practical. creepy. violent. a trifecta, except not.

On Writing, by Stephen King. Wow. If I had ever been an English teacher, or ever go on to teach English, I'm all over this book. It is single-handedly more practically useful and on top of that more interesting than any fiction-writing class I had in school. The first section is kind of a portrait of the writer as a young man, as it were, which is engaging and illuminating both; the latter half of the book is about the actual nuts and bolts of writing. Which is a far cry from the oft-repeated "we can't really teach you how to write" that was heard in school; but hell, they could have supplied the toolbox worth of advice and common sense that King offers. Ah well. Anyway, some really great stuff for anyone interested in writing; bonus trivia, there's even part of a first draft of 1408, with King's corresponding revising notes scanned over it.

1408, with John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson. Pretty solidly good horror. Though I still haven't figured out why they cast Jackson as the hotel manager, considering the completely opposite character in the corresponding short story the movie is based on; I guess maybe just for star power? Anyway, not really a jump in your face an scare you movie, but more old-school mess with your psyche horror. I enjoyed what they added to the story to make it more film-friendly, and though a couple of the special effects suddenly made me feel like I was watching an amusement park ride, generally it was fine - and that said, the subtle, regular old creepy-camera-angles did a lot of the legwork. Even had an ending that left me with goosebumps, which is pretty awesome, considering most horror endings these days. I'll note the random little thing I noticed wherein anytime Cusack's character hit anything while freaking out or angry, he had great martial form - I mean, what regular schmuck kicks a wall in general with a tight back-kick, or hits the door with a cutting elbow? Also, they still snuck something of a Dark Tower reference in there, I wonder if anyone else read the detail as such.

Reservoir Dogs, with, well, several now-famous actors. Like 1408, this mostly takes place within a single room; it also shares some of those unorthodox camera angles and tracking. And, that's the end of my conferral of the two films, I haven't really thought that out. Anyway, one thing I find really interesting about this iconic movie, besides the iconic images contained within, is that the main action and impetus of the story is never actually seen by the audience. What we see is purely what happened before and after the attempted robbery catastrophe, and I think that that frees up the narrative for its jumping around in the timeline. Instead of building up to what would have otherwise been the climax of the movie, the shootout at the jewelry store, the introduction and denouement become the substance of the story. Interesting! Abrupt ending, though.