Tag: Stephen King

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Across the Multiverse

One film looks set to dominate the weekend, but there’s a lot more to choose from on the big screen.

Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse is the sequel to the acclaimed 2018 animated superhero picture, and sees Miles Morales once again sucked into multiversal mayhem. Does this one include Peter Parker, Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, Spider-Woman, Vulture, Spider-Noir, or Yamashito the Japanese Spider-Man? The answer is yes to all of the above and more. That’s right, we’re going full Rick and Morty, and the advance word is good. Look for eye-popping visuals with an inclusive spirit. 

Vicaria (Laya Deleon Hayes) has a nice, suburban life until her older brother (Denzel Whitaker) is killed, as so many other Black youths have been, by gun violence. She becomes obsessed with bringing him back to life, which, as all available literature on the subject suggests, is a terrible idea. But who knows? Maybe it will work out fine in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Writer/director Bomani J. Story updates Frankenstein for our era of senseless shootings. 

 Before Stephen King was a literary superstar, he was a struggling writer of short stories for men’s magazines like Cavalier and Penthouse (and, to be fair, also Cosmopolitan). After his novel Carrie was an unexpected hit, the best of these stories were collected in Night Shift, which has since provided fodder for film and television that has been great, like Salem’s Lot, and Children of the Corn, and not-so-great, like Lawnmower Man and Maximum Overdrive. “The Boogeyman” has seen several short film adaptations, thanks to King’s standing policy of licensing his short stories for $1 to budding filmmakers, and now director Rob Savage and the writers of A Quiet Place are giving it the feature treatment. This looks really scary.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars in Nicole Holofcener’s latest comedy as an author whose reasonably successful marriage is thrown into chaos when her husband (Tobias Menzies) admits he doesn’t like her latest book. This rookie married-guy mistake haunts everyone in You Hurt My Feelings.

Ahead of Harrison Ford’s final fedora fitting in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the original returns to theaters for two special engagements on Sunday, June 4th and Wednesday, June 7th. With Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created the ultimate summer blockbuster in 1981, and while there have been many films that tried to recapture that magic, none has ever achieved this level of perfection. Watch for future movie star Alfred Molina in his debut role as Indy’s “Throw me the idol!” betrayer. 

At Crosstown Theater on June 8th, get a full frontal look at Brian De Palma’s gonzo rock opera from 1974, Phantom of the Paradise. I can’t really describe the “plot”, but Paul Williams’ music and De Palma’s visuals bring the glam rock weirdness that would later power The Rocky Horror Picture Show to cult immortality. “Life at Last!”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Doctor Sleep

Stephen King famously hates The Shining. To be clear, he hates the 1980 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of his 1977 novel, despite the fact that it is widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. I’ve never really understood why. I’ve read The Shining, and sure, it’s a lot different from the movie. But different things work onscreen than work in print. That’s just the way of the world. Both the film and the book work great for the medium they’re presented in.

Maybe that’s the gist of King’s distaste. Writing is such an intimate medium. A writer can literally make you hear voices in your head. I’m doing it right now. King’s book wasn’t just a Psycho-type horror potboiler, it was about his own struggles with alcoholism. Seeing it abstracted into the third person had to be uncomfortable, especially given Kubrick’s cold, analytical style.

Ewan McGregor (above) plays an older Danny Torrance plagued by alcoholism and PTSD.

In the sequel, Doctor Sleep, which King released in 2013, the writer explored the implications of the end of The Shining. Jack Torrance, the alcoholic writer driven murderously mad by the spirits of the Overlook Hotel, has frozen to death, leaving his wife Wendy and son Danny alone. They move to Florida, and Danny tries to come to terms with his psychic powers and PTSD. Thanks to the help of the ghost of the ill-fated Overlook Hotel employee Dick Hallorann, Danny gets a handle on his shining. Not so much on the PTSD.

The film adaptation of Doctor Sleep is something unusual in the world of the Hollywood studio: an auteurist work. Mike Flanagan scores the remarkable triple bill of writer, director, and editor, something rarely seen outside the low-budget indie world. The older I get, the more skeptical I become of auteur theory, the notion that the director always puts his personal stamp on a picture. I think the interplay of talent on the production team is more important in the long run. But with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan makes a good argument, at least for the notion that he knows what he’s doing.

Kubrick’s work on The Shining was transformative, while Flanagan seems content to be translative to the text. And that’s okay. His visual style is attractive and well designed, but not flashy. King’s strengths in plotting really shine through. Every action is motivated and logical, even to a fault. Danny is played as a child by Roger Dale Floyd, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Danny Lloyd, Kubrick’s Danny, and then as an adult by Ewan McGregor, who brings a satisfying depth to the performance.

The film’s second act takes place in 2011, when Danny is taking after his alcoholic father, drifting from job to job, pounding shots and running lines on a weeknight. When he is drawn to a small New Hampshire town that seems to be perpetually bathed in autumnal night, an act of kindness by Billy (Cliff Curtis) convinces him to go to AA and clean up. He takes up residence in the town, and gets a psychic pen pal, a tween girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran). But the pair discover that they’re being stalked by a clan of psychic vampires called The True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).

The funny thing about Doctor Sleep is that it is not so much a horror movie as a good, old-fashioned supernatural thriller. It’s more Dark Shadows than Halloween. It’s also pleasingly retro in its structure. Flanagan takes his time introducing all the players before they start bouncing off each other. Its three acts take place in three different time periods, but within the acts, there’s a lot of craziness.

King has always excelled at bringing supernatural-tinged horror down to Earth by setting the action in the most mundane of places. Hitchcock liked to set the climax of his films in recognizable landmarks, like Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. King puts a climactic set piece in a crappy little New England state park. He has a knack for finding the haunted spaces in our collective imaginations: lonely highways, abandoned factories, musty attics. Flanagan is at his best when his characters are digging up bodies in a dusty wilderness, lit by truck headlights.

Doctor Sleep is not an all-time classic, but it is a solid genre piece for horror fans that will hold up to repeat viewings. At 152 minutes, it’s long, but it doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Flanagan adds to King’s legacy and does no damage to Kubrick’s masterwork by not slavishly imitating it. Yes, during the climactic scene in the crumbling Overlook Hotel, he recreates the elevator blood-flood gag. But come on, given the opportunity, would you be able to resist such temptation?

Doctor Sleep

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

It Chapter Two

Me: Well, I saw the rest of It.

You: The rest of what?

M: It.

Y: Right, what did you see the rest of?

M: It.

Y: What is it?

M: Chapter Two. You know, the sequel to the highest grossing horror movie of all time, It.

Y: Oh, yeah. I forgot about It. It seems like It came out a long time ago.

M: It was only 2017. That’s life in the Trump era.

Y: Huh. Well, how was it?

M: It was okay, I guess. I’ll have to admit, I thought the first one was overrated, even though I know most people don’t agree. It made $700 million domestically! There were some good performances, like Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh, the lone girl in the group of teenage friends who call themselves the Losers. They live in the small town of Derry, Maine, which, it turns out, has a kind of Hellmouth situation.

Y: You mean like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

M: Not exactly. It was built on the site where an ancient evil crashed to Earth from the sky, presumably from space. Now it’s haunted by Pennywise, a demon who looks like a clown who dances and sings little songs.

Y: A clown, huh? That doesn’t sound so scary.

M: The clown eats children.

Y: Huh.

M: Also, it sometimes takes the form of a semi-humanoid spider thingy. And it knows your worst fear and will taunt you with it before it eats you with its thousand-toothed maw.

Y: That’s messed up.

M: That’s Stephen King for you. It’s based on one of his most beloved novels.

Y: What’s it called?

M: It.

Y: Right. Shoulda seen that one coming. So how does it compare to the book?

M: I don’t know; I never read It.

Y: Not a Stephen King fan?

M: No, I like King just fine. ‘Salem’s Lot was my jam. Vampires crossed with Lovecraftian, New England, existential horror — someone should adapt that one. Shut up and take my money!

Y: Stephen King’s had a lot of movies made out of his books, hasn’t he?

M: He’s the most adapted author in history. The trailer for Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, ran before It Chapter Two. Looked pretty good.

Y: He wrote The Shining, too? That guy gets around!

M: He sure does. He’s got a cameo in It Chapter Two as the owner of a pawn shop, playing opposite James McAvoy as Bill, who grows up to become a horror writer. King was my favorite part of Creepshow, where he played the farmer who gets eaten by meteorite slime. He’s a much better actor than he is a director. You ever seen Maximum Overdrive?

Y: No!

M: Don’t bother, unless you want to see what the product of full-blown cocaine psychosis looks like.

Y: Maybe I do …

M: That’s on you. Anyway, when they’re kids, the Losers have a run-in with Pennywise the clown; afterwards, they make a blood oath to reassemble if he ever comes back. Now, it’s 27 years later, and kids are disappearing in Derry again. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa/Chosen Jacobs) stayed in town, living above the library, obsessed with figuring out how to defeat Pennywise once and for all. He calls the now-grown-up Losers back together. The first film was set in 1989, which means It is kind of like The Big Chill for Gen Xers, only with a demon clown who feeds on your fear. It’s kinda like the Trump era.

Y: That’s a little too real.

M: Yeah. Pennywise the clown is a metaphor for coming to terms with your anxiety and past trauma. That’s what It is about. Fortunately, Bill Hader is in it, as Old Richie, who used to be Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Hader saves It from its own increasingly ponderous mythology by basically playing himself. (If you haven’t seen Barry on HBO, it’s a must. He’s brilliant in it.) Jessica Chastain plays Old Beverly, and she’s got that Molly Ringwald haircut, to keep it authentic.

Y: Bottom line: Should I go see It Chapter Two?

M: Sure, if you like It. It doesn’t really hold together as a movie, but if you’re invested in It, you’ll probably dig It Chapter Two, even though it’s really long and a bit of a slog in places.

Y: Is it the best horror movie of the year?

M: No, that would be Us.

Y: Who?

It Chapter Two

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

It

John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween must be regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Horror films have been around since the dawn of moving pictures, but the smashing success of The Exorcist in 1973 and Jaws in 1975 had loosened film investors’ purse strings and given the genre back some of the respectability it had squandered at the drive-in. But it was Halloween that would define the horror vibe for the next decade, horror’s silver age.

Today, ’80s horror is associated with the over-the-top gore of the slasher movie, exemplfied by Friday the 13th. But the original Halloween is not really like that. After a shocking start, it’s a creepy, slow burn that gets its power from the familiarity of the soon-to-be-deceased teenage characters, particularly Jamie Lee Curtis’ breakthrough performance as Laurie, the original Final Girl. In the ’80s, a big part of the appeal of horror was as a cinematic depiction of teen life. No film did that better than Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which launched the career of a guy you might have heard of, Johnny Depp.

It is ostensibly a Stephen King adaptation, but it owes as much to A Nightmare on Elm Street as it does to its source material. King’s gritty, working-class characters from his 1970s potboilers like Carrie were a big influence on the horror auteurs of the ’80s, and by the time he finished It in 1986, he was watching his own ideas thrown back at him on the screen.

Meet the Losers Club — (left to right) Oleff, Grazer, Wolfhard, Jacobs, Lieberher, Lillis, and Taylor

Of course, after The Shining, King was on his way to being the most adapted writer in all of film history. That has resulted in some all-time classics, like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and also big balls of dumb like Maximum Overdrive and this summers’ eye roller The Dark Tower. It is definitely a mark on the good side of the King ledger.

We first meet Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) in his bedroom in Derry, Maine, making a paper boat for his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to sail in the rushing storm gutter on a rainy day. Bill is sick, so Georgie goes out alone, and when the boat gets swept into the sewer, he meets Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). Lured by his boat — and an entirely plausible story about a super-fun circus that lives in the sewer — Georgie goes a little too far and becomes the first victim in a wave of missing children that sweeps through the small community.

The next summer, 1989, Bill and his friends in the Losers Club — chubby new kid Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), bespectacled loudmouth Richie (Finn Wolfhard), schlubby germophobe Stan (Wyatt Oleff), overprotected Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), and the home-schooled farm kid Mike (Chosen Jacobs) — set out to find the truth behind the disappearances while dodging the malevolent attention of a gang of bullies, led by budding psychopath Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton). Meanwhile, Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) is having some bully troubles of her own. The town mean girls have branded her a slut and unpopular loser. (As she says before getting trash water dumped on her “Which is it? Make up your mind!”) Fleeing her abusive father, she finds a natural kinship with the Losers Club and catches the eye of both Bill and Ben. The kids start to have visions invoking their worst fears, intertwined with the town’s dark past of murder, disappearance, and racist riots, which get more intense and dangerous as they close in on Pennywise, a malevolent supernatural force that feeds on fear. And what better way to generate fear than by manifesting as a clown?

Sharp-eyed genre observers will note that this is all very Stranger Things — right down to the presence of Wolfhard, who will return as the young hero Mike on the hit show next month. They share the core appeal of the plucky band of young nerds solving supernatural mysteries in the 1980s and the influences, which include The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, currently still in theaters after a surprisingly successful 40th anniversary re-release. It delivers the atmospheric horror and jolts of big scares, but the core of the film is the chemistry and talent of its young ensemble cast. It turns into what Tarantino has called a “hang out movie,” and in this case, you’ll be hanging out in a sewer with a bunch of nerds and a scary clown — and having a blast.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Dark Tower

Stephen King can’t catch a break.

I’m speaking filmically, of course. In all other aspects of his life, King is doing fine. He is probably the most successful writer of the last 50 years. He’s the Charles Dickens of horror, to be read widely and remembered far longer than his contemporaries, even the ones who might have had superior talent. King is a good writer, but he has had fantastic agents.

King’s work has been adapted for film (checks Wikipedia) 67 times! That’s a lot! (The Mangler had two sequels? Who knew?) But with the very notable exceptions of The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, movies based on King’s works have been pretty awful. (I admit, I have a soft spot for The Running Man, but that was technically a Richard Bachman book.)

The Dark Tower was King’s attempt at epic meta-fantasy and the project that he chipped away at between blockbuster airport paperbacks for 40 years. Clearly inspired by Tolkein, it’s not so much singing dwarves and lembas as it is a deep dive into King’s subconscious. The Dark Tower sits at the center of at expansive multiverse, protecting the multitude of realities where anything goes. Instead of knights in shining armor, the Tower — and thus, all of the multitudes of realities in the multiverse — is defended by a sacred order of Gunslingers, refugees from Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that King was obsessed with when he started the series in the early 1970s. Bits and pieces of King’s passing obsessions and his other books float up through the more than 4,000-page narrative. At one point, King himself makes an appearance as both author and character. In the age when HBO is dropping a cool 10 mil on every hour of Game of Thrones, The Dark Tower‘s seven volumes sound like the perfect fodder for a long-running prestige TV series. Instead, we get this chop job.

Matthew McConaughey (left) fled across the desert, and Idris Elba followed.

Idris Elba was born to play Roland, the supernatural protagonist, last of the Gunslingers. He’s got the natural gravitas and credibility as an ass kicker. Roland’s gun was forged from the sword Excalibur, and he “kills with his heart,” as the Gunslinger’s credo requires. Roland’s sworn enemy is the Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey, so pencil thin he seems to have been existing purely on Soylent paste and self-satisfaction.

Armed with the power of suggestion, an army of demonic lackeys, a snazzy Zara for Men duster, and a variety of colored orbs, the Man in Black seeks to destroy the Dark Tower and let in the demons from the dark outer-world so he can … do something. There was a prophecy that said the mind of a child could destroy the Dark Tower, so the Man in Black’s minions prowl the multiverse finding younglings strong in the Shining to feed into his kid-powered super-laser. I was not really clear on what he was hoping to accomplish with the destruction of the multiverse, but maybe if McConaughey put more than a car commercial’s level of effort into the role, I wouldn’t mind.

The young Brooklynite Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is the latest in a line of generic “chosen ones,” complete with evil step family and doomed mother. While in our reality, (“Keystone Earth”), he is repeatedly upstaged by his neighbor Timmy, played by Michael Barbieri of Ira Sach’s Little Men. Director Nikolaj Arcel would have been better off casting Barbieri as his audience surrogate, given how completely charisma-free Taylor is.

The literary Dark Tower is the result of a prodigious mind high on the writings of Joseph Campbell and, in the ’70s and ’80s at least, heroic doses of drugs. But instead of floating freely in Jungian archetypal space, the film just touches all the bases of another generic post-Matrix action fantasy. In the grand scheme of this summers’ colossal wastes of money, it goes down easier than, say, the Pirates of the Caribbean death rattle. But I liked The Dark Tower much better when it was called Big Trouble in Little China. At least Kurt Russell knew how to commit to the ridiculous.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Keith Krass Throws Stephen King Themed Halloween Ball

Keith Krass has many talents. He’s the proprietor of the Arthouse t-shirt shop, whose creations have added ironic heft to my closet, and he’s a talented experimental filmmaker, working under the name Lenzcrack. His bizarre, wildly creative video work can be seen regularly in the interstitials between the classic movies at Time Warp Drive-In, and his hilarious, eye-popping “Scumbags From Outer Space” will screen during the Departures experimental animation bloc at Indie Memphis on Sunday, Nov. 6 at 9 PM.

Krass is getting ready to move on from Memphis to pursue film projects in Atlanta, and he’s decided to say farewell by throwing a Halloween party  at the Hi-Tone. The honoree will be master of nightmares Stephen King, whom Krass will pay tribute to with a video installation in the club’s small room that will combine altered images from film adaptations of King’s work and remixed, theme appropriate music. 
In the big room will be the industrial Goth stylings of DJ PLASTIC CITIZEN leading a dance party that will be the official kickoff to Halloween party weekend “It will be gory. It will be scary. It will be awesome!” says Krass. 

The whole horrorshow will kick off at 9 PM. on Thursday, Oct. 27 at the Hi-Tone.  

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Flashbacks: Vinyl and 11.22.63

Two new TV series obsess over the details of a certain moment in time, but with vastly different approaches.

Bobby Cannavale as hard living record executive Ritchie Finestra in Vinyl

As Martin Scorsese’s new series for HBO, Vinyl is focused on 1973, a time which, in retrospect, was the height of the recording industry. Co-produced with Mick Jagger and much of the same production team behind Boardwalk Empire, including writer Terence Winter, Vinyl is a tale of out of control excess on all fronts. Bobby Cannavale, veteran of that show as well as Will And Grace, plays record executive Ritchie Finestra, head of the fictional American Century records. Ritchie is trying to turn his company’s fortunes around by signing Led Zeppelin and selling out the the German company Polygram, and turn his life around by getting clean and moving to Connecticut with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde). But with cocaine bumping all through his hard partying social circle, it’s clear from the beginning that sobriety was going to be an uphill battle.

With his cronies Zak (Ray Romano) and P.J. (Scott Levitt) at his side, he uses his “golden ear” to find acts to create hits for the label, cringing when he finds out his A&R people had a turned down ABBA as uncommercial. Ritchie’s big breakthrough, which forms the frame of the pilot episode, is finding the New York Dolls and opening up the American glam rock scene. We also flash back to the 1960s, when Ritchie got his start in the business promoting soul singers. Ritchie is another totally unlikeable protagonist in the Scorsese mold of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Record executives and Wall Street junk bond traders both live near the bottom of the list of careers that inspire sympathy, and Ritchie’s cavalier attitude towards paying his artists justifies reflexive hatred.

But drug-crazed macho preening is not Vinyl’s biggest problem. It’s characters seem to lack motivation (beyond “he’s drug crazed”) for almost anything they do, flying into fits of rage and falling in lust almost at random. And for a historical story made by people who were there, it plays fast and loose with anachronism. Punk and hip hop arrive three years too early, and the concert scenes, which should be the series strong suit, come off like Rock Band: The TV Show. There’s a long way yet to go in Vinyl’s first season, but Scorsese and company will be hard pressed to get themselves out of the corner that the pilot’s frankly ridiculous ending painted them into.

James Franco gets anachronistic in 11.22.63

Better with the historical details is Hulu’s 11.22.63. With 50 years of conspiracy theorists picking over the Warren Report and Zapruder film, few historical events have been obsessed over as thoroughly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stephen King, who wrote the short novel that the series uses as a jumping off point, created the story out of seemingly the same impulse that drove Oliver Stone to make JFK: to wallow in the details and try to emerge with a coherent narrative. But there’s no Stone-esque psychedelia here. Director Kevin MacDonald’s pilot is a workmanlike table setting exercise, spelling out the rules of the time travel scenario that sees New England writing teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) going back to 11:58 AM on October 21, 1960 by merely stepping into the closet in the back of the neighborhood diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) Jake is convinced by Al to use the portal to try and stop the Kennedy assassination, and thus Vietnam and a host of other bad things from happening. He’s got a carefully researched dossier accumulated from his own time travel adventures, and advice like “If you do something that really fucks with the past, the past fucks with you.”

King has had a spotty record with adaptations of his work, but this 11.22.63 does a good job of capturing him at a moment of storytelling tightness. Franco is an appealing presence, and his experience in genre work, which often requires actors to convey information about plot and emotional states very quickly, shines through. The first of eight planned episodes finds Jake experimenting with all of the information advantages being a time traveller 50 years in the past brings, which, when done intelligently and with a sense of play, is the fun part about time travel stories. The trademark King supernatural creepiness comes into play in the person of the Yellow Card Man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who periodically appears to Franco to point out that he doesn’t belong in the past. With the expositional formalities out of the way, 11.22.63 looks ready to take off.

Categories
Opinion

TV Minus Zombies, ESPN, and Food Channel

espn.jpeg

Six months ago I switched to basic cable, the cheapskate option in my AT&T U-verse package. I did it to save a little money, gain a little quality time, and make a symbolic protest against AT&T and ESPN, which I blame for jacking up my monthly bill to $174 and ruining civilization as we know it.

Resolutions are easy in January. Most of the football bowl games I wanted to watch were on broadcast stations ABC, NBC, CBS or FOX. There were Christmas gift DVDs to enjoy instead. Then it got harder. ESPN has fought back against people like me by capturing exclusive rights to more and more events. Here is my report.

Total Savings: The difference between my old 280-channel package and my new 15-channel package is $40 a month, or $240 for six months. The savings should be more than that, but AT&T charges cheapskates and Luddites $15 a month for equipment that is “free” with other packages. Offsetting expenses: Netflix subscription for $7.99 a month, $4 beers at sports bars.

Most Grief Taken: My wife loves the AMC zombie show “The Walking Dead.” She reminds me about once a week. Offsetting factor: The Brad Pitt movie helped, but the zombie appetite is not easily sated. If I break it will be due to zombies.

Second biggest loss: Who knew the Grizzlies would go so far in the Playoffs, and that several of the games would only be on ESPN? Or that Michigan would beat Kansas in a thrilling game on TBS? Offsetting factor: Mooching off neighbors.

Third biggest loss: Watching people cook on “Chopped.” Offsetting factor: Actually cooking.

Other regrets: French Open and Wimbledon early rounds. Offsetting factor: ABC highlights and replays, if you don’t mind knowing Federer and Nadal lost.

Worthwhile discoveries on basic cable stations: None. The major networks are a wasteland and appear to have given up on everything except reality shows and copycat crime shows. Offsetting factor: Black Hawks and Bruins in NHL Playoffs and WKNO documentary on Henry Ford.

Best rented movies I would not have seen otherwise: “Sherlock Holmes” and “In Bruges”.

Worst rented movie I would not have seen otherwise: “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”.

Long books I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise: “Blue Latitudes” by Tony Horwitz and “11/22/63” by Stephen King.

Smug moment: Pointing out newspaper stories about Evil ESPN and viewers cutting cable and asking people “Does Paula Deen have a show?”

Sick moment: ESPN ends sharing agreements with broadcast stations for major events. AT&T comes up with more fees.

Guilty pleasure: Surfing 200 stations while on vacation and watching Paula Deen and Matt Lauer on “Today” on NBC.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cruel, pretentious ending ruins King creature-feature.

The Mist opens on a dark and stormy night in Castle Rock, Maine, in the home of a book-cover artist (Thomas Jane) whose horror, fantasy, and sci-fi images cover his living room. If you’ve read much Stephen King, you sense the author’s presence even if you haven’t seen the Stephen King’s appendage on the film’s title.

For a while, The Mist, adapted from a novella at the end of his ’80s-era story collection Skeleton Crew, seems like it’s going to be a pretty good King adaptation.

The bad storm wrecks the artist’s house, so father and son head into town to stock up on supplies, getting trapped in a grocery store with an assortment of stock townsfolk while a mist enshrouds the store and rumors swirl of unseen dangers.

An entertaining, low-key cast fills out the broadly drawn collection of refugees — the hot checkout girl, the existentialist bagger, three soldiers from a nearby military base, a Bible-thumping town loon, a couple of rough-edged blue-collar guys, etc.

Into this familiar set-up, King and director Frank Darabont (of prestige King adaptations The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption) conspire on something that’s half monster movie and half nature-of-man talkfest. An octopus-like creature sucks a bloodied Norm the Bag Boy out into the mist. The ensuing in-store conflict pits fundamentalists against rationalists against existentialists.

But, despite that bid for significance, The Mist is at its best as a gee-wow horror/action movie: Pterodactyl-like creatures break through the glass and invade the store, warded off with makeshift weapons (and one revolver) created from store items. Jane’s protagonist leads an expedition through the fog to the drug store next door, which is enshrouded with webbing from a breed of spiders that would have scared away anything from Arachnophobia.

Darabont isn’t satisfied with making a minor pleasure, though, so he turns the film into a major monstrosity, with an ending that made me angrier than anything I saw at the movies this year. I never read The Mist as a kid King fan (one of the few King titles of the era I skipped), but I skimmed the end of the book recently to see if King himself was to blame. He wasn’t.

Unsatisfied with King’s open-ended conclusion, The Mist tacks on an extreme ending (which I won’t give away, though I’m tempted), more worthy of an ironic Eli Roth horror movie than the middling creature-feature The Mist actually is. There’s something smug, pretentious, and self-congratulatory about the utter pessimism and cruelty of the ending. It might have worked in a better, more severe movie, but it angered me here because I didn’t think the movie earned it. Or maybe even because the movie — or at least its actors — actually earned better.

The Mist

Now playing

Multiple locations