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If you don’t know, just move on. Later when you want to back up your HD-DVD’s you’ll thank the millions of nerds nationwide making these magic numbers public.

I don’t so much feel like writing a full review of The Notorious Betty Page, but I will say this: you think Requiem for a Dream had a depressing ending? Well I’ve got a surprise for you, my friend.

It’s as though the little girl from The Ring used her magic VHS conjuring powers to turn Viagra into a feature length film, and then Pat Robertson got his hands on it and changed the ending.  What’s even more depressing is that it’s true.  An hour and a half of light bondage, corsets and stiletto heals culminates into five minutes of repentance. Damn you God, you spoil everything.

Last night I finally watched The Passion of the Christ. I’ve seen a lot of violent, sadistic torture movies in my day, and I can say with little hyperbole in my words that the torment and torture in The Passion was the worst; but I’m not referring to the beating and murder of Jesus of Nazareth; I’m talking about the three and a half hour guilt trip laid on the world by Gibson of Hollywood. The Passion is at its very essence an entire childhood of Bible-thumping condensed into several hours of bloodshed.

I’ll be honest: I felt more sympathy as I watched the severe beating of Mel Gibson himself when Jet Li roughed him up at the end of Lethal Weapon 4. Now there was a classic ass-kicking! And what about the torture and beheading of William Wallace in Braveheart? Tell me, Mr. Gibson, what happened to humoring the audience with a little character development before the director starts tearing living tissue off the ribs of his protagonist? I suppose that one might assume that everybody knows the story of Jesus’ life and all of his great deeds, but one would be wrong. Infinitely more time is spent doting on Jesus’ death than on his life. Is it just me, or do Christians just not find his teachings all that interesting?

I did feel bad for Jesus when I watched The Passion. I felt bad for Him just like I felt bad for the Japanese tourist in Hostel when her eye was burnt out with a blow torch; I felt bad for Him the way I felt bad for Robocop when his limbs were separated from his body with an elephant gun; I felt bad for Him the same way I felt bad for the man in Audition when his fiancé cut his feet off with piano wire; but throughout The Passion a feeling kept creeping up on me that Mr. Gibson wanted me to feel guilty because Christ willingly endured a slow and painful death to cleanse me of my sins. Christians reading this are probably saying “well, duh.” You folks go and pray for me. Everyone else, keep reading.

Now I know, I know: according to the New Testament that’s the way all it went down. The script was already written centuries before Mad Max got his hands on it and he took surprisingly few liberties in his cinematic rendition of the death of Christ. So why am I being so hard on The Passion? Because The Passion was so hard on it’s audience. Am I supposed to be thankful that Christ died for my sins? Am I supposed to feel guilty that I sin at all? If God created man, then God also created our sinful nature. If God exists, I’m not asking Him to forgive me for nor will I feel guilt over actions that He himself programmed me to perform. God would probably just laugh if I repented anyway: “forgive me father, for I have drank Jack Daniels and sang the wrong words to That’s Amore at karaoke.” A real commandment breaker, I am.

I presume you need to be a strong Christian going into The Passion to truly enjoy it, if enjoy is even the correct verb to use in conjunction with watching the torture of someone you love. I suppose if I were a good Christian then watching The Passion would give me the same masochistic pleasure as scratching open poison ivy or picking a scab, but that’s just not me.

If you feel compelled to remind me that this review is several decades too late, save your words; I already know. Cool Hand Luke is one of those classic films that a movie buff like me should feel ashamed to be watching only now. Well, my friends, it’s new to me. So if you want to hear what I have to say about one of the greatest films of all time, shut up and listen.

Cool Hand Luke stars Paul Newman as Luke, a war hero who is arrested for cutting the heads off of a row of parking meters. When asked why he committed this venomous act of victimless vandalism, Luke offers two reasons. The first is that “there ain’t much to do in a small town.” Luke’s personality has many layers, and this explanation gives us a glimpse at the outer skin of his personality. He’s a rebel, but peace-loving and harmless. He could have gotten drunk and smashed mailboxes with a two-by-four like a normal country boy, but he chose to methodically decapitate the parking meters with a pipe cutter. His mind and morality transcend the absurd laws of man, and it becomes abundantly clear that because of this man will not suffer his presence. Luke’s second explanation is that he cut the heads off of the meters to “settle old scores.” The movie doesn’t explain what he means, but there is some insight to be gained from this comment. Who owns a parking meter? No one person does, so Luke can’t be settling a score with any individual. Parking meters are controlled by and turn a profit for local governments; so seemingly Luke must be striking a blow, if only symbolically, at the government.
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Introduction

Is it just me, or do the Japanese have an irrational fear of damp little girls? Perhaps there’s some cultural nuance that I’m missing. Perhaps. Or it could just be that Hideo Nakata accidentally delivered the same movie twice. I seem to remember another movie he directed about a little girl that drown whose restless spirit haunts the living so that they will solve the mystery of her death.

A friend asked me to rent Dark Water, and it was my mistake that I picked up the original Japanese version. It wasn’t a problem for me since I’m a fan of Japanese horror anyway; but this friend of mine refused to watch with subtitles, so I was stuck watching the movie with English dubs. For those of you that have watched a movie in a different language, you know that dubbing pretty much ruins foreign films, especially horror. I tried to watch bearing that in mind, but even so you won’t hear me preaching any praises for Dark Water.

Plot Summary

Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water is the story of Yoshimi Matsubara, a woman in the middle of an unpleasant divorce and custody battle over her six year-old daughter, Ikuko. Yoshimi has won temporary custody of her daughter, but must find a permanant home and gainful employment to keep it. Yoshimi and her daughter rent an apartment in an older building in Tokyo. When they inspect the apartment the manager attributes the humidity and condensation in the apartment to the bad rain. However after they have settled in and the rain has long since passed, the moisture not only persists but gets worse, leaving watermarks on the ceiling of Ikuko’s bedroom.

Yoshimi begins to sense that something is wrong at her building when Ikuko discovers the backpack of a small child on the roof. They turn it in to the apartment manager who, quite curiously, remarks that no children have lived in the apartment complex for some time. Her suspicions are confirmed when, after the bag was disposed of several times, it keeps reappearing on the roof, in the trash, and even in her own daughter’s backpack.

The story begins to unravel when Yoshimi sees a missing child poster while picking up Ikuko from school. The child in the picture coincidentally is carrying a red bag just like the one from the roof. As Yoshimi puts the pieces together, the moisture in her apartment becomes worse and worse, until their paranormal roots are eventually revealed.
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