Posted on 08/04/2017 12:57:40 PM PDT by EveningStar
... The Dark Tower is taking a serious drubbing, and many diehard King fans are similarly displeased with how the movie turned out. But let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly the first film adaptation of a Stephen King book to lay an egg. Children of the Corn, anyone? Maximum Overdrive? The Lawnmower Man?
Fortunately, King’s cinematic oeuvre is chockablock with movies that are actually good. If you were let down by The Dark Tower – or you plan to give it a miss entirely – here are seven great Stephen King movies that you can stream or digitally rent from the comfort of your own haunted house...
(Excerpt) Read more at jam.canoe.com ...
I had to walk the dog in the middle of posting, and by the time I came back you had beaten me to it!
The Gunslinger novels were very tedious to read and the audiobook version didn’t help - though it was performed by a master - the late Frank Muller.
“Shawshank sucks.”
And swallows.
Morgan Freeman and Mr Sarandon?
Those two together could put an insomniac to sleep.
Mr Sarandon is a dopey hack who lives off his wife and Freeman is only as good as the rest of the cast makes him, IMHO.
The Dog was just trying to save her and her child before the Pinto exploded.
The Stand was also good.
That's the way I felt about "It"
It follows these characters for decades, you really get to know them over 1000 pages, and the ending is what?
His best works IMHO are (somewhat) shorter novels, where you get a satisfying ending.
Well, *an* ending at least.
Rage
Carrie
11/22/63
(although it clocked in at around 800 pages)
The Green Mile
Misery
The Dead Zone
Fun facts about The Dead Zone. Senator Stillson, the bad guy was a democrat. King hates republicans. King also received death threats because animal rights activists didn't like Stillson kicking a dog to death. In a novel.
“Probably better done as a series, like “The Stand”.”
only possible way to do it justice, but even then would have to be done by very talented folks and not hacks.
“He writes the same inanities over and over again.”
I’ve read about all his stuff and I don’t think he’s ever had an original thought. A lot of his stuff is lifted directly from Twilight Zone episodes and similar shows from the `60s. All he did was update it for aging Boomers.
Even he admitted his stuff was baloney (but `good baloney’ he says). It was in one of his endless intros to one of his own books.
Now, `The Long Walk’ might make a good movie. But how do you show the shooting of 99 kids one after the other, even if, as Chuck Barris said, “The ultimate game show will be one where the losing contestants are killed.”
Btw, making Roland Deschain a Brother was about the dumbest thing King has ever done, including re-shooting `The Shining’. The closest thing I can think to it would have been hiring Sean Connery to play Forrest Gump, it is that bad.
Vigo Mortenson, Jim Cavaziel or some other male model blank canvas willing to work hard would have been a good choice: an essentially humorless but noble Aragorn trapped in a squirrel cage. That might have worked.
But as someone put it up-thread, trying to put King’s paid-by-the-word theft of Tolkien’s trilogy and a raft of horse operas, updated with a smart-ass junkie, a Freedom Rider black woman in a wheelchair and a prep school kid with lousy parents—that should require at least three or four movies. I’ll wait for it to show up on Netflix. Or MST3000.
Finally, man, King’s writing, waxing rhapsodic over JFK as the last gunslinger, etc., is really cringe-worthy. He does it again in `1963’ and in other stuff, he’s got the biggest faggot man crush for Kennedy, and he’s clueless about how lame it sounds.
OK, I’m done.
“I’ve never felt so ripped off reading a book.”
I felt that way about Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” AND the Cohen brother’s movie based on the book.
“I really liked Stephen Kings early stuff. I stopped reading him when he got so commercial and started kicking stuff out left and right. My fav was probably The Stand.”
same here. I’d add The Shining to The Stand, though.
The Blue Oyster Cult song (Don’t Fear) The Reaper at the beginning of the movie pretty much hooks you.
Kathy Bates, though, as a courageous radio DJ standing up to The Soldier Mens—that’s the price we pay.
(At least we got to hear her get shot.)
The part in the book about naked black soldiers executing docile fellow soldiers waiting their turns in theater seats, that was wild ...
like the Lud executioners feeding lined-up Pubes and Grays into the falling hammer as the purple poison gas spreads
It’s not based on the books. It’s a sequel to the books.
And I say ‘Salem’s Lot. I bought it at lunch one day and after work went home and started reading it. Read until about 11, then got ready for bed and climbed under the covers. About midnight I got up, turned on all the lights, and finished the book before going into work the next day. Scariest book I ever read.
Both television adaptations of ‘Salem’s Lot were bad, IMHO.
You mean Susan Sarandon’s wife and that black democrat MORON that’s always put up as some kind of wise old sage only because he’s black and has a deep voice?
LOL! The libs get upset over the fiction of kicking a dog. Yeah, King is a super lib and that is telling that he would make Stillson a Democrat. Subconscious admission?
Anyway, Mark Twain use to do the same thing, get bored with a story and crap it out. I did read “It” and if I remember “It” was a giant spider at the end? LOL! But anyway, Twain would do the same thing, even in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” which I consider the greatest novel ever written, no book comes even a million miles close. He labored like hell over that book, and it’s like he had this huge burst of genius making connections with his childhood and freedom and slavery and then he goes into this utterly pretentious garbage of Jim being in chains and Tom Sawyer must make pretend they are breaking Jim out of jail and goes on and on and on.
I guess they didn’t have editors back them, but other than that, no novel can touch Huckleberry Finn. I must have read it literally a thousand times, I read it to this day off and on, I got it on my cellphone through Kindle. I’m 54 and I’ve been reading it since I was 8. I know every line, every chapter. It’s like a drug that book, you read it and it totally changes your mental chemistry. Huck hiding out on Jackson Island smoking his pipe and the sun coming through the leaves in the trees making “freckled places on the ground” where they “swapped about a little suggesting there was a breeze up there”, and he hears the low faint “boom” of the cannon on the paddle boat. Chapter 8 of that book is probably the most brilliant chapter ever written in fiction.
FWIW, year's ago when I cast this movie in my mind, I had Jason Isaacs picked for the part of Roland. I thought he'd be just about perfect for the part.
“Hearts in Atlantis” was good, even though the movie only really dealt with one of the short stories in the book. Anthony Hopkins was great, and so was David Morse, who is a seriously underrated actor (George Washington in HBO’s “John Adams”).
I have a similar story. I was a senior in HS (1980 way back!), and I have to read a “current” book and do a book report for Advanced Comp class. I am discussing it with the teacher and comment that I don’t really have a book in mind to read. He reaches into his desk and pulls out a copy of Salem’s Lot and says, “You know, try this, I’ll bet you’ll enjoy it.”
I read the entire thing that night. Great book!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.