editorial

Don’t Call Us...

Chances are, you haven’t seen Chakushin ari, the Japanese horror film on which this month’s One Missed Call is based.

But you may have heard the cellphone ringtone that’s central to its plot — a plinky plunky children’s tune that’s also known as the “ringtone of death.”

In the film, and its new American counterpart, when someone answers a call with this eerie ringtone (which isn’t their normal ring) the voice on the other end is their own, coming from the moment of their death.

Creepy, yes. But apparently not so creepy as to dissuade scores of the film’s fans from seeking out the ringtone of death and making it their own. (You can find it all over YouTube, among other places.) That’s like the opposite of turning on all the lights in your house after watching a scary movie. You know, to get the villain out of your head.

These kids (yes, I’m going to make the snap judgement that most of them are kids) want to prolong the psychological terror. They invite the movie’s villain into their everyday lives, encouraging the killer to leave the screen and enjoy a vacation home inside their phone.

It’s that sort of psychological tension that attracted Edward Burns to the remake. He says he liked the script because it reminded him of psychological thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Back, movies he loved when he was a film student. Read “Last Call,” for more of Burns’ insights into One Missed Call.

From one extreme to the other, Burns also appears in this month’s romantic-comedy 27 Dresses. He plays Katherine Heigl’s boss — and crush — who ends up marrying her sister. The pain is compounded by the fact that Heigl’s character has been a bridesmaid 27 times, but never married. Check out “Maid to Order,” to find out how making this movie finally inspired Heigl to get serious about planning her own wedding.

Be Kind Rewind has Jack Black playing a guy who accidentally erases all of the videotapes in his friend’s store and then sets outto replace them with low-budget adaptations he shoots himself.

In “Tale of the Tape,” Black talks about playing Muhammad Ali in When We Were Kings and one of the guys from Ghostbusters… although he’s not sure which one.

And in “Spell Bound” Canadian actor Marie-Josée Croze talks about the strange experience of delivering most of her lines straight into the camera for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

—Marni Weisz