1408

Dear God, what hath John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson wrought?

The formerly reliable Cusack plays a paranormal travel writer who specializes in debunking ghostly occurrences at hotels, motels and creepy country inns. He used to be a "real writer", but he has become kinda stuck in this rut of being a professional ghost hunter. He's also a cynical bastard, you betcha. Until he encounters real terror in room 1408 at the legendary Dolphin Hotel in New York City. Those numbers add up to 13, by the way. Isn't that clever?

Excuse me while I yawn.

Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh-owwwaaaahhhhhhrooohhhwrrr!!!

Sorry about that. Couldn't help myself. Besides, that yawn is probably as good of a review as you are gonna find for this, um, er...yawner. See what I did there?

You know there was a time and a place when I would watch pretty much any piece of crap that John Cusack or Sam Jackson produced. I probably would even watch them produce an actual piece of crap, but we aren't talking about my bathroom fetishes here. No, we are talking about bad cinema. And this, my friends, is truly bad cinema.

I still had high hopes, though. I love these two actors and I love ghost stories. I even kinda love Stephen King who wrote the story that the movie is based upon. Or at least I used to. Back in the day. And he had done "bad hotels" before, and done it well. Like I said, I had high hopes.

So what went wrong? Was it the faux yellow and red hued atmosphere? Was it the kitschy inclusion of every ghostly trick in the book? Radios turning on by themselves, candies appearing on the pillows, toilet paper re-folding itself, pictures dislodging themselves from the wall, a sudden bout of deafness followed by painful encounters with a window pane and some scalding hot water. It all feels like it has been done before. Better, I might add.

Nah. You know what I really think it was? It was John Cusack.

I just don't think he was the right guy for this role. I kept imagining someone who I believed was more cynical, more beat down by life in the role. Clive Owen in the beginning of Children of Men, maybe. He also become too manic too quickly, I thought. And then he started accepting it. And then manic again. There was no slow dissolve into madness like there was with "The Shining". He just sank right into it. That might be the fault of the screenwriter and the director more than the star, but Cusack certainly bought into it.

And I couldn't help but feel that it would have been better if it downplayed the SFX and maybe was in black in white. Or in French. I dunno, but it could have used something.

Another thing. It wasn't scary. Or at least it didn't scare me. Lord knows I wanted it to. I love a good scary flick. All cheap special effects with no payoff. Why did some of the ghosts look like bad movie projections on the wall? Was that supposed to be scary? Was the excessive heat or the chilling cold? Any of it?

Turns out he was more haunted by his own personal ghosts than the not-so-scary ones in Room 1408.

Or was he?

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha...um, er Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh-owwwaaaahhhhhhrooohhhwrrr!!!

Sorry. Yawned again.

Vantage Point

I seem to be watching a lot of movies lately that beg/borrow/steal from Akira Kurasawa. This time it was Vantage Point that gets the Rashomon treatment. Badly.

It's actually not a awful movie. Some A-list or former A-list actors are littered through the film. Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver (in an extraordinarily useless role...must have needed a new bathroom in her house or something), Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, etc... All big shots trying to make it work in this ensemble piece. Yet the only character I seemed to care about was Whitaker's eyewitness to the tragic events portrayed in the film.

You know what I hate? I hate when I can spot the actor playing the bad guy right away and it turns out that I am right. Took me all of 3 minutes to figure this movie out. That is either a new personal record for me or it is damned close. The obvious choice had me doubting myself all through the picture until...duh! There it is! Holy fuck is that awful!

Like I said, the Forest Whitaker sub-plot was interesting to watch, but the rest of it? Feh. Watch the first five minutes and see if you can guess who the bad guy is. Then watch the last five minutes of it to see if you are right. I bet you will be. And I saved you an hour and half of viewing.

You are most welcome!

Doomsday

I had high hopes for this one for a number of reasons. First off, it was written and directed by Neil Marshall. The man responsible for Dog Soldiers and The Descent, two terrific films. Secondly, it is Marshall's homage to films like Escape From New York and the Mad Max trilogy. Films I love! Genres I love!

But this one disappointed.

It started off great. A killer plague wipes out most of the residents of Scotland forcing the U.K. to totally isolate the region by wall to the South and by a sea blockade of mines around the rest of the nation. After close to 30 years it is discovered that the plague still exists and that there are survivors living in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

A girl who escaped (sans one eye) from Scotland before it was sealed off is now a grown up special forces hottie. She is chosen to lead a team into Scotland to finds some survivors to halt the spread of the plague in London. Since there are survivors there must be a cure, right?

First she encounters a group living a very Mad Max-ish existence in Glasgow. Why is it that as soon as a bunch of people die in a Nuclear War or a monstrous plague, the survivors begin piercing things and shaving their heads into Mohawks? Anyway, these guys are bad. And they are cannibals. Which makes no sense since there appears to be plenty of cows running around the countryside. But I've never tried human flesh, so I could be talking out of my ass.

The team later encounters a second group of survivors led by Malcolm MacDowell, and this is where the film lost me. This group of survivors, in under 30 years, have reverted to living in the Middle Ages. Castles, swords, armor, horses and bad personal hygiene. You get the picture.

Not sure where Marshall was going with this particular homage. I get the Mad Max references and the Escape From New York references, but this one escapes me. Knightriders by George Romero, maybe? I dunno.

I do know that I was thoroughly enjoying the film until it went there. REALLY enjoying it. But as soon as that happened I was really let down. And even though it went back to the Mad Max theme fairly quickly, it was too late. For me.

I get that it was supposed to be just a little bit o' brain candy for those that love these kind of films. And lord knows, I'm one of them. But the Medieval shit just was a bit too much for me. Shame.

I Know Who Killed Me

You've heard the stories.

A movie so bad that it almost makes you cry. A movie so bad that it defies all logical reasoning. A movie so bad that you almost can't believe your senses. A movie so bad that you wonder if you actually died and went to Hell and Satan himself made you watch while his minions skinned you alive.

This is that movie.

Lindsay Lohan, channeling Elizabeth Berkeley from Showgirls, plays a young woman who dreams of herself or someone who looks exactly like her who is being tortured at the hands of a madman. But everything that happens to her double also happens to her. Including the radical removal of her right hand and her right leg below the knee. It's okay though. She gets some really badass bionic prosthetics to make up for the loss. Seriously.

She winds up in the hospital where her parents come to claim her. But she has never seen them before. They think she is their suburban perfect teen aged daughter. An aspiring writer. She thinks she's the stripper daughter of a heroin addict who died years ago. Oh, sweet agony...which one is right?

So is she crazy? Is she making it all up? Has her traumatic torture forced her to create an alter-ego to deal with the pain? Or does she have a stigmatic twin? A twin sister who experiences all the same pain and feelings that she does, and vice versa. The mind boggles.

While the mind is, um, boggling, the film is degenerating into an absolute fucking mess. The editing, the soundtrack, the unintentionally hilarious tension. I particularly liked how stripper Lindsay takes writer Lindsay's boyfriend up to her room right in front of her "mother" for a bout of kinky double amputee sex. Just to prove she's not who he thinks she is. Huh?

Oh, and they used the clever "try to borrow a condom from the FBI" ploy to sneak her out of the house. That one never gets old.

The only way I made it through this pile of crap was utter laziness and a bout of stomach flu/head cold. Maybe I was having fever related delusions. That would be a rational explanation.

I mean, they couldn't have made a movie this freaking bad. Or could they have? Hmm.

Harsh Times

Hard to include a film in this blog that features two of my favorite current actors. Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez. But I gotta do it. This film was truly disappointing.

OK, picture this. Bale and Rodriguez are native Los Angelenos. You can buy that for Rodriguez even though he is of Puerto Rican descent and from Chicago. Bale, even though he is a great actor, is a bit harder to buy. Whenever he slips into the old "homey" and "esse" crap...nah, I don't get it. I mean, I guess that's how the white boys from the 'hood in LA talk. I wouldn't know. It just sounded weird to me.

Bale is veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He's been a part of some fucked up shit over there, and it seems he was a part of some fucked up shit over here even before he went. Everyone they run into during the film refers to him as the craziest mother-fucker that ever went down. He is trying to become a cop with the LAPD, but they are stringing him along because of his psych profile. The exact reason that the LAPD don't want him is the reason that the Feds (Homeland Security) do want him. Because he follows orders and doesn't care about the body count.

But before he can start his new job, he hangs out on the streets of LA with his buddy Rodriguez who is looking for work. They drink all day, riding around in Bale's faux police cruiser. They even roll some drug dealers and some hardened criminals while they are at it. As if there were no repercussions to worry about at all. Of course, they wind up being terribly wrong about that.

Good acting, even if Bale may have been miscast, decent storyline, hard as nails life on the streets of LA. So what went wrong with this flick?

I dunno, but something did. The characters weren't very likable. Bale was a psycho and a bully. Rodriguez was a little crazy himself, and he was weak-willed to the point of following Bale into just about any nutso situation. But I've watched plenty of films where I haven't liked the main characters and I have still enjoyed them. So it wasn't that.

The writer and director is the same guy that did Training Day, and this film had a lot of that same atmosphere. Just not as well done. Maybe because Ethan Hawke's character in that film was actually someone you could root for. Maybe.

Maybe it was just the sheer hopelessness of the situations that these characters kept getting themselves into. Maybe it was just LA. I've never been, and I've never really had an urge to go. It just seems so grimy and violent as it is portrayed on film. And I grew up a stone's throw from NYC, so I know a little about grimy and violent. I definitely do have an East Coast bias. I tend to prefer films that take place in NYC or Boston or even Chicago. Once you get past the Mississippi River, all bets are off.

But I watched this film and I kept waiting for it to deliver. I kept waiting for something that would make me go "Wow". But it never did. It wasn't an awful film. It was merely average. And sometimes a mediocre film that could have been great is worse than a bad film that never aspired to be anything other than what it is. At least you can have a good time making fun of those bad films.

This one just disappointed. And that's a shame given the pedigree of the participants.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls

Um.

Well, you see...

..there was, um.

Well...the refrigerator. Yeah...um, and then the, um...

...my God! WTF with this Mutt kid?

Um, and the...

...Holy crap! What happened to Karen Allen?

Um, well...it looks...wait, what is that?

Monkeys and aliens and a wedding!!!!

What the fuck!




(PS - Honestly, I kinda didn't mind this one as much as most. It sucked, but it was better than the average episode of Heroes. But when they encountered the giant ants or Siafu in South America...well, the geek in me knew better. These ants are only found in Africa. Even the name Indy used, Siafu, was given by the Maasai. This is just plain unforgivable. - Earl)

Vacancy

After watching this, I honestly didn't expect to find myself on here blogging about it. I enjoyed it, y'see. It's simple, short, very direct and quite amusing. Its stars are sufficiently no-faced (Luke 'Everyman' Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) that it doesn't matter who they are; I suspect I would have loved this if it had had two no-names in it, but that's by the by - it doesn't, so let's look at what it is.

Oh, spoilers ahead.

A couple's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. They end up at a nearby motel, where strange things start happening; banging on the door adjoining the next room, on the front door, some other weirdness. They complain to the manager, he says he's sort it, blokey goes back to their room and puts a videotape on, is shocked to see it's a rather crude film of people getting the shit kicked out of them and killed, then realises the films were all shot in the very room he's sitting in.

Then he starts to get worried. Fair enough.

What follows is the ideal introduction to the horror thriller for pre-teens – pretty Hollywood faces in a film short enough for any attention span (80 minutes including credits!), no major on-screen violence at all, and everyone good survives (except the panicky policeman, who you knew would die as soon as he appeared). It's reasonably imaginative, has a few jumps in it that are telegraphed from far away, and there's very, very little on-screen blood. It has a small cast too, which makes movies like this much more effective.

So why is it on here? Because Luke Wilson's character fucking lives, that's why. He's stabbed in the stomach, I'd say right around the liver; that's fatal pretty quickly without major surgery and hospitalisation. But no. It's very dark when he's stabbed, and yet Beckinsale, when she comes out of her hiding place after a good kip and kills all the bad men, finds him weak but alive right where he collapsed and crawled to after being stabbed.

The movie lost me right there. Stabbings are more often fatal than gunshot wounds; one in the stomach with a reasonable-sized knife, left for a few hours on the ground… Deader than shit, Luke. I suspect there's a version of this script out there where he dies, when the budget was probably $15million lower, but that's long gone. I bought into this movie, and it sold me out, and for that, dear friends, it's a MOVIEGRENADE!

Oh, kudos to Frank Whaley though - he did just fine with a very limited and concise script. Yay Frank!