Saw The Ring last night: holy crap good movie. A strike up my alley. Note: in my alley, True Romance is a more affecting Tarantino movie than Pulp Fiction, even though Romance has that unpleasent Aerosmith song stuck right in the center. That song is a cudgel that the heartless esoterics use to whack you over the head that you shouldn't like this. But Romance has Gary Oldman as the white black man we're happy to hate, the Hopper/Walken monologue battle, Christian Slater's low expectation love for the first beauty that ever looked his way. Slater's character is a loser who's spent his life doing nothing but watching movies and reading comics: and the best fantasy of the movie is that Tarantino convinces that all this research gave him street smarts. Next to a dream like that, Pulp is just fun banter.

The Ring is like Seven. It makes evil real for a real popcorn eating audience. Like Saving Private Ryan and Catch-22 make gut-shot soldiers real. They all seduce you with charismatic characters you want to be friends with, suck you in, lead you smiling around one bright corner after another. Except then you turn a corner and there's Hell looking at you.

Holy crap good movie.