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Friday, January 4, 2008
Nobody does human Tetris better than Japan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You know why I love Japanese TV? Because it is INSANE.
Here’s a type of human Tetris that is ridiculously funny and thoroughly enjoyable.
So, enjoy!
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Be sure to miss the made-in-Atlanta ‘One Missed Call’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The made-in-Atlanta “One Missed Call” is one big miss of a horror movie.
The latest in a long line of American remakes of Japanese fright tales, “Missed” involves a string of people — mostly young and in college — who receive weird cell phone calls with messages indicating the day and time of their pending deaths. Oh yeah, and sometimes these premonitions from beyond include a few of the final words they will utter.
Shannyn Sossamon (the “A Knight’s Tale” princess whom we last saw in the forgettable suicide fantasy/comedy “Wristcutters: A Love Story”) stars. While riding in a car she gets to deliver one of the film’s weakest punches, talking about this “spirit, moving through the phones, killing people.”
There are creepy-crawling bugs, ghostly mannequins, an incredibly stupid cell phone exorcism, heavy breathing and past visions of child abuse. Sossamon goes alone (naturally) into a dark and burned-out hospital to get chased around by a freaky spirit.
She deadpans most of her lines to Ed Burns, who plays a cop required to run around and convince others that evil is among us, or, at least, in our cells.
The first victim has the biggest breasts (naturally) and is required to lean ever so far over a gurgling koi pond while looking for her cat.
Don’t think that Warner Bros., which is distributing this mess, doesn’t know what it’s got. The studio booked only one advance screening and it didn’t end till close to midnight Thursday — the better to prevent critics’ reviews from landing in print in newspapers today.
Audiences seem to know, too. At the film’s conclusion, several of those at last night’s screening in Atlanta booed and made catcalls.
Fortunately, there’s little in “Missed” to connect audiences to Atlanta. Those who live here will recognize the occasional downtown skyscraper that pops up, the cobbled streets of the Fairlie-Poplar District or a street sign or two that reveals a location. But the film’s setting is never revealed and the cinematography is so intentionally claustrophobic that the storyline could be happening anywhere in America.
Just know that no one’s safe. Certainly not the big-busted girl. Or even her kitty cat.
Grade: D
“One Missed Call.” Starring Shannyn Sossamon and Ed Burns. Directed by Eric Vallete. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and terror, frightening images, some sexual material and thematic elements. At metro theaters. 1 hour, 27 minutes.
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