Numbers

1408

10

Hello, or as they say in binary code, 01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111! Maybe I’m still feeling spaced out from last week’s stoner cinema selections, but I thought it’d be fun to explore another trippy phenomenon that makes my head spin: numbers. Numbers are simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, to this learning disabled critic. Math always was and always will be the hardest subject for me, but this is not for a lack of effort or appreciation of the art and science of numbers. Reading and writing were always my strong suits, because I happen to (mostly) understand the subjective, relative, everchanging language of these topics, but numbers have always eluded me. I think the certainty of numbers is astounding—how every math problem and equation has (typically) one correct answer every single time. And people who can speak the language of numbers, people who can magically conjure up the solution to each mathematical scenario they’re faced with, are like superheroes or freaks to me. I think it is legitimately cool that numbers were both invented by human beings, and yet… sort of already existed naturally. The symmetry and asymmetry of nature does not bother to learn to count our way, it does so on its own: trees have rings that indicate their age, the tides of the ocean have a certain rhythmic pattern, sedimentary layers of earth visibly reflect how they have morphed and multiplied over time. If I’m not making full sense, I’ll reiterate that numbers and math are the polar opposite of my thing, so even describing them is a Herculean effort (to quote a math teacher who told me how hard her Algebra II class would be for me) but I am still drawn to the satisfying, frustrating, seemingly limitless possibilities of numbers. We depend upon them to tell the time, to measure distance, to attach specific meanings to specific metrics within specific cultures that can decide how one is perceived and treated. How much you weigh, how much money you make, how much square footage you have in your home, how many sexual partners you’ve had, how much time we have spent on this planet and how much time we have left with it—numbers hold such significance and importance that it truly gives me a headache to think deeply about. I even attempted to do some research on the history of numbers and numerology this week, and I now feel even more numb to the mystery of numbers. So instead, tonight I’ll stay in my lane and not count on myself to understand the numbers too much, as we explore films with numbers in the titles. There are plenty of sequels with a number 2, 3, or 4 in the title, 2 Fast 2 Furious, for example, but tonight isn’t a sequel double feature. Plenty of films reference numbers in their titles: Se7en, I Am Number Four, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Third Man, 10 Things I Hate About You, Zero Dark Thirty, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, 30 Days of Night, The Fifth Element, Oceans Eleven, 12 Angry Men, The Sixth Sense, 12 Years a Slave, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Ten Commandments, the Three Colors trilogy, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and, more vaguely, What’s your Number?—which is the most underrated romcom of all time in my opinion. But tonight I’m just focusing on films with a title consisting solely of numbers/digits. The first one of these films I remember seeing is a sad movie called 9, about a group of ragdolls in a post-apocalyptic world that was for some reason made for children. This is not to be confused with the movie Nine, a movie musical starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Fergie, which was confusingly released the exact same year. I recall the highly-parodied film 300 and the highly-revered 1917, but I had little interest in watching these, plus I’ve already read and seen 1984. What I decided to watch instead is a horror film (shocker) that I’ve been wanting to see for a very long time called 1408.

Mikael Håfström’s 2007 film 1408, based off of Stephen King’s short story of the same name, begins as all good scary stories do, on a dark and stormy night. Braving this abysmal weather is Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a cynical writer who travels around the country, staying in haunted hotels and other establishments that are allegedly creepy or supernatural. He rolls his eyes through a meeting with an old couple who own a supposedly haunted bed and breakfast, as they give the same hokey spiel he’s heard a million times. If there are ghosts, Mike has never encountered one, and he seems annoyed to have landed in this particular niche, and that he’s been reduced to writing books like “10 Haunted Hotels”, “10 Haunted Graveyards”, and “10 Haunted Lighthouses.” Mike is clearly haunted by his own demons, but he goes about his normal routine anyway in Venice Beach, checking his P.O. box for new brochures that implore him to come visit and write about them. In one particular batch of mail, Mike finds a postcard from the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, that contains the message: “Don’t enter room 1408.” Like the good, curious writer he is, Mike calls up the Dolphin Hotel and attempts to book a night in room 1408, but the concierge says it’s unavailable. “I haven’t told you the date” Mike says, but the man on the phone continues to refuse, so Mike has to get crafty. He has his literary agent (Tony Shalhoub) and attorney (William Armstrong) find a loophole—a civil rights law that states that no hotel can deny him access, so they’re forced to give in. “But it’s in New York, Mike, are you sure you wanna come here with all that happened?” his agent asks, suggesting that Mike has more than just a mysterious hotel room to face. When he arrives at the Dolphin Hotel, he is astonished by its bustling normalcy, and how it doesn’t fit the mold for the dingy, desperate establishments he typically frequents. He is immediately faced with more pushback upon asking for his room key, and is introduced to the manager of the hotel, Mr. Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), who spends a great deal of time trying to talk Mike out of staying. Mr. Olin tries to update him to a penthouse suite, he even suggests that he stay in room 1404 since it’s the exact same layout as 1408 and no one would know the difference, but Mike is adamant about staying in this room. Even when Mr. Olin tells him that no one has lasted more than an hour in that room, how 4 people have died there while under his watch, and 56 total people have died there over the years—including both natural deaths (heart attacks and strokes) and very unnatural deaths (like a man drowning in his soup, or a man who castrated himself before committing suicide, not to mention all of the “jumpers” this room has had)—and still Mike is persistent. Mike explains how he’s stayed in countless haunted places and has managed just fine, how even the phantom of this room can’t get to him. Mr. Olin warns him, with a disbelieving laugh, “I never said ‘phantom.’ Whatever’s in 1408 isn’t any of that. It’s an evil fucking room.” Olin rides the elevator with Mike, but won’t even get out onto the 14th floor with him, making one last effort to change his mind, but Mike is too stubborn, and now too curious to give in. When he first enters 1408, almost immediately he says “Is this it?” as he takes note of the mediocre regularity of its layout, design, and furniture, none of it frightening him off the bat. Mike wanders around the room, describing his observations to a small recorder, when he is startled by the sudden sound of the radio alarm clock blaring “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters. It doesn’t take much to make the gorgeous voice of Karen Carpenter sound haunting, but 1408 really utilizes this song to a hypnotic, deeply unsettling degree, as it becomes more distorted while it plays over and over and over again. This is just the beginning of a night of terror for Mike Enslin, as this room learns about what makes him tick and what will specifically drive him insane. This room defies logic, physics, and all goodness. As Mike tells his recorder, “Hotels are a naturally creepy place—how many people have slept in that bed before you, how many were sick, how many lost their minds?”, but this room goes far beyond the normal realm of creepy—the temperature changes on its own, the phone rings and whomever is on the other line doesn’t seem real, the walls crack and ooze blood, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the tv begins to play some of Mike’s old family movies, where he is forced to reckon with the traumas he’s attempted to dull with booze and cheap notoriety. 1408 is a film I’ve been wanting to see for years—I can vividly remember seeing the trailer as a child and feeling frightened just from that glimpse—but I still went into my viewing with the understanding that it might not meet my adolescent expectations. And while there were some lame effects and a few clunky lines of dialogue, I actually really enjoyed 1408, and how it felt like old-school Stephen King or the Twilight Zone in its creative flavors of torment. John Cusack always plays these salt-of-the-earth, sometimes scummy characters, and this film found a way to expand on this archetype a bit. I love how Stephen King operates within some of the most simplistic premises ever created—how ghosts and demons and corporeal monsters are not needed to create a horrifying atmosphere when the human mind can come up with plenty of horrors on its own with the mere suggestion of “evil.” If you’re a horror buff like myself, it’s unlikely that 1408 will terrify you, but it might charm you with its innovative use of space and careful suspension-building. If Samuel L. Jackson told me not to enter a room, I would personally listen to him, but maybe that makes me a less courageous writer than our protagonist. I won’t tell you how this film ends, but there’s no telling which version of the film you’ll even encounter if you watch it because they filmed four different endings. But that’s only part of the freakish fun of this film, as I found out in my research all of the different numbers that I missed—like the fact that 1+4+0+8=13, the address of the fictional Dolphin Hotel is 2254 (which equals 13 when added together), the runtime of this film is 1 hour 40 minutes 8 seconds long, the protagonist’s name consists of 13 letters, and even the date this film was released (June 2007, 6+7)=13. I’m not even a number nerd I think that’s fun!

What was also fun, but not nearly as clever, was tonight’s next film: Blake Edwards’ 1979 film 10. Blake Edwards is known for his colorfully kooky, big-budget comedies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Victor/Victoria, and the Pink Panther series, but 10 may just be his most culturally-significant film. This film officially coined the phrase “she’s a 10”—the top level of the most basic way to judge women’s appearances, on a scale from 1-10. It’s so deeply ingrained into our Western cultural language that we might forget just how sexist and bizarre it is, but the film 10 is here as a loud, silly reminder of this hot-or-not metric’s chauvinistic beginnings. 10—or as I’d call it, Male Gaze: the Movie—introduces us to the freshly-42-year-old George Webber (Dudley Moore) just as his girlfriend, Samantha (Julie Andrews), throws him a surprise birthday party. As far as mid-life crises go, George is set up pretty sweetly: he’s a rich, famous, award-winning songwriter dating a rich, famous singer, and they live in one of the hey-days of sparkling, sunny Los Angeles. He can even get his kicks from his large telescope in the backyard of his Hollywood hills home, where he often spies on the sexcapades of his younger, hotter neighbors. The issue is: he’s aging, he’s bored, and like most men, he lacks the emotional intelligence to communicate his feelings properly, so instead he fantasizes about young women whom he sees around town. But his fantasy turns into a full-on obsession when locks eyes with a woman at a stop sign—a gorgeous blonde woman (Bo Derek) on her way to her wedding. He proceeds to stalk her: following her to her wedding and covertly watching from behind a large flower arrangement, making an appointment with this woman’s dentist father to learn where she’s honeymooning, and eventually booking a flight to that exact destination in Mexico. While his girlfriend, his songwriting partner (Hugh Webber), and everyone he interacts with thinks George has gone mad, I found that the reactions to his behavior were actually rather tame considering all of the crazy, expensive, creepy lengths he goes to to be around this stranger. The tagline for this film’s release was “A temptingly tasteful comedy for adults who can count”, but I couldn’t even count all of the absurdities in this film. I can however, count on one hand how many of this film’s big swings paid off. I found myself rolling my eyes and saying “really?” quite a few times while I watched 10, not just because of how stupid this movie is, but because of how unclever it is. So many elements of 10 are a direct ripoff of Elaine May’s film The Heartbreak Kid, and it started to frustrate me how it wasn’t nearly as good as that film. I’m sorry if I have high standards, but I want all sex comedies to be as good as What’s Up, Doc?, or hell, even as decent as Shampoo. I can forgive a lot of stupidity if something is funny, and I just wanted 10 to be funnier. With the reliably-frequent flashing of boobs, fart jokes, and too many prat falls to keep track of, 10 was everything and less than what I expected from a 1970s sex comedy. This film is mostly known for introducing the world to Bo Derek (the product of a real-life Svengali situation), as she runs in slomo on a Mexican beach with her iconic, culturally-inappropriate cornrows bouncing, and every inch of her body is scanned by the camera. This is the part of the review where I sound like an unempowered, sex-negative feminist, but 10’s sexism went way beyond just typical naval gazing and male gazing. The entire ethos of this film is perhaps summed up best in one scene, when George hooks up with a nice girl at the resort named Mary (Dee Wallace) then shortly after she sees him flocking to the younger “10” played by Bo Derek, and Mary asks the bartender, “What’s fair about a man becoming older and more distinguished, and a woman becoming older and just getting…older?” to which the bartender earnestly responds, “Not fair at all.” He could’ve at least feigned that this is not the case, but the patriarchal powers of this movie solemnly swear by the message that a woman can and will be rated on a scale of 1-10, and your number just continues to go down as you age. Bo Derek doesn’t even utter a single word until an hour and a half into this movie, but we’re meant to be intrigued by her? George fumbles every other relationship in his life just to get physically closer to this woman and we’re meant to think, “Oh, so silly!” and not, “Well, that’s depressing”? The only thing more dated about this movie than its frank sexism is its tonal confusion in regards to its music. I say this as a fan and admirer of Julie Andrews, but there were simply too many musical asides in this film. How we can go from a scene of Dudley Moore falling continuously down a Hollywood hill right to a scene of tits and asses by a pool right to a scene of Julie Andrews just singing her pure and wholesome heart out, was jarring to experience. It was enough to make George Segal (who was originally cast as George) walk out on this movie, out of disdain and embarrassment for Blake Edwards’ overuse of his wife’s singing voice in a movie that is not even close to a musical. Honestly, I don’t blame you, George! This whole movie is indulgent—in regards to its liberal usage of the naked female form, in regards to its long running time, and in regards to the weirdly frequent singing of Julie Andrews. There’s a time and place for everything, and I suppose it’s time to wrap this up. Both of tonight’s number-titled movies were entertaining, strange, and impactful for different reasons. Thank you for reading along and keeping up with me, my dear reader. You can always count on me to provide you with long-winded film reviews. Talk 2 you next week!