Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sorcerous arcana. A priest in ?CESK? announces these rules, as if every educated person knows them: ?When two opponents have the same strength, the one with the taller altar will win,? and ?He who wears a red petticoat will be possessed by the god of war.? ?Devil Fetus? mixes ghost lanterns and paper money (actual paraphernalia of grieving) with a levitating mom, a bleeding mirrors and a flying carpet that?s less magic than black magic. To make a ?love hex? operable, in ?Eternal Evil,? a man needs his sister?s sweat; and Julie Lee tells the hero...
...films came in two main flavors. One was the luridly violent melodrama: ?The Untold Story,? for example, with Anthony Wong as a restaurateur who kills people and serves them up dumpling-style. The other was period fantasy with lots of simulated sex. In epics such as ?Erotic Ghost Story? and ?Liu Jai: Home for the Intimate Ghosts,? horny demons and succubi preyed on innocent maidens and scholars, and the rite of copulation was a vigorous and elaborate martial art. Until about 1997 - when Britain ceded the colony to Mainland China, and the helium coincidentally seeped out of the cinematic balloon...
...Asian movie fans know The Ring as Ringu. This ghost-story thriller?about a journalist drawn into the video mystery at the peril of herself and her family?was a novel, then a TV film, and then a big-screen scare show. It attracted huge audiences from Tokyo to Thailand and spawned both a sequel (Ringu 2) and a prequel (Ringu 0). The film's life-after-death continued past its theatrical release: who wouldn't want to see the killer-video movie on video...
...Hollywood is always fishing around for new ideas, and Asia is proving to be a well-stocked pond. DreamWorks has bought remake rights to the Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl, and Tom Cruise's production company picked up the Hong Kong-Thai ghost thriller The Eye. Dark Water, another spectral-effects drama from Ringu author Koji Suzuki and director Hideo Nakata, is to be remade in Hollywood, possibly with Nakata himself at the helm...
...meeting of East and West already means good business. Will it mean good movies? Maybe not, if The Ring is any indication. Gore Verbinski's U.S. version works best when it copies directly from the original: the suspenseful opening and the hackle-raising climax (with a ghost crawling out of a TV set). Still, the Japanese film dragged at just 90 minutes; the remake is nearly two hours, with a trawler of new red herrings introduced but little value added. And though Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) carries the film in the role originated by Nanako Ma-tsushima...