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I just got home from AMC Kennedy Commons after watching Dark Water (Walter Salles). The only other film by Salles that I’ve seen is Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries) (2004), which I loved. Following the trend of many other recent “horror” films, this film is based all things Japanese: the novel by K?ɬ¥ji Suzuki (who also wrote “Ringu”) and the film by Hideo Nakata (who also directed “Ringu” and the Americanized version “The Ring”).

Overall, I liked this movie: I liked the way it looked and it was pretty entertaining. It wasn’t that scary, though, which was a bit disappointing, and the story was kind of hokey, but it was still pretty enjoyable. Jennifer Connelly was good, as was John C. Reilly, who I’m starting to really like. Tim Roth was pretty neat as usual, as was Pete Postlethwaite.

It was nice to see a horror movie that didn’t use a lot of obvious special effects. The water was pretty gross and cool but I would have liked to see it tie in more with Dahlia’s (Connelly) psychological issues. What I mean is, since water is so obviously important to the “horror” aspects of this story, I kind of expected some sort of relationship between what it does to the characters in the present and what it did to the characters in the past. I felt like the filmmaker wanted us to question how much of what we see was “real”, and how much was in Dahlia’s mind. If she had suffered some trauma having to do with water, then using water as the horror motif would make perfect sense, and could have been a clue as to whether these things were actually happening the way we saw them. The only thing that I can think of is that it was always raining during her flashbacks, but that could have been pathetic fallacy.

It was fairly creepy in some parts (though not scary) and with my cousin Ronnie grabbing my sleeve on one side and my aunt slapping my arm on the other, I think I had a pretty good theatre experience.

On a side note, I don’t like AMC theatres. On Saturday night when I was there to see Murderball, you could hear music leaking in from another theatre. Tonight, the sound was pretty bad and for a good chunk of the movie we could hear constant clicking as the surround speakers flickered on and off. They are also more expensive than the other theatres, so I’d expect their equipment to work.