The Good, the Boring and the Worst!

Sin City

I like movies with style. I love slow-mo shots, wire-fu stunts, split-screens and all those other techniques that add style to a film. I love old John Woo movies and movies as diverse as Run Lola Run, Hero and The Matrix for this reason. The story is secondary in such movies which catch our attention with their visual flair more than anything else. Sin City is another addition to the list and a movie where style oozes from every frame.

The film has three stories and I shamelessly confess to not understanding all stories and the links between them completely. But I still watched what was onscreen with rapt attention because of the presentation. The film is presented in film noir style and is entirely in black and white. But there are flashes of color (usually red or other bright colors) in some of the scenes that really pep up the visual effect. The characters are memorable and some real cool dialogs are uttered with relish by the actors. Action (there’s not a lot of it though) and violence (there’s a lot of it) are way over-the-top but suit the mood of the film.

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Sahara

Sahara is an action adventure with little action and little adventure. Its characters spend too much time talking and the action, when it happens, is completely preposterous and boring.

The story in such movies is usually merely an excuse to string together a bunch of action scenes. So the outlandishness of the story (something about looking for a ship in the middle of the desert and contamination of all the water in the world) wasn’t a big surprise. But the lack of action definitely was. The first action sequence is a long time coming and I was barely awake by that time. And the sequence itself did nothing to wake me up.

The action set pieces also set new standards of preposterousness and make the over-the-top stunts in James Bond flicks look muted by contrast. In one sequence, the hero and his sidekick push themselves off the back of a pickup truck, walk across the desert (in the hot sun with no drinking water) carrying the bed of the pickup between them, find a crashed airplane and ‘sail’ on the sand using it. And you thought Vijayakanth’s movies had unbelievable stunts!!

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The Ring Two

The Ring Two has to be the stupidest horror movie I have ever seen. It’s a given that the characters in horror movies are not exactly the brightest of the lot. I mean, they have to willingly enter haunted houses, dark basements, creepy cemeteries and other places we wouldn’t go near in a million years. But this movie and its heroine raise(or is it lower?!) the stupidity bar to a whole new level.

The mother here deserves to hauled up by Social Services for negligence and endangerment of her son. She lets him wander around alone in a fair in a brand new place, lets him sleep in his own room after knowing the ghost is after him and leaves him sitting in a bathtub in a co-worker’s place while she returns home to “pick up some things”!

Ghost stories usually work within their own logic but this film has no logic and just doesn’t work. Some really outrageous concepts are thrown around (the ghost apparently cannot hear what they talk in their sleep, which results in the mother talking to her son when he is asleep) and there are scenes (like the one where mother and son have a conversation ‘inside’ her dream) of mind-boggling stupidity. And the ending truly makes no sense considering everything that went on until then.