Hotel recommendations

I’d love to see the write-up Mike Enslin would do for Travelocity concerning his stay at the Dolphin Hotel.

I saw 1408 last night, and found it to be a smart adaptation. It conserves a lot of the original story, though it doesn’t have much of the bizarre voice from the telephone saying things like, “This is number 5”. They added a good backstory about Mike’s wife and daughter (his wife only appears in a single passing reference in the short story). There are a couple of nice establishing scenes early on, one in which Mike visits another “haunted” hotel and one where he shows up for a poorly attended booksigning.

John Cusack is phenomenal. I love the way you can tell he’s lying to the woman in the bookstore about his first novel. The writing is also smart enough that they don’t pound that point home–it is what it is and you take it at face value. The exchange between him and Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) is an entertaining game of chess. There are some funny camera angles. Why do we need to see him take his mail out of the mailbox from the inside? Perhaps only so that when that persecutive is used later on it won’t be as much of a surprise (I liked the shot of the tumblers inside the lock, for example). Some of the camera angle switches felt awkward, but that, too, might have been to conjure up a feeling of disorientation. One subtle touch I appreciated was the sound of his feet squeak-crunching on snow.

There’s one piece added to the story late in the film that I didn’t care much for—it felt like an extended cheat—but I liked the resolution they came up with. The movie ends with a nice gentle punch to the stomach. All in all, a solid B to B+. Stretching a short story to feature length can be a challenge and, for the most part, I think the additions enhanced the story (with the one exception I alluded to above).

I finished the first draft of my new short story. 5500 words. Now comes the real work—honing, shaping, forming, crafting and discovering the story. I was intrigued to find two unconscious influences on the tale toward the end of the first draft: The Monkey’s Paw and Rumpelstiltskin.

So was it just me or did Anderson Cooper look like he wondered what the hell he was doing spending an hour of his life dissecting Larry King’s interview with Paris Hilton?