Sharkwater Happily NEver After

Sharkwater

Happily NEver After BRAY A seductive retelling of the legendary tale, BRAM STOKERS DRACULA is Francis Ford Coppolas opulent, erotic, blood-filled feast. Count Dracula played with irresistible intensity by Gary Oldman reunites with his soul mate, Mina Winona Ryder, after four centuries. Minas Happily NEver After Movie Bloodthirsty vengeance is measured out in buckets, not spoonfuls for this hard-hitting vampire movie sequel. The story picks up right where the first UNDERWORLD left off, in the midst of a war between Lycans werewolves and vampires, with the Happily NEver After Video Along with their contemporaries 311, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and System of a Down, Southern Californias Incubus defined 1990s alt-metal with a loud and aggressive blend of thrash, funk, rap-rock, and grunge. The band is captured live in this July Happily NEver After Film Set in San Francisco amidst a feud between the Japanese yakuza and Chinese Triad criminal factions, director Philip G. Atwells WAR stars Jet Li as the enigmatic assassin Rogue, and Jason Statham as Jack Crawford, an agent determined 2003 Widescreen; Dubbed; Subtitled; DTS Sound Happily NEver After Review BULLETPROOF MONK begins in the 1940s, as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, charged with protecting an ancient scroll, passes on his legacy to his pupil. As the student receives the power to safeguard the scroll, his aging process is halted With the American remake of The Ring such a surprise hit, the rights to Hideo Nakatas follow-up horror thriller Dark Water didnt linger unbought for very long. To be honest, while Nakatas 2002 original had a few interesting ideas about emotional abandonment and alienation, it largely played as a stale retread of the Ring films, complete with a scary dark-haired ghost girl rising from her watery grave. That particular image has become such a cliché that it represents everything tired and derivative about recent Asian horror cinema. When the inevitable Americanized version was announced, its prospects didnt exactly spark my interest despite the participation of director Walter Salles The Motorcycle Diaries, screenwriter Rafael Yglesias Fearless the 1993 Jeff Bridges drama, not the recent Jet Li martial arts epic, or star Jennifer Connelly. I missed the Sharkwater when it played theatrically, and judging by its box office returns so did most everyone else. Thats too bad, because looking at it now the movie has a surprising amount of merit and actually improves upon the Japanese original. Connelly stars as Dahlia, a recently divorced mother forced by economic necessity to move with her young daughter into a dreary, run-down apartment building just outside of New York City. The place is quite clearly a miserable hell hole, a fact the obnoxious building owner John C. Reilly tries to downplay by cheerfully announcing that it was designed in the Brutalist Style and claiming that the living room is actually a second bedroom. Daughter Ceci hates their new home instantly, but has a sudden turnaround after wandering up to the roof and finding a Hello Kitty backpack mysteriously waiting for her. Resigned that she can do no better, Dahlia tries to make the best of a bad situation and doesnt question her daughters strange behavior, which includes talking to a new imaginary friend named Natasha. As if the apartment werent already unpleasant enough, tromping footsteps from upstairs keep Dahlia awake in the middle of the night, and a water stain on the ceiling starts dripping icky black liquid onto her bed, a problem Sharkwater which the rude building superintendent Pete Postlethwaite doesnt offer much help. As the stain grows larger and larger, it seems to take on supernatural overtones when Dahlia learns the true story of the apartment above and the little girl named Natasha who used to live there. Salles and Yglesias stick fairly closely to Nakatas basic plotting while effectively transplanting the Japanese setting to urban America. The movie is a ghost story, but the remake downplays the supernatural aspects in favor of nuanced character drama, leaving it ambiguous whether most of the spooky events actually occur only in the emotionally-fragile heroines head. Abandoned as a child by her own alcoholic mother, Dahlia may just be projecting her fears and insecurities onto her new environment. Connelly delivers a restrained performance free of the histrionics expected in this type of movie, and shes supported by equally good turns from Reilly, Postlethwaite, and especially Tim Roth as her concerned divorce attorney. Each of these roles seems pretty straightforward but are given unexpected complexities. The movie is plenty atmospheric and creepy, but not at all the type of gory shocker the studio promoted it as, which probably accounts for its poor reception. If not exactly a genre masterpiece, the new Dark Water genuinely surprised me with its intelligence and depth of characterization. Its a better movie than it needed to be, and even a better movie than the source its based on.