Golden Week DVDs

Jeff invited Neil and I over to his place for a DVD and pizza. Little did we know we were going to watch The Grudge, and we were watching it because Jeff’s girlfriend Via refused to watch it with him. Now, I’d heard that it was all right as a horror movie, but Neil had refused to watch it because he saw the beginning on the plane and ‘just couldn’t get into it’. All I knew was that it was a remake and Sarah Michelle Gellar starred. I was totally waiting for Buffy to come out kicking and slam Kayako and Toshio’s ghostly arses into the dirt. Alas, she even ran like a girl in this one.

Via ‘watched’ the screen aspect ratio (i.e. the black bar on the top of the teevee) the entire length of the film. So she does not have any questions regarding the plot. How come Detective Nakagawa got killed off, but his deputy, who was clearly in the house to0, did not come to a high-pitched musical interlude end? Shouldn’t he have been in the room at the end for Karen when she was identifying the body and Kayako / morgue staff member turned up behind her? Does he die later? Did Bill Pullman’s character die because he’d been affected by Toshio’s ghost and the discovery of the bodies, and why was it suicide and not by the hand of the ghosts? How did Yoko end up back at the care centre, sans jawbone? Did it snap Alex to death?

It was creepy, but not as creepy as The Ring (the original Japanese one, which freaked me out for months). The Grudge freaked me out for one night only (I kept expecting a scary shadow to appear when we went to bed that night).

So, in order to try and dispel the heebie-jeebies from The Grudge, Jeff put on Old School (”I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it!”). Aside from marvelling at how eerily similar Luke and Owen Wilson are, Old School is a boy’s flick, a reverse coming-of-age. Except that the Vince Vaughn character wimps out on his bravado and can’t cheat on his wife and Will Ferrell’s character gets his heart broken because he’s an idiot. I suppose it was a good old American film, because under the obvious gags (and topless girls who, remarkably, had real, unaugmented boobs), the movie preached values of fidelity and teamwork. And tying penises to cinder blocks and spoofing Fight Club.

The bonus of the film was surely seeing Stiffler (Seann William Scott) as the mulleted petting zoo wrangler who gets French-kissed by Will Ferrell.

And finally, I managed to get Neil to watch Sideways with me. Again, I knew very little about the film, except who was in it and the basic premise (two blokes go on a road trip before one of them gets married). I’d only seen Paul Giamatti in one other film, American Splendo[u]r, so I had high hopes for this one. As Neil observed, there are characters like Jack all over the world (with a strong concentration in Xiamen, I might add). And that’s sad. If getting married and being faithful is considered something restrictive and a loss of freedom, don’t get fucking married. In fact, don’t get serious with any woman because she’ll probably expect you to treat her with respect, and we can’t have that, can we?

I thought it was pretty realistic in that it shows two dissimilar men who are friends because each has character traits that the other lacks. I see that happening all over the place and this movie should cause people to reevaluate who they are and why they are the way they are.

It is also, I’ve heard, very realistic how Miles catches Jack mid-stroke, as it were, when he returns to the motel room (if I ever walked in on any of my mates in the act I’d be scarred for life, so this is hearsay only). Why they would share a motel room is beyond me, I presume it was Miles’ naive belief that Jack would not behave like a horny teenager on his first lad’s holiday.

• 8 May 2005