August 8th
The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983)
John Smith (a cypher's name if ever there was one) is looking forward
to marrying the love of his life when a traffic accident puts him in
a coma for five years. When he awakens (no one thought he would) he
finds his love has married someone else and time has moved on without
him. He has also gained an unwanted ability with ESP, which
complicates his life in unexpected and tragic ways.
By the time I read The Dead Zone I was already a fan of King. The
movie made me a fan of Cronenberg who is now a favorite director.
The Dead Zone is one of his best novels and I think this is one of
the very finest King movies. That said, I don't watch it much.
There's nothing I want to say of the substance of the movie
(questions of fate and free will, dealing with loss). I'd rather
talk about Cronenberg's knack for surrounding himself with talent
from longtime collaborator Carol Spier (production design) to his
cinematographers (in this case, Mark Irwin), composers (usually
Howard Shore, here Michael Kamen), screenwriters, actors, etc...
Jeffrey Boam wrote the script chosen by Cronenberg, the first time
the directoed worked from a script not his own. Between them, I
think they put the lie to the idea held by many fans of King that the
barometer for a good adaptation is in it's to-the-letter fidelity to
the source material. (Also see Firestarter, the next movie –
together, Firestarter and The Dead Zone pretty much kill that
misconception). The Dead Zone does not follow King's details without
alteration, yet this is among the closest you'll get to recreating
the flavor of the author and his sensibilities. The only thing
missing is King's sense of tackiness, and I don't recall that I the
book either.
Importantly to his career, Cronenberg proved himself here as an
actor's director. I say it's this one and not Videodrome because you
already expect a great performance from James Woods and might overlook the
director's contribution there but here you have one of Christopher
Walken's finest performances, understated but powerful and
compelling, playing against type and bolstered by a great cast all
giving their best: Herbert Lom, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Anthony
Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Tom Skerritt. This is an actor's movie, the
major characters are fully dimensional while the lesser roles in
their brief appearances manage to be fascinating and vibrant in their
own right. In his next two films Cronenberg would go on to elicit
star turns from Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Irons, both career
highlights for those actors.
Walken...man, he's amazing in this. I love seeing him play a
sympathetic character for once. All Johnny wants is – well, not,
that's not right, what he wants is his life back. He has
watched his love spend her life without his having been able to share
any of it with her, and though she loves him still he's not welcome
there. So what he wants now is to crawl into a hole and be forgotten
by everyone else. Walken makes that pain palpable.
The romance...aw, fuck. When I read the book in 1980 the romance was
just...er, romantic. Derp. Oh, you know what I mean. Good
melodrama, very moving. These days it has a personal resonance, it
hits too close to home. I do not have the emotional space left in my
life to wallow in downers, and this time through I really didn't
care to engage with this movie the way I usually do. There are so
many fucking downers in my favorite genre. I'd rather watch movies
for fun.
Come to think of it, almost every one of my favorite director's
movies is a downer. Well, that sucks.
Cronenberg often has opening credit sequences that are apropos to the
movie. I love these,establishing the setting with still shots of
bucolic Maine countrysides that are whittled away bit by bit, lost to
void until they form the title.
August 9th
Firestarter (Mark L. Lester, 1984)
Everyone has music that speaks to them gets into their soul, fills
them with emotions that are impossible to explain. Songs, even whole
albums. Tangerine Dream's score for Firestarter is that for me Go
on, find it on YouTube and give it a listen. Listen to it on
headphones at ocean's edge at night. That shit's nearly spiritual,
that is. I took it with me to the beach for solace once when –
well, never mind. It's powerful.
It might be worth noting how that score came to be. The members of
Tangerine Dream were willing to take the gig but only in their terms -
they didn't give a damn about the movie and refused to watch it, but
would gladly take the money and compose some fresh themes. This they
did, and handed the music over to the producers saying, essentially,
“You tailor it to the film. Use it how ya want. Were
done.” IMO it turned out to be maybe their best work, but that's
no way to score a film. I'm amazed how well it works for the movie,
but it works even better without the movie.
Why am I going on about tangerine Dream instead of the movie?
Because the movie is not more than the sum of its parts. It's not a
bad movie, it's reasonably good, but the parts by themselves are
better.
First, you've got a solid Stephen King tale. Young Charlene McGee
has a strong pyrokinetic ability that a shady and powerful Federal
agency wants to cultivate as a weapon, and they'll do anything to
have her. Charlie and her father Andy are on the run. Having been
enticed to finally read King by the movies Carrie, Salem's Lot, and
The Shining, and having been handed a paperback copy of The Stand,
this was the first King novel I ever read and loved every page of it.
(A personal aside, I was entranced by the cover art, as seen at the
top of this post, as much ore than by the blurb on the back cover:
those amazing liquid eyes, I thought, that's the kind of work
I want to do!)
I've mentioned the score, so how about the cast? Adorable child
actor Drew Barrymore is at the center, surrounded by David Keith (a
good actor, though not how I pictured Andy so a little jarring), the
great George C. Scott as an understated menace, Martin Sheen more
lucid than he was in The Dead Zone, Art Carney and Louise Fletcher as
decent folk who try to help. Freddie Jones is the scientist who
regrets having started the ball rolling.
What else? Mmmmm...no, that's pretty much it. Those are the
highlights. Oh, the smoke – the opening titles appear over a whiff
of smoke that dances serenely. I liked that a lot too.
When the movie hit theaters, I saw it with a friend. He thought it
was alright but I was so happy to see it given life that we sat
through two consecutive showings. Ultimately he was right: it's
okay. The story moves well enough, though the dynamic changes
midway through from a road adventure to captivity. That slows the
pace a tad, but not a lot as the first half was shot through with
explanatory flashbacks. This follows the flow of the novel
perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly, I got the feeling that the
energy inspiriting the tale comes strictly from the book, and that
the screenwriter gave it none of his own – no passion for the
material, no getting into the heart of the situation or characters.
This is the other half of the argument I'd give (see The Dead Zone
above) that King fans who prize strict adherence to the source novels
above all else. Same with the direction: sturdy enough but artless.
Firestarter does that and feels at times uninspired for it. We the
audience seldom feel more than mere observers even if we like the
story. The movie could have used a stronger identification between
the characters and the the audience. Don't just tell us a story,
put us there with them!
I like the movie well enough. I just don't watch it much. That
Tangerine Dream album, though...
August 10th
Cujo (Lewis
Teague, 1983)
(Spoilers)
In the midst of a marital crisis, Donna Trenton and her son Tad
become trapped in the Pinto when it's laid siege to by a rabid dog.
The dog isn't the story. You can think of it as fate, or the hand of
God (as Donna does in the novel) or just a random life event, the St.
Bernard Cujo is just a device.
Like Carrie, Cujo is another King story in which the women act while
the men react. The story is about two women with sons making choices
about what matters to them. One is very clear – Mr's Camber
intends to get the fuck away from her abusive lout of a husband and
save their boy a dismal future growing to be like his old man. The
other, Donna, is still in a fog. She's got a wonderful son, a
devoted husband who's a great father...a loving family all around.
And she's jeopardizing all of that by having an affair with her
husband's not-so-best friend. That's where the device comes in,
she's about to have her priories brought into sharp focus via an
expensive lesson. More expensive in the novel, wherein the child
dies.
I'm not too big on the God angle and prefer to see it as life blindly
stepping in. Fate I could be okay with but it's a harsh, Old
Testament move if the Deus really is in the machina. It smacks of
slut-shaming, a mindset and practice that pisses me off. Granted,
the real offense isn't being sexually active (am I assuming too much
of either King or readers/audiences to give them the benefit of the
doubt on that call?) but that she has betrayed the faith of her
husband and child. Even so, if this is punishment it outweighs the
offense by a long shot (especially in the novel!) Abusing (killing!)
the boy to teach the mother is a dick move. King as the god of his
literary world goes for that OT grand gesture, and it leaves an open
question of the survival of Donna's marrriage. The movie's ending
can't help but be more upbeat after putting the characters and the
audience through the wringer. No, the angry God rap isn't for me,
but king has always been fascinated by it.
Director Lewis Teague does an evenhanded job of the family drama,
never sentimental or overbearing. He and cinematographer Jan de
Bont do some lovely, understated work (look at those scenic shots!)
with a few nice flourishes (Tad racing to reach his bed in the dark
before the monsters can grab him). For the most part it's a
lightweight cast but Dee Wallace is a knockout as Donna, and Danny
Pintauro gives a surprisingly credible turn as young Tad.
In a way, Cujo makes the third star. He's a magnetic presence –
powerful, brooding, and progressively gooier. Great makeup fx, you
can almost smell hot diseased dog wafting off him in the heat. The
second half of the movie is a director's challenge, what they used to
call an elevator drama (an entire story in which your characters
never leave the confined setting). TV shows used to do elevator
stories to save money, while masters like Hitchcock did them
(Lifeboat) because they relished the challenge. Teague is well up to
it, but again it's Dee that really sells it.
Important to King fans the story is set in Castle Rock and features
Sheriff Bannerman, both of which first appeared in the serial
killings segment of The Dead Zone. I don;t recall wither of them
being mentioned by name in Cujo, however.
August 11th
Creepshow
(George A. Romero, 19882)
An anthology consisting of five stories of varying length and a
wraparound. Creepshow was written for the screen by Stephen King and
directed by genre icon George A. Romero in homage to the horror comic
books published by EC Comics (Entertaining Comics). EC titles like
Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror...well, to be honest I
didn;t grow up on them and shouldn't be the one to describe them.
King himself, in his book Danse Macabre, reminisces favorably about
them as lurid tales of poetic justice, usually consisting of
unlikable characters abut to get what's coming to them, and written
under a child's logic. If we didn't have EC as kids, most of us
encountered some equivalent. Like King we often have fond memories.
Romero does a first-rate job bringing the comic-book sensibilities to
the screen with faux paneling, a lurid basic color palette for the
horror stings, and King's script emulating the EC ethos of simplistic
characters, horrible deaths, and crude comeuppances. It makes for a
movie that stands out visually from the crowd. Better – if you're
into this kind of thing – King and Romero really do evoke memories
of the horror fare we had as kids. There's not a thing wrong with
it. (You just said uh-oh). Yeah, sorry. Good movie but I never
liked EC much, so I don't get much from Creepshow. My favorite
segment would be 'They Creep up on You” with E.G. Marshall as a
misanthropic millionaire and germophobe shut up Howard Hughes style
and dealing with a cockroach advance. Marshall plays an
entertainingly vile piece of work gleefully insulting the widow of a
man he's just driven to suicide King must have had fun with the
dialog here, it's fun to listen to and the bugs are well icky inside
the antiseptic white of the apartment.
The best story, though, is also the most developed: The Crate, in
which a ferocious creature lies dormant in the basement of a
university. On being rediscovered, it starts eating the faculty.
Doormat Hal Holbrook sees a way to be free of the abrasive harridan
he's married to (Adrienne Barbeau, you never imagined she could be so
intolerable). An explanation of the beast – where it came from ,
what it is, how it remained alive for over a century in a crate –
is never offered and beside the point. It exists because without it
there's no story.
I can get into the hang of this movie around Halloween, which IMO is
the perfect time for a viewing of Creepshow.
August 12th
The Shawshank
Redemption (Frank Darabont,
1994)
(spoilers)
Is
the prison drama an American thing? I know other countries have
them but it seems to me that America in particular loves them.
Something about our rebel history and nature draws us to outlaws like
Jesse James and Billy the Kid, or the Corleones. Both real and
fictional, they're a apart of our cultural mythology. IRL we have a
justice system in dire need of rethinking, born of a
crime-&-punishment mentality, a disproportionate percentage of
our citizens in jail – we just keep building them. We've a
fascination foe the death penalty. We also love prison break
thrillers and tales of the long con. I've no information to base
this on but I think Shawshank Redemption is an especially American
story.
Andy
Dufresne is a Maine lawyer wrongly convicted for the murder of his
wife and the man she was having an affair with. Is that a spoiler?
It's been too long, but I have the impression from the novella that
we knew right away that Andy is innocent. The movie keeps that from
us until late in the film, pulling us in by keeping the man a mystery
and then dropping the info when it would have the most emotional
impact.
The
movie is an adaptation of the King novella Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption, one of four King novellas published in the
Different Seasons collection. Between this and The Body (filmed
as Stand by Me), King had a winning one-two punch against critics who
turned up their noses at the horror genre, as three of the novellas
are non-horror and these two in particular are among his best works.
Both are highly American in flavor, one about adult disillusionment
and the other about children having their first realizations of an
adult world. Already a popular cross-media success, King now had
critical recognition not just as a genre star but as one of the great
American authors.
The
movie adaptation of Shawshank was something of a revelation. I
remember well when the public at large started to turn on King, after
a number of films had been successful and a string of bestselling
novels, we also started to get a lot of adaptations that were
mediocre or just plain bad. It was unfair to King as it was none eof
his doing, but then he shot himself in the foot by declaring that if
anyone was going to make a bad Stephen King movie it might as well be
him – and he proceeded to do just that with Maximum Overdrive*. By
now going to see a Stephen King movie was considered a gamble if not
a losing bet. Frank Darabont's Shawshank was not only a damn fine
movie, it was that rare beast that followed the source material
nearly intact right down to King's dialog with few if any noticeable
changes. I hate to criticize King but his attempts at more colorful
dialog usually sound awful on the page and when spoken aloud by
actors it just doesn't play. Darabont makes it all work, which is a
remarkable feat. To a lot of King fans, if Darabont could do it then
there was no excuse for other directors to take liberties.
Thing
is, I think Darabont and King are two of a kind. They're both
consummate storytellers brought up on the classical mold – King
emulates the authors he loved and Darabont the old Hollywood greats.
They both live for the little details, among other things. Their
characters are storybook perfect. Both artists want their audiences
to share in the emotional lives of their protagonists and sometimes
their villains, and they find relevance in side ventures. Neither
finds aesthetic pleasure in streamlining their tales – where are
the unexpected pleasures in refusing to explore your fictional
universe? All due respect to Mick Garris, Darabont is the director
King was waiting for.
The
Shawshank Redmption has a ton of little joys throughout but there are
three standouts: the two leads, and the prison itself. The exterior
of Shawshank was filmed at Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, a
magnificent and cold behemoth that could crush any man's soul. One
we've had an introductory flyover of it, we never question the
authenticity of the interior sets. Darabont and his crew make
Shawshank a “real” place. In that setting its easy to to forget
Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are anything but Andy Dufresne and
fellow con Ellis “Red” Redding. Andy is a quiet guy, aloof, and
we see him through Red's eyes. To facilitate this we get a constant
voiceover from Red. That also goes a long way to bringing the movie
closer to its literary counterpart, King's own prose read aloud (and
by none other than Morgan Freeman, how much classier can it get?).
Very sly like the con itself, the focus of the story is on Andy but
it's really about Red. We root for Andy but never really get into
his head, always viewing him as outsiders. It's misdirection. Red's
is the life that is changed most profoundly. We cheer when Andy is
triumphant, but the strongest emotional fulfillment comes in the
final sequence of the film, and we share it with first Red by himself
and then Andy and Red together. Shawshank Redemption is neither
sloppy nor maudlin, the emotions it evokes are hard earned.
*Maximum
Overdrive is one of the movies I won't be watching this month, and
hopefully not ever again. It gets a lot of love for being a
superlatively bad movie but I was never able to see the charm in it.
I saw it with a friend who was excited for it, and well before it
was over he was begging m to leave the cinema. He stopped being a
King fan almost overnight.
August 13th
Stand by Me (Rob
Reiner, 1986)
Someone posted on IMDb that kids today cannot relate to Stand by Me.
Yeah, I remember back in my day when we'd tromp off across the
countryside to see dead bodies because we didn't have wi-fi.
Sometimes we'd do it two or three times a year. These kids today
don't have cliques, or troubled home lives, misunderstanding parents,
dishonest teachers, ambitions that feel too big for them, older
bullies terrorizing them, or inane discussions over pop culture and
junk food...and ya know what, the little bastards had best stay the
hell off my lawn. Harrumph, that's what.
Come on, man, if the dog in Cujo isn't the story, then the plot in
Stand by Me isn't what matters either. It's about the bonds, and
that magic time in adolescence when one finds ones clique to share it
with. I had mine in middle school and high school (with a slight
change of cast). The first girl I ever loved had hers in 5th
grade, Mr. Sherrill's homeroom. The Separator had hers in Mrs.
Collin' 8th grade homeroom, and she and I clicked in
another community in high school: the drama crowd. I don't know
what her memories of her friends are, but I treasure that time with
my friends. They're what made going to school worth it.
Nostalgia, that's one of the keys to King's success. He's a master of
evoking it. Stand by Me is based on the novella The Body, from the
Different Seasons collection of four novellas. Four friends learn
where the body of a missing school peer can be found, in the woods
off a railroad track, and make a cross-country trek to see for
themselves before anyone else can find the boy. The Body was a
proving point for King, as Different Seasons included three stories
that strayed from the horror filed King had made his name by.
Critics could no longer dismiss him based on genre snobbery. With
The Body, King delivered something still further, a fiction steeped
in his own deeply personal biography. As a boy he once came
wandering home from roaming the Maine countryside with a case of
amnesia, only to discover that the best friend he'd been roaming with
had been struck and killed by a train – presumably right before
his eyes. King wrote the Body in first-person singular as Gordie
Lachance, the talented storyteller who doesn't believe in himself.
Nostalgia being the key to the story, it is set up specifically as a
reminiscence of the grown and published Lachance. King could do
more than just write, he could open himself up in astonishing ways.
Stand by Me was the movie that proved Rob Reiner's merit as a
filmmaker. A likable cast of young actors that would keep getting
roles deftly, deftly handled in their camaraderie and bonding, sweet
photography, a solid screenplay the only flaw of which is to
arbitrarily relocate the story from Maine to Oregon (where it was
filmed, a boon for me as an Oregonian but it screws with King's Maine
mythology),. Reiner might well have been drawing on his own
memories, because he sets just the right tone throughout. There's a
subtle shot at the end of the movie where the body has been found,
the kids have realized that rather than a lark this adventure has
been a solemn discovery about the fragility of their lives, and as
they head home again...they cross a field in which the late afternoon
sun backlights the air filled with dancing seedpods. I'm pretty
sure there's no similar shot earlier in the movie...it points to the
film's substance. This isn't an ephemeral fancy, nor is it an
ending. Their future has been seeded by their shared experience.
There's another moment that struck me as signifying a coming of age,
and it points directly to another of King's maturation tales. Having
crossed a small lagoon the kids find themselves covered in leeches.
Gordie looks into his underwear and finds one on his genitals,
removes....then stares in shock at the blood on his hand before
passing out. It directly echoes Carrie in the shower, deliberately I
believe, as Gordie's own pivotal awakening.
August 14th
Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998)
(spoilers)
From the Different Seasons collection: High-schooler Todd Bowden
discovers a Nazi war criminal living incognito in town, and instead
of exposing him Todd takes over the man's life.
Apt Pupil is another example of an adaptation best viewed at a far
remove from the source material. The longer it's been since you've
read the novella, the more satisfying the movie. It's an excellent
film in its own right, but has been considerably toned down in
grottiness with violent acts removed and an altered ending.
Studying the holocaust in school sets off a flame in Todd's
imagination and he becomes feverish to know more...to really sink
into it entire. Not the politics, not questions of how it an entire
civilization could have descended so low...just the cruelty, and the
power to be cruel. We're clued in via montage that the victims are
not who Todd identifies with, his face juxtaposed with those of Nazi
officers, including one he will recognize riding a bus. Todd stalks
the guy, identifies him via fingerprints as Kurt Dussander, then
confronts him in his home. In exchange for Todd's silence, the boy
demands that Dussander tell him all the most horrible details and
sensations of what it's like to be a mass murderer...a slaughterer.
Todd soaks it up, feeding his fantasies while his friendships and
schoolwork deteriorate...nothing else is as important to him, he is
addicted.
There are two lines I can pursue here, one being the nature of
sociopathy. I think the novella is meant to make us ask whether Todd
is seduced by evil or if he already had it in him. To me, the answer
to that is clear: an innocent does not start a relationship by
blackmailing a total stranger, nor could he be so unmoved by the
atrocity he wishes to learn about. Todd is an evil seed before the
opening credits roll, he only needs nourishing in order to blossom.
We never learn Dussander's arc, how he became a Nazi, so his
recollections mean nothing to us as they to to Todd. Bryan Singer
started what that same assessment. For this sociopath it's nature,
not nurture. The Bowdens (sans their son) are good people.
So, what about that need for murder and cruelty? The movie does an
uneasy dance around the subject, never fully going there as King does
in he book but playing up other aspects of it that are every bit as
queasy and rather more questionable. There is an overt sexual
tension between Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander, made clear by the
dialog and the staging of certain sequences. Should we infer that
the bond is one of gay attraction? Well...it's hard for me to argue
otherwise when Singer himself testifies that this is what he intended
– not as a fact but as a suggestion. And that's a little
troubling, given that Singer is gay himself and yet is flirting with
the steretypes that homosexuality os inextricably linked with madness
and criminality. I'd seriously like to question the guy on this,
because I have no idea what he's thinking.
On the other hand, pay attention to just who responds to what.
Dussander is not drawn to the boy, he finds Todd an unwelcome danger
that has to be handled with craft and deceit. Todd, meanwhile, is
not attracted to physical sex of either gender, it's power that he
fetishizes. Watch the scene in which he dresses Dussander up in
costume and forces him to march – it's not the old man that has him
rapt, it's the uniform. Todd lies awake in bed fantasizing about
the gas chambers and of medical experiments and other tortures.
Singer has him photographed nearly naked in moonlight, a voyeur's
layout. Perhaps to avoid a stronger rating, Todd isn't getting
off...except that we know he really is. Like I said, it's an odd
dance we're being led, one that skirts the issue in some ways but not
others, in seemingly arbitrary manner. The book's Bowden cannot help
himself but to sate his desires through the killings of transients.
The movie doesn't go there. Horror beats missed. Dussander also
begins to kill again, though not for sexual gratification but to
restore his confidence and quiet his nightmares.
Which gets us to the finale, and the spoilers. King ends his novella
with Todd sussed out by his school counselor. In a chilling
foretelling of real-life school massacres to come, high-schooler Todd
takes arms and ammo to an overpass to begin a shooting spree, knowing
it is a suicide move. Death by cop, and he'll take as many innocents
with him as he can. No such thing occurs in the movie, where Todd is
confronted by the counselor and todd gets the upper hand by
threatening to claim the counselor sexually abused him. The final
shot of the film is of Todd smiling in triumph. “You have no idea
what I can do” is the movie's last line.
So, which is the more powerful? Which the more chilling? I think
it's a tossup. The book's is more visceral, certainly, and probably
the more credible...but the movie leaves us to wonder how far can
someone like this go? It plays on one of the same fears that fueled
The Children of the Corn, that the next generation will form a world
that does not hold the same values that we do. Some would say we've
had people like this in office already. Are we looking at a future
leader of the United States?
Already stated, Kin ties the story of Todd Bowden to real-life mass
killings, especially those committed by kids. By implication it asks
what drives someone to commit an atrocity like this. King may or may
not have the right ending. I'm under the impression that most
killings of this sort are committed by the mentally ill, and some who
have felt bullied and victimized past the point of reason, not
clinical sociopaths but people who are alienated. This is not Todd.
Todd has spent the entire movie learning how to hide his twisted
soul and survive.
So what we have then is a polished, professional piece of provocation
that's also frightening for its subject matter, and a smart script
that raises more questions than it answers. Singer's direction is
quietly stylish and confident. It is broguth to life by pone very
good performance (Brad Renfro as Todd) and one great one (Ian
McKellen as Dussander). In all a superior film in the upper tier of
King adaptations, getting the core of the material if not its full
horrific impact of the plot.
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