Haunted Hotel Rooms, and one of the best finishing lines ever
1408
It was strange how this movie couldn't keep my attention, even with how half-assed I've been watching movies lately. It had a great cast--John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson leading--it had a good concept--The Shining confined to a single room--and it was by Stephen King, who's pretty consistent in putting out good, scary horror.
But for everybody who's pretty consistent, it means they have a little screwup every now and then, which is when we end up with stuff like Dreamcatcher... or this movie.
John Cusack plays a writer, practically obsessed with the afterlife and paranormal phenomena, who has decided to stay in the Dolphin Hotel's room 1408, home to 56 mysterious and often grisly deaths. The hotel manager, Samuel L. Jackson, quite plainly says that he doesn't want the writer to stay there, as nobody has lasted more than an hour within the cursed walls of 1408, and he "doesn't want to clean up the mess."
What follows is some exceptionally clever and creepy sequences that lead up to a horrifically anticlimactic ending, which seems strangely typical in horror movies nowadays. Just wait 'til I get to The Descent, I'll rant on about that ending for days.
1408 was not a bad movie by any means, but with how exceptional its cast was, I was expecting a lot more.
Air Force One
It took me long enough to figure out that this movie is basically Die Hard on a plane--and it makes perfect sense that this was former president Bill Clinton's favorite movie. Not only is it about a just, honest, and charismatic US President (Harrison Ford) leading the way globally, but it's also about a just, honest, and charismatic US President kicking the living shit out of a bunch of terrorists--terrorists led by evil incarnate, Gary Oldman. Not only does Han Solo/Indiana Jones/President Marshall take on the terrorists one at a time and slowly chip away at their nefarious plan, but we also get extra action from a flight of F-15s guarding the hijacked plane as we get the kind of aerial battle we last saw in Top Gun, only this three-minute action scene kind of eclipses everything in the Tom Cruise vehicle.
As usual in a Harrison Ford movie, I will honest-to-God straight-up say that no movie fight is ever as realistic as a Harrison Ford fight. Two guys shoving each other around, into walls, throwing the occasional punch that knocks the wind out of you and stumbling about--yes, that's what a fight really is between two average guys, and it's definitely not a pretty sight. It's not even the ending when Ford and Oldman face off in a brawl on Air Force One's parachute ramp, with Ford's ending one-liner--"GET OFF MY PLANE"--going right up there with the Yippie Ki-Yay Motherfuckers of film with how simple and effective it is, right before Oldman's neck snaps like celery. On that note, Oldman was so evil and merciless throughout the entire film that you don't feel bad at all when he gets his--hell, I felt a little bad when Alan Rickman was dropped out a window in Die Hard.
I was also surprised with how much CGI Wolfgang Petersen used throughout the movie--this is a director who's known for Das Boot and In the Line of Fire, two intelligent action movies that focused on traditional effects with solid writing, and while Air Force One maintains that level of quality in its admittedly simple story, it was just surprising to see tastefully-rendered CGI jets dueling around a massive CGI 747 without it looking ridiculously fake, which seems to be the current trend in action movie CGI. Go Rambo and your copious squib effects that look so much cooler than CGI blood.
Next up: Aladdin and American Psycho.
It was strange how this movie couldn't keep my attention, even with how half-assed I've been watching movies lately. It had a great cast--John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson leading--it had a good concept--The Shining confined to a single room--and it was by Stephen King, who's pretty consistent in putting out good, scary horror.
But for everybody who's pretty consistent, it means they have a little screwup every now and then, which is when we end up with stuff like Dreamcatcher... or this movie.
John Cusack plays a writer, practically obsessed with the afterlife and paranormal phenomena, who has decided to stay in the Dolphin Hotel's room 1408, home to 56 mysterious and often grisly deaths. The hotel manager, Samuel L. Jackson, quite plainly says that he doesn't want the writer to stay there, as nobody has lasted more than an hour within the cursed walls of 1408, and he "doesn't want to clean up the mess."
What follows is some exceptionally clever and creepy sequences that lead up to a horrifically anticlimactic ending, which seems strangely typical in horror movies nowadays. Just wait 'til I get to The Descent, I'll rant on about that ending for days.
1408 was not a bad movie by any means, but with how exceptional its cast was, I was expecting a lot more.
Air Force One
It took me long enough to figure out that this movie is basically Die Hard on a plane--and it makes perfect sense that this was former president Bill Clinton's favorite movie. Not only is it about a just, honest, and charismatic US President (Harrison Ford) leading the way globally, but it's also about a just, honest, and charismatic US President kicking the living shit out of a bunch of terrorists--terrorists led by evil incarnate, Gary Oldman. Not only does Han Solo/Indiana Jones/President Marshall take on the terrorists one at a time and slowly chip away at their nefarious plan, but we also get extra action from a flight of F-15s guarding the hijacked plane as we get the kind of aerial battle we last saw in Top Gun, only this three-minute action scene kind of eclipses everything in the Tom Cruise vehicle.
As usual in a Harrison Ford movie, I will honest-to-God straight-up say that no movie fight is ever as realistic as a Harrison Ford fight. Two guys shoving each other around, into walls, throwing the occasional punch that knocks the wind out of you and stumbling about--yes, that's what a fight really is between two average guys, and it's definitely not a pretty sight. It's not even the ending when Ford and Oldman face off in a brawl on Air Force One's parachute ramp, with Ford's ending one-liner--"GET OFF MY PLANE"--going right up there with the Yippie Ki-Yay Motherfuckers of film with how simple and effective it is, right before Oldman's neck snaps like celery. On that note, Oldman was so evil and merciless throughout the entire film that you don't feel bad at all when he gets his--hell, I felt a little bad when Alan Rickman was dropped out a window in Die Hard.
I was also surprised with how much CGI Wolfgang Petersen used throughout the movie--this is a director who's known for Das Boot and In the Line of Fire, two intelligent action movies that focused on traditional effects with solid writing, and while Air Force One maintains that level of quality in its admittedly simple story, it was just surprising to see tastefully-rendered CGI jets dueling around a massive CGI 747 without it looking ridiculously fake, which seems to be the current trend in action movie CGI. Go Rambo and your copious squib effects that look so much cooler than CGI blood.
Next up: Aladdin and American Psycho.