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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Chance" data-source="post: 2421821" data-attributes="member: 2795">I question the idea that murder-suicides that ends the lives an entire family, while certainly awful, qualify as "commonplace." Regardless, even if such a murder-suicide took place in your neighborhood every single day, it would still qualify as a genuine tragedy rather than a mere "tragedy."The Grudge isn't that good of a movie precisely because it stuck too close to Ju-on, which also isn't that good of a movie. The narrative is too choppy, too full of holes incapable of being plugged by the shallow characters that inhabit both films. Sure, characters get killed in both of them, but who cares? The characters aren't sympathetic. They're not on screen long enough for the audience build enough empathy with them to overlook the fact that they're just characters in a movie.The American version should have taken the time and effort to recraft the fine details of the narrative into something more fully-fleshed and coherent, much in the same way as the American versions of the divorced parents and daughter in Dark Water come across as more human - and thus more believable - than they do the Japanese original.</blockquote>