The Curse of Cash
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From the New York Times bestselling author of This Time Is Different, "a fascinating and important...
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Enrique Browne: Bringing Nature Back to Architecture
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This highly anticipated monograph focuses on the architectural output of Enrique Browne, a talented...
Gareth von Kallenbach (977 KP) rated Ringu 2 (Ring 2) (2005) in Movies
Aug 14, 2019
The film had all of the elements for success, a creepy supernatural tale, a twisting and complex storyline that kept viewers guessing, and plenty of frights that made even the most jaded horror viewers squirm.
Sadly, the newest film in the series The Ring Two plays as an uninspired effort that seems to exist simply to cash in on the first film with little to no effort to add to the series.
The film opens with Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), having left Seattle with her son Aidan (David Dorfman), in an effort to put the horrors of their experiences in the first film behind them. Settling into a bland but comfortable existence in a coastal town named Astoria.
Rachel spends her days working for the tiny local paper though it is obvious that she is struggling to cope with the step down from working for a major metropolitan paper. When an unexplained homicide occurs, the local media crew is excited as for once, they will have a real story to cover. That is all of the staff aside t for Rachel who finds details of the murder disturbingly familiar to what she has witnessed in the past.
A study of the crime scene discovers a copy of the tape from the first film, that when viewed causes the viewer to die in seven days. Rachel is convinced that destroying the tape will end the terror once and for all, but despite her best efforts bizarre events continue.
The fact that her son has become ill and is acting odd, (even for him), is cause for Rachel to try to determine what is causing the changes. What is missing though is the energy and eeriness that drove the first film. Instead the audience gets paper thin characters, a very slow and plodding story, and very few frights.
The film has a couple of good scares but they are very few and far apart. The film also has gigantic lapses in logic as characters act as if their brains are in a deep freeze. During one moment, Rachel is told by her son to drive, instead she decides to stop and chat. Something goes awry, and Rachel is again told to drive, yet again she decides to stop and chat oblivious to what has happened.
All of this could be forgiven but not the very tired fallbacks that the film uses instead of offering anything fresh. What made the first film so good was the way it kept surprising the audience by coming up with new twists and turns as well as clever misdirection that kept viewers on edge and guessing what was to come next.
This time out, the cleverness and originality of the first film seems to have been sucked out of the film in favor of a few gimmick effects and a paper thin plot that seems to have been culled from other films. Add this all up, and sadly The Ring franchise has become an imitator rather than an innovator and this effort will leave fans in the cold.
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graveyardgremlin (7194 KP) rated Ablaze in Books
Feb 15, 2019
As with most other books of the 80's, there are a lot of "endearments", which drive me crazy for some reason. Maybe because there’s one in every sentence the "hero" utters in the beginning? I don't know, I just get tired of hearing, "little one", "darling", and let us not forget in this book, "Heller mine"! Ugh, how awful that one is!! Not to mention all the comments about her voice going squeaky. *rolls eyes* The typical overbearing, bulldozing male is once again used in this book. Why he can't just let Heller tell things in her own time is beyond me, instead he has a private investigator (or the like) pry into her business to find out.
Some other things I didn't like about the book:
1. There was too much going on in it; mother's health, a fire, the Witness Protection Program, misunderstandings (which are usually the main or only thing in a romance book). Just pick one and stick with that, don't go over-the-top.
2. Heller was worried about endangering Conrad's life but not Simeon's, I found that wrong. Some convoluted thinking there.
3. Why-oh-why did the author decide to name Heller's best friend Doodie?
Even with all that I still found myself enjoying it more and more as I progressed through the book. Both Con and Heller became more likeable and Heller started showing more spunk. I do have to say that everything tied itself up rather nicely in the end and their relationship was rather sweet and instead of not being together until the end, they actually had a relationship during the book. And the after-party was highly entertaining, too. :)
If you can get through the first 50 or so pages it's actually rather rewarding! I ended up enjoying it way more than I thought I would. :)
Frank Lowy: A Second Life
Book
The brand new second volume of the biography of one of Australia's richest, most active and most...
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy
Book
Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been...