Shanghai

 Shanghai has a fascinating history. A focal point for the opium wars, control over it was strong-armed from the Chinese by foreign powers during the second half of the eighteenth century - the British, mostly, at the beginning, but other countries with imperialist designs (USA, France, Japan) soon joined in and basically set up wholly international suburbs around the city. While the city was nominally controlled by the Chinese, it was a sort of international plaything until it was invaded by the Japanese during the second world war.

 A political spy thriller set there just before the US joined WW2 is an incredible pitch, seeing as how both the Germans and the Japanese both had a presence in the city. But Shanghai, the movie, had a seriously troubled production; Permits to shoot on-location were revoked by the Chinese after pre-production had started. This forced the shoot to move to Thailand and the UK, further investors had to be brought in to cover ballooning costs, and let's not forget that this is a mainline Weinstein company production; The full extent of Harvey's sins was yet to be known, but they were still a legendarily meddlesome company. The finished film, when it was finally widely released seven years after completion, is a bit of a mess.

 Paul Soames (John Cusack) is a jaded, worldly spy in the Ian Fleming mould, sent to Shanghai to bring in a rogue spy acquaintance (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) at the behest of their handler (David Morse). When the spy turns up dead, Soames dives into the city's underworld to try to avenge his friend, and discovers that he was following up on some troubling information unearthed by an opium-addicted informant with ties to the head of local Japanese intelligence (Ken Watanabe).

 While all that's going on, he also tangles himself in the business of a local Triad boss (Chow Yun-fat) and his beautiful wife (Gong Li).

 

 The way things tie up is less than satisfactory, with the characters crossing paths in extremely contrived ways (Soames seems to luck into many of his major findings), desultory 'action' moments that drop Soames into a shootout solely to give the film some excitement, logic be damned, and a deeply suspect final act that feels completely at odds with the rest of the film's tone and even its genre. I've liked other scripts by writer Hossein Amini but this one, whether by design or compromise, is not one of his best.

 Pulpy noir and wartime movie references are thick; There's a lot of The Third Man and more than a little Casablanca in this movie's DNA. But director Mikael Håfström loads the movie with stylistic signifiers (An assassin shooting someone only shown by his shadow, Dutch angles, overwrought voiceover) that seem come off less as a homage than tacky.

 It's a lush, often handsome, clearly expensive production that nonetheless is made to feel weirdly low-rent by things like an over-reliance on TV-movie-style captions for the locations, bad editing, some desultory film-making, and an overuse of its claustrophobic exterior sets. This last one is forgivable, given the film's production troubles and how good the sets are; Production designer Jim Clay  pulled off an admirable job, as did cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who manages to achieve some beautifully atmospheric shots (a shipspotting diversion is a highlight).

 The main problem, though, is the characters. The protagonist in particular is a gaping void at the story's heart, a cypher who uses Bondian nonchalance to mask a lack of characterization. Cusack is a good actor who's really good at putting on a blank expression, and that talent gets a huge workout in this movie. He manages to imbue Soames with a little of his fidgety, nervy energy and some intelligence, but as written the character just doesn't seem to have much of an inner life, however  much the glib voiceover narration may protest.
 And the extremely stacked international cast barely gets to make an impression despite involving some of the biggest stars outside of Hollywood. It's all surface-level; Watanabe gets to show off his wounded dignity, Chow Yun-fat his charisma and poise (even if his one action scene is deeply shitty), and Gong Li's femme fatale is mostly there to... well, look beautiful in glamorous dresses, her character oddly inert despite being deeply enmeshed (in oblique ways) in the plot.

 It's not terrible film, per se, just stilted, staid and disappointingly compromised. A huge waste of an incredible setting and premise, a great cast, and some incredible sets. Ces't le vie.

1408

 Weird how memory works. I remembered 1408 as a CGI disaster, a mess of crappy, cheap looking computer effects. Rewatching it now, I realize maybe I was thinking of a short, and yes, very crappy scene of flames licking the outside of a hotel close to the end; Other than that there are a few other visual effect here and there, but the vast majority are practical- and pretty good! So I owe it an apology.
 Unfortunately, revisiting it didn't lead me to revise my opinion on the movie by much; I think I disliked it a lot less this time around, but it's still a dumb, loud, cheesy mess. A fun one, at least.

 Based on a short and much simpler Stephen King story, 1408 follows Mike Enslin (John Cusack), an occult writer who goes around staying in supposedly haunted places and writes up reviews for them. At least ten years before the glut of  movies about paranormal investigators getting more than they bargained for that are all over the place these days; Mike's a writer, though, so that means it's not found footage.
 Mike catches wind of a haunted hotel room in New York, and his interest is piqued when the hotel manager refuses to allow him to book the room. Oh, it's on: next thing you know he's at the lobby of the hotel, and Gerald Olin, the hotel manager (Sam Jackson, making a big impression with a very small role) is giving Mike the rundown on room 1408 straight from a thick file full of scene-of-the-crime pictures. Turns out, 1408's got an impressive bodycount: people go there to kill themselves, or just die of 'natural causes' which include drowning in a bowl of chicken soup. It is, as Olin explains, an evil fucking room. Mike is unimpressed, convinced it's all a hoax, so Gerald ends up relenting and lets Mike in, reckoning he won't last an hour.

 The room itself seems unremarkable at first - there's a bunch of good lines lifted straight from the story about the nature of hotel rooms, and Cusack makes Mike's gruff scepticism and dickishness very entertaining to watch. There's a very effectively creepy scene early on - probably the best part of the movie - as Mike investigates the scenes of old deaths in the room and gruesome pictures of the corpses from Olin's file are superimposed over old bloodstains. Very cool.
 It doesn't take long before strange hotel-themed supernatural stuff starts happening; mints appear on pillows, toilet rolls are magically replaced - you know, classic horror! And then The Carpenters (gasp!) start blasting on the radio, which is cliché Hollywood horror code for shit's gonna get spooky.

Watch out, goofy hammer maniac's gonna gitcha!

 The haunting keeps getting more and more punishing; Injured, seeing ghosts jumping out windows and hallucinating both traumatic scenes from his past and attacks from a silly-looking hammer maniac, Mike's ready to check out after only a few minutes. But he's trapped in the room, and his attempts at escape keep getting foiled in increasingly surrealistic ways; I liked the bit where a floorplan of the hotel floor just shows room 1408, surrounded by darkness.

 Once things start moving they go over the top pretty quickly. There's a bit of psychological horror as the room forces Mike to confront a pretty horrible family tragedy (completely absent in the original story) but mostly it's a series of reality-bending attacks on Mike's sanity. The movie invests a lot of energy on some of these with quick, roving camera moves and making poor Cusack jump around like a mad man, but for me at least the gamble doesn't fully pay off - instead of the spookablast impact I they were going for, these overactive scenes feel manic and forced, and end up making everything feel faintly ridiculous instead. More Jan de Bont than Reimi. Some of the practical effects are pretty good, though, especially when the room starts destroying itself.
 Cusack gives a game performance, overacting and randomly doing mundane actions with additional athletic flourishes as if he was trying to overthrow Nic Cage - it's not a good performance, exactly, but it's very entertaining to watch, and it adds to the films weirdly endearing cheesiness.

 Despite all the gruesome happenings in the room over the years, there is next to no blood and guts on display, which is a surprisingly restrained choice for a movie that otherwise goes for Poltergeist-levels of supernatural mayhem (and would be completely justified in indulging in a bit of gore, given how many people met grisly ends in the room; Poltergeist certainly didn't have that excuse, but Hooper's gonna Hooper).
 The plot is nonsense and full of dumb developments and clichés - from bleeding walls to evil doppelgangers to a hallucinated fake-out of a successful escape, but it does have fun ideas and ends up with a satisfying conclusion*, and there's enough weirdness on display here and there that I can't really hate on it too much. This is one of King's favorite adaptations of his work, which, given how poorly so much of his stuff was treated in the '90s and '00s, makes sense. He was even happy with how well the added backstory to the main character turned out. I wouldn't go that far, but it's understandable why they felt the need to add it.
 ...Yeah, I definitely don't hate it. Glad I gave it another chance. Good job everyone involved, I guess, and sorry I didn't appreciate the effects more the first time around.

 *: there's a Director's Cut with an alternate ending that's a bit darker and a whole lot better. It's available on youtube.