Ten Years Later? She's Still Not Sleeping

As of this weekend, The Ring is a decade old.

I wrote up a retrospective review for the blog Ten Years Ago, which you can read if you want to hear my thoughts on how the passage of time — and the passing of the Asian horror remake fad — have colored this film. (You know, more than those cyan filters colored it in the first place.) But you will have to click the link to read them. Here below, however, I give you my miscellaneous notes about The Ring, in classic A.V. Club style. Sadly, they may be more telling of how the last ten years have treated this movie than anything I say in my actual re-review.

• I can’t decide if Ring parodies have helped or hurt the movie’s rep. It’s a toss-up, probably, but one spoof stands out: “Body Fuzion,” one of the first Saturday Night Live Digital Shorts. In the original broadcast, the Drew Barrymore-led workout clip turned out to be the video Aidan is watching, the one that prompted Rachel’s horrified reaction. In re-broadcasts, the Ring endjoke has been stripped, but I’m sure this version still exists somewhere online.
• So who of this film’s cast has done the best career-wise? Watts’s career has cooled in recent years, but she’s playing Princess Diana in a buzzed-about upcoming film, and I feel most people still consider her a capable, reliable actress. The Ring also boasts a pre-O.C. Adam Brody as a spooked high schooler, but it’s maybe Pauley Perrette, who plays Noah’s college-aged fling, who’s come the farthest as far as mainstream popularity is concerned. No matter what anyone says, tons of people watch NCIS.
• In a class by herself: Daveigh Chase. She’s something, even independent of Samara. She voiced both Lilo in Lilo & Stitch and Chihiro in Spirited Away, and she played the non-Gyllenhaal Darko sibling in Donnie Darko — a role she reprised in the rather meh sequel. She also played the manipulative Rhonda Volmer on Big Love, but her most recent feat to date is her involvement with a messy custody battle over a dog... named Stitch. Like I said, a class by herself.
• Shannon Cochran played Samara’s mother, the one who bashed the little darling’s head in and dumped her in the well. She doesn’t have an extensive filmography, but she did play Pam Beasley’s mom in a 2005 episode of The Office before the role was recast. That puts Pam and Samara in the same category, at least in my head, and I think that is funny.
• Gore Verbinski directed three Pirates of the Caribbean moves as well as the Oscar-winining Rango. Ehren Krueger wrote two Transformers movies. I maintain that The Ring is the best film either has been attached to.
• The VHS tape isn’t the only antiquated technology in the film: landlines and non-flatscreen TVs abound. But this former newspaper editor had to cringe at the scenes of Rachel working in the bustling newsroom of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, because that’s perhaps the most glaring example of something that was plausible in 2002 but is no longer so today.
• Finally, if you’ve made it this far, you might be interested to read a personal intersection of my life and The Ring — the Amber Tamblyn corpse in particular. Enjoy!

The Girl in the Mirror in the Calendar on the Wall

My computer has a calendar and my phone has a calendar, but my wall also has a calendar because I find it convenient to glance up and quickly check the date or when the next Friday the thirteenth is coming. (It’s this week, by the way.) Also, I constantly worry that my machines will develop late-onset Y2K and make me think that 1900 has returned and I haven’t been born yet. So handy though it might be, my physical, hanging-on-the-wall calendar has recently stopped making me so happy. Every month gives me a new work of Japanese art, and August has arrived with Kitagawa Utamaro’s “Girl With a Mirror.” It looks like this:

And every time I see it, I think of this:

(image via dementedstuff.com)

Creepy Anna Morgan from The Ring, brushing her hair in front of a similar oval mirror in and then turning to the camera and glaring. I could think of better associations to make whenever I look up from my computer screen. Because The Ring was a remake of a Japanese movie that also featured a woman grooming herself in an oval mirror, I wonder if “Girl With a Mirror” might have inspired the composition of the original scene and, indirectly, the remake too. Utamaro is remembered today as one of the more important Japanese artists, so the creative people behind Ringu would have likely known his work. Yes, I’m probably overthinking this, but you try staring at an image every time you struggle to find the right phrasing. Besides, this would not be the first time I’ve noticed Ring-like happenings in real life, because my roommate once did an inadvertently accurate impression of Amber Tamblyn’s corpse. (Note that I refrained from using the word mirrored to complete that last thought. I’ve also stopped myself from referring to anything coming full circle. You’re welcome.)

Bonus Ring trivia: Shannon Cochran, the actress who played creepy Anna Morgan, also played Pam’s mom on The Office exactly once, before the role was recast last season. I’d like to think she lost the job by insisting that she play the role as creepy.

Things are like other things, previously:

• The Coral sound like The Supremes
• Scissor Sisters sound like Mega Man
• “867-5309” sounds like a B-52s song
• Baby Doll from Batman is like a Japanese parasitic dwarf
• Rebecca Demornay is like Rebecca De Mornay
• Dhalsim from Street Fighter is like a guy from Master of the Flying Guillotine
• Girl Talk is like Girl Talk
• A Coldplay song is like music from Legend of Zelda
• Lost is like the short-lived 1969 series The New People
• Ashlee Simpson lip-synching on Saturday Night Live is like Stephanie Tanner

Samara Morgan in Isla Vista

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: First, dig up that photo of my old college roommate passed out in the corner of the kitchen and bearing a striking resemblance to the corpse of Amber Tamblyn in The Ring. Next, put it right next to the original so as to accentuate how well she accidentally nailed it.

We had all seen The Ring and found scarier than the PG-13 rating led us to expect. I know I spent the night after I saw it trying hard not to think about the corpse of Amber Tamblyn, only to naturally think of nothing but. Later, after a party, someone woke up and went to the kitchen to get water. She opened the refrigerator door and the light from inside illuminated the room enough that she saw what initially looked like poor, dead Amber Tamblyn. Further investigation revealed Dead Amber to actually be another roommate, whose night’s activities had led her to believe that the kitchen floor would be suitable place for a nap. Of course, the event was photographed for posterity.

Here’s the corpse of Amber Tamblyn:

And here’s our roommate’s accidental rendition of it:

Brilliant, really. Oh college, how I miss you.

Samara's Revenge

More weirdness regarding SNL's digital shorts. Back in early February, I posed the short from the Drew Barrymore-hosted episode. "Body Fusion" was an intentionally low-grade, vaguely pornographic 80s-style workout video. It made me laugh.

Just recently, Spencer was re-watching it on YouTube, only the version he was looking at ended with weirdly familiar-sounding screaming.

You watch it!

Despite both versions — the above one and the one in the original post — being allegedly from NBC, this one has a scene from "The Ring" spliced in. It's kind of weird and it puts me out of the humor of the sketch. Apparently it's the original, "director's cut" of the short. Very, very strange, I say.

Also: Great, another way for people looking up information from "The Ring" to find my blog.

Moesko Island Lighthouse

NOTE: Since so many people are finding this post my searching for the phrase "Moesko Island" — nearly fifty a day, by the count of Freestats.com — I thought I'd drop links to two other "Ring"-related posts that you might not find otherwise: "Spreading It Like Sickness" and "Rewind, Rewound."

So I'm writing a review for the "Ring" sequel for Brenna to run in Artsweek this week. I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might. Sequels generally disappoint, and while I think I could have lived happily without seeing this film, it didn't bastardize the original. It seems like the people behind "The Ring Two" actually understood the original, even if they did break the rule of Samara only showing up by popping out of TV sets when some unlucky fucker's seven days are up.

Most anyone who knows me knows I really liked "The Ring," even if a lot of people didn't care for it much. It genuinely scared me and I find it hard to believe it only got a PG-13, even with its lack of gore or raunch. In the neverending fight against writer's block, I re-watched the original when I got home from work. Whether or not you thought the movie worked, I think it's beautiful. The look of it — this gray-blue haze, like some low-lying rainstorm. IMDb says Gore Verbinski looked to the paintings of Andrew Wyeth for visual inspiration, and you can really see it. There's something crisp and cold and vaguely lonely about these and I get that from the movie. (See Christina's World, Wind from the Sea and Fed, all by Wyeth.)

Anyway, watching it again, I realized that aside from being a neat little horror mystery, this movie has a theme of art and creativity and creation in it. All the main characters are make things that could be considered art, in one way or another. Rachel, the Naomi Watts character, is a newspaper reporter and a writer. It's her propensity for words that drives the film's central investigation. I know a news story isn't generally considered art, but it's definitely a creative process — and one that ultimately leads to her survival. Journalism versus Evil: Round One, as bygone Artsweek editor DJ Fatkid headlined my review for the original two years ago. Rachel's ex-husband, Noah, is a photographer. Before he finally believes Rachel's story about a cursed video tape, he uses his camera to conduct his own little investigation. The creepy son is a little artist too. In his first scene, he's drawing a morbid little picture with crayons. He keeps doing this throughout the movie, and one of his doodles eventually provides a pivotal clue for Rachel.

And then we have Samara. Oh Samara, the little dickens who re-affirmed my general fear of children, dead or not. In the movie, we learn that Samara had freaky psychic powers, even before she died. She could create images on negatives just by thinking about them. She burned a perfect image of a burning tree into the wall of her bedroom. And she, after all, is the one who put the images on that damned video tape together. (You could also say that Samara is a bit of a sculptor, too — whatever the fuck she does to people sure leaves their corpses in a memorably horrifying state.)

The most interesting artist figure, I guess, would have to be the film's director himself. Not Gore Verbinski himself — though "The Ring" sure springboarded him to bigger and better things — but the idea of a director — the director as an abstract figure. "The Ring" suggests that a film is so powerful that it actually can kill a person — make them feel an emotion so profoundly that it overrides every other bodily impulse and shuts the whole system down. When Samara emerges from the TV to kill one of her viewers, it's like the person has gotten so into the movie that the lines between art and life completely disappears. They let the art in, and when Samara reconfigures their corpse into some horrible death posture, they become art themselves.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it got to me, this movie. It did before. It does now.

By the way, here's the first picture I ever took with my digital. Last Christmas, I drove out to the edge of where I lived and snapped some shots of this creepy area where people's area stops and it turns into countryside. They always reminded me of "The Ring." Just a little bit.