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Pity Kristen Bell: required to be a sort of Buffy-substitute on television, she now finds herself frowning Grudge-ingly through an American remake of a Japanese neo-horror, which in its haphazard way doesn't seem to be about how suthin' bad happened in some house, but about how internet access leads to anomie, alienation, and suicide, just like in Durkheim but with more ordering take-out food. It doesn't do much with this cranky-grandpa diagnosis, though apparently it has something to do with our inappropriate desire to have do with the dead, hence the whole Japanese neo-horror thing. Apparently this was more carefully integrated in the original, wherein the teens are more Scoobies, less sitting around getting picked off one-by-one by the wifi.

The shot of the flaming plane passing overhead as it crashes to earth, so "reminiscent" of the shot in the recent War of the Worlds, and so suggestive of 9/11, is actually footage spliced in from Kairo, meaning it preceded both. O grandchildren of Hiroshima. When Steve Spielberg and American lo-budge horror are jacking their image-set from the same source as al Qaeda, the terrorists have won.

Posted by jane at August 13, 2006 08:52 AM | TrackBack