a horror movie that isn't scary still be called a horror movie?"
Friday, February 3rd, 2017
In the "The Ring" a cursed videotape—featuring a short movie that looks like it was made by a first year film student who had watched too many Luis Buñuel films—does the rounds, killing its audience seven days after viewing. Based on 1998's "Ringu," a masterpiece of atmosphere and psychological terror from Japanese director Hideo Nakata, it spawned a mini-empire with multiple movies, manga comics and television shows based on the original idea.
"Rings," the latest addition to the continuing tale of the terrifying tape takes place thirteen years after the events of the last film. Julia's (Matilda Lutz) boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) has gone to college out of state. One night during a strange Skype call from his account a young woman appears. "Where is the dead man?" she shrieks. "Tell him she's coming!" Unnerved, Julia hightails it to the school looking for answers. Seems Holt has become involved in a project to discover the meaning of the meaning of the videotape. The professor Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) thinks he can prove the tape is a doorway to the other side. If that's true, it will also verify the existence of the soul and life after death. There's one big problem though, his students keep dying seven days after viewing the tape. The only way out is to make a copy of the tape and pass it along to someone else. With only hours to go until Holt becomes the tape's latest victim Julia watches, and inheriting his curse. "Whatever you were leave him alone!" she says. Instead of passing the death tape along she decides to get to the bottom of the mysterious tape and put an end to the evil forever. "No one is dying because of me," she says.
That may protect the movie's characters but the audience may die of boredom.
Can a horror movie that isn't scary still be called a horror movie? "Rings" plays on primal fears of the unknown and darkness, but fails to actually make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Some weird things happen—there is one cool image of Samara, the cursed girl, crawling out of a flatscreen TV to claim her victim—but it is mostly a collection of dimly lit scenes, loud sounds and jump scares.
More troubling than the bland leads or Vincent D'Onofrio reaching for a paycheque as the local blind man who may or may not have something to do with the supernatural goings on, is the movie's complete lack of purpose.
Julia sets off to figure out why this videotape is a death sentence to anyone who sees it. Good idea for a movie. There is an investigation and she uncovers certain things but (THIS IS A MILD SPOILER) there is no explanation as to how or why Samara ended up on tape and how the tape was distributed. None. Things happen but they have little to nothing to do with the already established "Ring" mythology. It was as if the three—count 'em three—screenwriters—including Academy Award winner Akiva Goldsman—lost interest in the story after the first hour. I know I certainly did.
"Rings" ends with the words "evil won't stop." It's a set up to the inevitable sequel but in this case it sound more like a threat than the promise of more.
Tags: Aimee Teegarden, Alex Roe, Bonnie Morgan, David Loucka, F. Javier Gutiérrez, Jacob Estes and Akiva Goldsman, Johnny Galecki, Laurie MacDonald, Matilda Lutz, Rings, THE RING, The Ring Two, Vincent D'Onofrio, Walter Parkes
Posted in Film Review	| Comments Off on RINGS: 1 STAR. "can a horror movie that isn't scary still be called a horror movie?"
Metro Canada: Are you afraid of the toaster? The real story behind Rings!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Years ago I interviewed Kōji Suzuki, author of the novels that spawned the Ring movies, manga comics and television shows. Ringu, the first book in the series, was published in 1991 and introduced us to the idea of a videotape (remember those?) that killed people seven days after they watched it.
The book and the movie were sensations, but in the interview Suzuki told me something really interesting. It's hard to imagine the Ring movies without the spooky, grainy videotape images, but the writer let it slip that VHS tapes weren't his first choice as a conduit of evil.
What was?
A haunted toaster. Good sense prevailed and he went with another commonplace object, one that almost everyone in the nineties had at least a passing familiarity with.
This weekend, Rings revisits the horrors of the original novel and films as a young guy decides to explore the urban legend of the deadly mysterious videotape. When his girlfriend sacrifices everything to save him, a shocking discovery is made — there's a movie within the movie!
Suzuki made videotapes the spookiest inanimate horror object ever, but they're not the only ones.
We can all imagine the fear that comes along with being chased by a werewolf. Or waking up to find Dracula staring down at you.
They are living, breathing (or in Drac's case, dead and not so breathing, but you get the idea) embodiments of evil. But how about inorganic objects? Have you ever been terrified of a lamp? Or creeped out by a tire?
There have been loads of haunted houses in the movies. In most of them, however, the house is merely a vessel for a spirit or some unseen entity that makes its presence know by making the walls bleed or randomly slamming doors. Rarer is the house that is actually evil.
Stephen King wrote about a house that eats people in the third installment of his Dark Tower series. On screen Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg visualized the idea in the appropriately titled Monster House.
In that animated movie three teens figure out the house across the street is a man-eating monster.
By the time they got around to the fourth installment of the most famous haunted house series, the Amityville Horror, filmmakers had to figure out a new plotline apart from the tired "new owners move in to the house, get freaked out leave," storyline. In The Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes, a cursed lamp causes all sorts of trouble when it is shipped from the evil Long Island house to a Californian mansion.
Much weirder is Rubber, the story of a killer tire (yes, you read that right) with psychokinetic powers — think Carrie with treads — who terrorizes the American southwest.
It's an absurdist tract on how and why we watch movies, what entertainment is and the movie business, among other things.
But frankly, mostly it's about a tire rolling around the desert and while there is something kind of hypnotic about watching the tire on its murderous journey — think Natural Born Killers but round and rubbery — that doesn't mean Rubber is a good movie.
Finally, think bed bugs are bad? How about a hungry bed? The title of this one sums it up: Death Bed: The Bed that Eats.
Tags: Aimee Teegarden, Alex Roe, Bonnie Morgan, David Loucka, F. Javier Gutiérrez, Jacob Estes and Akiva Goldsman, Johnny Galecki, Kōji Suzuki, Laurie MacDonald, Matilda Lutz, Rings, THE RING, The Ring Two, Vincent D'Onofrio, Walter Parkes
Posted in Metro, Metro In Focus	| Comments Off on Metro Canada: Are you afraid of the toaster? The real story behind Rings!