Monday, July 2, 2007

Day Watch

Night Watch was pretty good - an unexpected and welcome change of pace from Russia sci-fi. Day Watch is the second part in the trilogy and I was pretty unimpressed. I was pretty bored and by the end I didn't care about what was going on. Yep there's a bunch of strobe lights and Russians having a party and the witch from the first movie and...

Both the book and the movie fizzled out in the last third. Meh.

4/10

1408 (2007) dir. Mikael Hafstrom

John Cusack was John Cusack, Sam Jackson wore a nice suit, and Room 1408 was haunted.

Not much of a review but 1408 is exactly what it is - a haunted house movie with John Cusack in it. I knew what I was getting and got exactly what I was expecting. Some of the movie was spooky, a few jump scares, John Cusack says something cocky, Stephen King's "man dealing with fallout of family crisis" storyline, decent direction and cinematography, some neat spooky sound design, and a fairly forgettable score with a Carpenter's song as the "uh oh" trigger. I wasn't disappointed nor was I blown away.

1408 is a solid creepy ghost story/haunted house movie that moves a little slow at times - I think the audience we saw it with was bored most of the time. Worth seeing at a matinee if you can sneak off and hide one afternoon during the week.

Humourous sidenotes:

I accidentally wore my "Steven King Rules" Monster Squad shirt to the movie. Spoooooky! I still felt ashamed when I realized what I did. At least I wasn't the lady who wore a Serenity shirt to Slither.

The next day Amanda and I were having dinner at the diner next to our house and that Carpenters song came on! Spooooooky!