You are not logged in. Please register or login.
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
Sky Dog wrote:I love Kubrick and the movie. I guess that's the difference between a fan of Bon Jovi and a real rocker.
OR someone who actually reads novels and someone who watches movies!
Ha.....you are correct sir! Haven't read a book in quite a while. +1 
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
-D- wrote:Sky Dog wrote:I love Kubrick and the movie. I guess that's the difference between a fan of Bon Jovi and a real rocker.
OR someone who actually reads novels and someone who watches movies!
Ha.....you are correct sir! Haven't read a book in quite a while. +1
HAHAHAH that was a softball dude! 
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
I always thought King's adaptions sucked major ass compared to his actual novels. My favorite novel of his, Pet Semetary, has still yet to receive anything remotely resembling a good treatment other than a kick ass late-era Ramones song.
A lot of this comes from the way his novels have been optioned.
Carrie, Salem's Lot and The Shining, the first three adaptations, were handled (in comparison) with considerable care, gradually having all the more established names at the helm (De Palma, Hooper (a replacement for Romero), Kubrick). Essentially, this was because King inspired the movers and shakers in the industry, and directors wanted to try their hands on his works.
Many successive adaptations found quality control flying out the window, with Z-grade production values and a rushed video release to capitalize on King's clout. They were the cinematic equivalent to softcovers you see at the stand of every nick-nack shop, but never actually buy. King saw the money coming in and he was more than obliged to keep optioning.
Every once in a while, a prestige horror filmmaker like David Cronenberg picks up The Dead Zone and turns it into a minor gem, but we get one too many Sometimes They Come Back sequel to balance that one out.
King himself has a mixed relationship with the adaptations. He never got around to admit Kubrick took his concept, twisted it to suit another medium and crafted a work that has since been added to the annals of cinema - for the uniniated, Kubrick's Shining is truly considered that relevant.
King's only hands-on contribution to the multiplexes is Maximum Overdrive. I'm fond of an early sequence at a cut-off bridge.
[youtube]MgkvaKe1Wes#t=3m3s[/youtube]
Trust me, you want to stop watching around the 6-minute mark.
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
In fairness, Maximum Overdrive is a hard concept to transfer to screen in that time period without it being considered camp.
Audiences still weren't too far removed from the Smokey and the Bandit days, and trucks and truckers were still considered subjects to be made fun of.
Max OD would work better today with upgrades in CGI technology, but for that film to work, there has to be a creepy factor. I was never fond of Carpenter's Christine, but you have to admit it's alot creepier than MaxOD, if just for Arnie.
It was obvious with Max OD that it was someone else looking for a hit (a big problem with King's movies), that basically just copied Carpenter's format from Christine, threw in a COMPLETELY MISCAST AND MISUSED AC/DC soundtrack and had no fucking clue what they were doing.
That AC/DC threw me completely off as a kid. How pointless. It might as well of been Poison.
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
Another thing was that the director was hardly in the best possible condition.
Smoking at least two packets of cigarettes a day, King craved anything which might drive him on in his writing, including the cocaine freely available at the Hollywood parties he attended as Carrie and The Shining were turned into movies towards the end of the Seventies.
'One snort and cocaine owned me body and soul,' he said. 'It was my on-switch, and it seemed like a really good energising drug.'
In 1980, the Kings renovated and moved into an imposing 24-room house in Bangor - with bat motifs on the stained-glass windows and a wrought-iron fence paying homage to the real-life creatures which flitted-around the old roof spaces.
This became a place of pilgrimage for King fans, who hung around for hours in hope of a glimpse of their hero, throwing books and presents into the seven-acre garden and occasionally haranguing visitors as they drove through the gates.
They kept vigil unaware that, during his late-night marathon writing sessions, their idol was supplementing the many gallons of beer he drank with so much cocaine that he had to stick cotton wool up his nose to stop blood dripping on to his typewriter.
His dependency had reached such a pitiful stage five years later that he had resorted to buying antiseptic mouthwash for its alcohol content - as his editor Chuck Verrill saw during the making of the film Maximum Overdrive, King's directorial debut.
'He was gargling Listerine and popping pills,' recalled Verrill. 'He was still a nice guy and coherent, but he did seem to be strung out.'
King later said he was 'coked out of my mind' during the making of the film, but at first his escalating drug problem did not appear to affect his output. His spine-chiller It became America's best-selling book of 1986 and the following year he received critical acclaim for his thriller Misery.
-DM
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
^^ Good article.
I loved Carpenter's Christine. And I loved Kubrick's The Shining. Every film, except for probably LOTR and Harry Potter, takes a departure from their novels. Which they should. Two very different mediums and it allows you to appreciate both works on their own. And I always thought it was pretty silly when people would get so bent over an adaption.
btw, Interview With The Vampire was just as good of a movie as it was a novel. And Anne Rice was a better writer when she was a drunk.
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
Stephen Gallagher raises a good point, which I for one am ready to sign:
"If Kubrick's SHINING had been lousy through and through, I imagine that it might have been less of a problem for King. Galling, yes. Annoying, certainly. But it would have been easier to set aside and would have left the field wide open for some later, definitive and faithful version. As it is - and I'm presuming here - he probably felt as if the best of his imagination had been strip-mined to service another man's creativity."
- Clicky
I don't agree with everything he says about the shortcomings of Kubrick's version, but I may be biased. The long and short for it, to me, is that King's untampered vision of the story is the book. The film is a different beast and should be considered to be rooted in the book, but comparing them too directly sets the film to an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, as Gallagher does point out, the storytelling of American television (in the late 90s) differentiates heavily from American filmmaking of the late 70s. In short, at the cinema, visual is the defining narrative element - on tv, it's replaced with audio. Things are spoken aloud instead of seen.
When these two narrative principles are compared to the written word, where everything is described in prose, one has to come to the conclusion that all books are somewhat unfilmable as themselves.
Literal adaptations are lousy, as they not only slavishly heel to the written word on the pretext of "faithful", but they also disregard the benefits of the target medium, with the end result being neither here or there.
Is Kubrick's version then flawed, much like the derided TV version? In terms of visualizing the book, my vote's on Kubrick - while watching the film on the big screen, you are in the Overlook. If we cast aside the book, the topiary animals, the ghostly Tony, and, most importantly, separate the Jack Nicholson Torrance from his literary counterpart, we get the film by its own right.
As such, it's grand. Full of intrigue, studying the slow-burn breakdown of a family unit, which, pivotally, is coming apart from the seams at the get-go. Out there in isolation, Jack has a chance to find his book, Wendy can reconnect with her estranged husband, Danny has a winter he can boast to any other schoolyard kid in the years to come.
Only it doesn't quite work out. This is where my views differ most from Gallaghers, as he points out Jack's story arc as a major shortcoming in the film. My point is, if you compare the arc to that of the book, you know it's "short", because it's pushing some of the same buttons, but emphasises things differently.
"You have always been the caretaker" scene is the crux of Jack's story. The cinematic Overlook is not as interested about a stressed-out boy with the ability to see dead people, rather than feeding on the emotional turmoil of its habitants. In the grand scheme of things, Danny is reduced from prime target to a silent witness.
Jack's torment to go out and turn against his own family is what drives the film. When you think about it, it's actually very cinematic, very creepy. And very much at the heart of the book, as well.
Re: The Shining Gets A Sequel
The TV Version of The Shining which was promoted to be King's definitive vision was a big hunk of turd.
So King needs to fuck off on that. King needs to stick to writing great books, and let guys like the late Stanley Kubrick figure out how to make them great films.
Sure most guys fuck it up, but some of the later shit obviously didn't have the same pedigree once King's back catalog got whored out to everyone in Hollywood.
