Two tales of terror…
Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006)
Crap. Pure crap. I didn’t see the “twist” coming and I didn’t care. This was a real shame since Saw was such a fine example of the no-budget psych thriller.
Saw II was good, but Saw III was a waste of time. Its point is to make the audience cringe in disgust, but the fear never gets inside you. We went to bed laughing, but not in the same way that the brilliant Scream films make a person laugh while gettin’ skeert.
Saw should have been cut off (ouch!) after the second one. Oh, well. Ch-Ching.
An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006)
Al Gore should have been our president. The sad thing is that had he been the man who narrates An Inconvenient Truth, – passionate and funny – he might have.
I read the book a few months ago (here’s the link to that post), and most of my thoughts about the subject haven’t changed and since the movie hews pretty close to the book, there’s not much point in reiterating except to say that this is something we should all be concerned about.
The film version is gripping and disturbing, at times both heartbreaking and wickedly funny. Everything a good horror flick should be. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think about the Saw films in which “Jigsaw” places his victims in traps designed to make them face their own sins and crimes, each victim forced to face his or her own inconvenient truth. Escape is meant to be excruciatingly painful, but always possible. His victims, however, are rarely able to muster the strength of will to inflict the necessary pain on themselves to escape before it’s too late.
An Inconvenient Truth explains the workings of the trap we’re in and offers a way to escape, though Gore is much for comforting than “Jigsaw’s” mechanical puppet head. The question is, do we want to save ourselves badly enough?
Jigsaw’s infamous question, “Do you want to play a game?” has already been asked.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Great, if that’s the right word, comparison between the two films. Who needs horror when we’ve got the real world?
Inconvenient Truth was far scarier.