Pulse & Nine Queens

Pulse is both very creepy and about the dehumanizing effects of technology. Plus, it was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who, while no relation to Akira, clearly is very talented, as he'd have to be to have a last name of Kurosawa and direct films. I think there are good things about having an enormous Netflix queue, and one of them is the ability just to sit down and watch a movie without even remembering much about why you wanted to watch it in the first place. I knew it was J-Horror, and was supposed to be much better than run of the mill stuff like Ringu and Ju-On, but I really didn't expect it to be so much better. There were some typical horror aspects to it (especially that the typical Japanese ghosts look the same as they do in most other J-Horror, but Kurosawa is capable of making it slightly less than cliched), but it was just vastly better than most. Almost makes me want to see the apparently terrible American remake. Well, it's mainly for Kristen "Veronica Mars" Bell (and Samm "Neal Schweiber" Levine and Ron "Arvin Sloane" Rifkin). Man, put a bunch of TV people in a movie directed by someone who only has one other movie to his credit and remake a Japanese horror film that's practically perfect (as in, I can't see a way to make the film better than it already was), and of course you're going to get dreck. Well, I can't blame those three, I blame the fact that Hollywood feels the need to remake great foreign films because people can't read subtitles. SPOILER: And the best thing about it is you think it's just a normal little horror film about terrorizing a few college kids when you get to the end and realize that it's about the end of the world.

Nine Queens was, speaking of remakes of great foreign films, remade a couple years ago, but this time it was remade with John C. Reilly and directed by someone who hadn't directed a movie before, but had been assistant director on a hell of a lot of great films. And Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, but really, he's worked with the Coen Brothers, Soderbergh, Hal Hartley, John Sayles, and Jodie Foster, so he probably has at least some talent. Of course, since I saw the original Argentinian version, I don't entirely see the point of watching what is probably a weaker remake. As I have a weak spot for twisty little thrillers that don't entirely give their plots away, I should have loved it, and I did, to a certain extent. My problem was that I've seen so many movies, I knew that the big plot reveal was going to be one of two things, because really, with two con men joining forces you're never going to get a straight forward plot. I think the writer-director, one Fabian Bielinsky, clearly has talent, and the movie was very well-made, but unless he wants to be an Argentinian Mamet, he needs to show that he's capable of making something more than a complicated and twisty thriller. I'm not saying that's bad, because we certainly could use more movies that don't insult the viewer's intelligence, but it's sort of disappointing to know a little about Argentinian history and see where one plot point was going. I mean, really, I wrote papers about it in college.