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Dead ringer
Based on a 1998 Japanese box-office smash, this electric shocker runs rings around its recent competition, including The Blair Witch Project. Only last year's The Others rates a similar chill factor. In my years as a film critic, I've rarely used "terrifying" to describe a horror movie. A zinger of an urban legend come to life, The Ring deserves that appellation. It's terrify-ring. I'm not exaggerating. Just watch what happens to curious Seattle newspaper reporter Rachel Keller (Mulholland Drive's Naomi Watts), whose teen-age niece dies under mysterious circumstances. The girl is not alone: All of her friends who watched a certain videotape the week before perish under similar circumstances. Director Gore Verbinski (The Mexican) and writer Ehren Kurger masterly create a nightmare world out of the everyday. Even the sound of a shutting car door sounds threatening. Watts is our stand-in through this supernatural voyage, one that preys on our deepest fears of death and the dark unknown. The secret within The Ring lies in the video that Rachel and others find and watch. Unsettling, almost abstract, it contains a seemingly random array of images. A ladder. A stark tree shot in time lapse. A woman in a mirror. Insects. A well. Vaguely avant-garde, the film defies interpretation, which makes it that much creepier. As soon as the viewer finishes watching the tape, the phone rings and a voice announces, "Seven days." For Rachel, it's a real, gulp, deadline. As we are caught up in the film-within-a-film plot, the horror reflexively doubles back on us, as viewers involved in the act of watching a horror movie. Rachel's knowing young son (David Dorfman) describes the situation as a "conundrum"-a deep mystery involving a riddle. The riddle is who or what made the tape, and why. Rachel's search leads her to a desolate Northwest island on which sits a lighthouse seen in the video. A surly man (Brian Cox) living on the island had a wife who went insane. And the couple once had a little girl who vanished without a trace. You may need a sixth sense to make sense of all of The Ring. If it falters, it's because not everything fits together like it should. Red herrings swim with clues. But what this movie does have is one shocking sequence after another, which, perhaps, are more shocking since they don't logically mesh together. Nightmares spring from within nightmares, so that nothing stands on firm ground. Aboard a ferry to the island, Rachel comes across a horse that goes mad and bolts its pen. It's a genuine night-mare. Like other vintage tales of terror, this one plays on our fears of violent death. At the end of her search, Rachel and her friend Jonah (Martin Henderson) return to the scene of a horrid crime that happened years before. Verbinski dredges up a psychiatrist's couch full of dread: Falling, premature burial, drowning, isolation. To these he adds another, in maybe the film's most hair-raising moment, which has to do with a particularly lively TV set. Verbinski may be channeling David Cronenberg (in Videodrome), but it's still a shuddering set piece. Audiences may be puzzled over the ending, which is a conundrum all by itself. Though it's entirely unexpected, I'm not sure Verbinski's coda isn't a cop-out. In any case, I dare anyone to watch The Ring alone. If you do, just hope you don't get a ring on the telephone afterwards. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Auto erotica
To the latter list add Auto Focus, director Paul Schrader's overdeveloped exposé of the short, sordid life of actor Bob Crane. Crane was known to millions as the suave star of TV's "Hogan's Heroes," the Nazi POW comedy (an oxymoron if there ever was one) that ran on CBS from 1965-71 and lives on in re-runs. Crane's career spiraled down after the show's demise; in 1978 he was found brutally murdered in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hotel room. Schrader builds the movie around Greg Kinnear, the smooth, affable star of As Good As It Gets and Nurse Betty. By casting Kinnear, Shrader wants to seduce us into swallowing the seamy subject matter. It works, but only temporarily. I doubt this will be a career killer for Kinnear. Still, the only comparable vehicle would be a biography of a porn star. I say that because Crane was a no-limits sex fiend. He'd make the Sodom and Gomorrah Olympic team. He was also addicted to pornography. He'd photograph and videotape himself in the act with his countless female conquests, keeping the library for posterity. "I love breasts," Kinnear says in the voice-over, which he claims makes him just like any other red-blooded American male. Schrader-who grew up in strict Calvinist family-has already raked this turf before, in 1979's Hardcore. This is a cautionary tale on the damning dangers of unbridled lust. But it's a moral lesson that's punishing to sit through. It's like getting smacked on the palms with a ruler at parochial school. The plot rotely follows the rise-and-fall formula of many a biopic. First come Crane's salad days in sunny Southern California of the early 1960s. When he gets his big TV break with "Heroes," he's living in a sitcom-perfect Los Angeles ranch home with his wife (Rita Wilson) and kids. Dark clouds roll in with the entrance of John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), an electronics whiz who specializes in hi-fi equipment and a new gizmo called the videotape recorder. As soon as Dafoe slithers in with that bony face and leer, you know Crane is set to get in bed with the devil. An X-rated Odd Couple, these two feed off each other's needs. Carpenter is Crane's entree into a lurid L.A. underworld of strip clubs, easy women and swingers. Crane's fame brings both men all the girls they can handle. Crane uses his celebrity to pounce on any female within ogling distance, including the "Heroes" regular (Maria Bello), who becomes his second wife. If you strip away the sex from Auto Focus, all you're left is tedious sleaze. We discover that Crane had a penile enlargement and that both his wives left him (surprise). Down to hell goes Crane, with a video camera following him every grimy step of the way. One thing's for sure: The star of "Hogan's Heroes" was no hero. But you could find that out by watching Schrader's skin-and-sin flick on fast forward. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Want to see something really scary? Then take in The Ring-if you dare.
Think of all the screen biographies that haven't been made-Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Albert Einstein, et al. Now think of all the biopics that shouldn't have been made.
