Well, Sukie and I sat down last night and watched Gothika. While I certainly understand the title now (having seen the movie), I am still puzzled, some 8 hours later, as to whether or not it was a good film.

Right now, I’d say the movie is teetering. It certainly was a jumpy and frightening film, but I don’t know exactly what kind of movie it was.

For the first part of the movie, it was like we were watching her go crazy, and it literally felt like we were inside her madness. The movie takes an unexpected turn, and it seems that she becomes much more sane, and it is the rest of the world that is going mad.

As a thriller/horror movie … my personal philosophy is that these movies are like playing poker – the story teller obviously has a really good hand, and he should let you know he does, but he should not let you see the contents of his hand until the 5th act, when he slowly and exactly places each card in his hand on the table, face up, in a suspenseful manner.

The Ring managed to do this very well, I think, and as each card was revealed, each one put us in the protagonist’s position – shocked, but rewarded.

Without giving away too much, Gothika seems like it isn’t sure what kind of card game it is playing. There’s a few cards that are shown in the first half of the movie, and some that come flying out of nowhere, and some that are merely plot devices.

I wonder how many times this script got sent back for rewriting …

Nevertheless, it was a fairly decent film.

Afterwards we watched a few minutes of Dirty Dancing, which cleaned my mind of the horror-movie-ness, except that after we stopped watching and felt like our minds were clear, I uttered a line from Gothika, “You can’t trust someone who thinks you’re crazy” – it was like some kind of reflex …

Well, it creeped out Sukie all over again, but we went to bed anyway.