Metro Pulse Online: Movies, Past &Amp; Future

Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

Boat Trip (R)
Two straight friends (Cuba Gooding, Jr., Horatio Sanz) mistakenly get passage on a gay cruise ship. Hijinx and sex theoretically ensue.
Prediction: I have a verrrrrrrrrrrrrry bad feeling about this.

Dreamcatcher (R)
Four childhood friends, now adult men with "issues," go on a hunting trip and encounter a disoriented guy who seems possessed.
Prediction: The trailer looks promising, but nothing like the Stephen King novel the movie's based on—and if it is anything like the novel, then the movie is going to be quite different from the trailer, Capiche?

Piglet's Big Movie (G)
Winnie's stuttering sidekick gets his own feature, something about aiding his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Prediction: Cute 'n' adorable for the little 'uns, but can the big 'uns that fork over the dough take it?

Till Human Voices Wake Us (R)
Sam Franks (Guy Pearce) returns to Genoa, Australia, to bury his father. While there, he saves an amnesiac woman (Helena Bonham Carter) from drowning herself, and begins caring for her. As he tries to discover her identity, he comes to realize it is caught up in his own unhappy past.
Prediction: This was actually released in 2001. The reviews are generally negative, calling it dreary, aimless, cliched, obvious, and far too long.

View from the Top (PG-13)
Gwyneth Paltrow is a small-town girl who wants to be a flight attendant. That, in sum, would appear to be the essence of this movie.
Prediction: It's release date has been pushed back a number of times and the script was rewritten. Not promising.

Bored of The Ring

The most interesting thing about The Ring (2002, PG-13) is that it was based on another movie, a smash hit called Ringu (1998, not rated). If you don't remember Ringu, it's probably because you don't live in Japan, where it became the top-grossing horror film of all time (it's already spawned a sequel and a prequel). Thanks to the mild success of the Hollywood version, the Japanese original is also now available here.

If you don't have time for both, see Ringu. Director Hideo Nakata's creepy ghost story isn't perfect, but it is unpredictable and eerie, and it has a few magnificent freak-out moments. A reporter, Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), is investigating urban legends about people who die one week after they watch a haunted videotape. When she realizes her niece may have been a victim, she tracks down a copy of the tape—which, this being a horror movie, she immediately watches. That sets the clock running, as Reiko scrambles to solve the mystery within seven days. She recruits her psychic ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) and they're soon scrambling around desolate volcanic islands and abandoned stone wells. There's abundant incoherence of the kind you can get away with only in a movie full of vague supernatural forces, but Reiko and Ryuji are a likable detective duo and Nakata keeps changing the story's rhythm so that you're never sure what's coming.

In The Ring, on the other hand, studio hack Gore Verbinski can't leave well enough alone. Although the movie follows the general outline of Ringu, everything about it is broader and slicker. The scares are more graphic and more telegraphed, and the whole tone has shifted from spooky fun to grim foreboding. It's shot entirely with the gray-green lighting that signifies "art" in nü-metal videos. Where Nakata makes everyday settings unsettling by playing on their ordinariness, Verbinski's grimy warehouses and disheveled cabins are spookhouse cliches. Naomi Watts, showing none of the verve she brought to Mulholland Drive, plays the reporter. There's not a pleasant character in the whole movie. They're all pallid, doughy and bitter. The film spells out a lot of what was left implied in Ringu—not an improvement; plot is not Ringu's strong point. Watching The Ring after seeing Ringu is like listening to someone explain the punchline of a joke.

—Jesse Fox Mayshark