_ The Shining. Different from the book that I also love but a great film nonetheless and one of Kubrick's best.
_ Carrie. Great performances and also one of De Palma's best film. King seems to inspire a lot of great directors to do some of their best work. Which brings us to
_ Dead Zone. A great Cronenberg film and great performance by Christopher Walken.
_ Creepshow. Not a King book but a cool original screenplay written by the master. Also King's best performance as Jordy Verill in the segment "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill."
_ Stand by Me. A pretty good film.
_ 1408. Maybe not as great as the other ones I mentioned but still very enjoyable.
ok, spoilers for the Dead Zone in this post...
Yeah, The Dead Zone is one of my favourite films, I am quite pissed off that print on the dvd release is so worn down, it needs a good remastering. The colours on on a vhs recording I took from tv about twenty years ago are better than the dvd, but the vhs is a little fuzzy now, so I watch the dvd.
I think it's Chris Walken's best performance, and the best Stephen King adapted movie I have seen.
I have seen all the movies on your list bar Creepshow, they are all classics apart from 1408, which is still pretty damn good.
The only King book I have picked up was TDZ, I only read about 2/3 of it though, I left it down somehere, and never got back to it, but I was not that bothered as the story was faithful and I already knew how it played out. But, of course it is great for getting a lot of background details, particularly on the presedential candidate Martin Sheen plays. We only see a little of that in Johnny's visions, but in the book it goes right back into his early years, childhood iirc.
It is just a very touching movie, first you have all the stuff with his ex-gf, she comes round to make love even though she is married now, as a one time thing, and it's just heartbreaking to see him playing with her kid afterwards(once they have given him the smelling salts, following the drugged up baby bottle, one time deal, no unexpected accidents or nappy rashes are getting in the way of this), and then having to say goodbye and crying, Walken is simply astounding, i'm feeling it a bit recalling his performance there.
Also, the stuff with the kid he tutors, forget about it, I am am welling up with the emotion typing this up, holy moses, when he phones him up after saving his life, and all the kid hears is silence, 'Johnny, is that you?', Johnny being forbidden to contact him.
So, not only does he miss out on marrying his sweetheart and having a family with her, but he loses a surrogate son, because that's what they had, that kind of bond. It wasn't just the fact his dad was freaked out by his powers that brought about the forbidden zone, he was also jealous of his relationship with his kid.
It is actually a frickin depressing story for the main character, who is pretty much a saint(apart from maybe doing the do with a married woman, but i think if god was going to excuse any time for that, it would be that time, 'ok, johnny, I'm going to curse you and f*** you up anyway, so on you go, i won't have the husband walk in on you or anything, and ok, i will let you off for making the baby a valium addict for life) but you are obviously uplifted by the good he does, if King had killed that kid off, no way this would be one of my fav movies, but he knows what he's doing. It's the story of the gift and the curse, and the gift *has* to pay off in big ways, all the way through the story, to offest the depressing loneliness this guy goes through in the film.
And even though he dies at the end, he has a happy ending, he looks happy when he gets that final vision of Martin Sheen blowing his brains out when he picks up Time magazine. You'd think Sheen snr would have taken some advice from his son and learned to spin that incident with the bullet proof baby vest into some kind of positive...'I'm bibbing!'
and the music, forget about it, Micheal Kamen's music is not only emotionally moving, but it's got the eeireness sitting just right in with that too.
I was so glad that he got to do the 1st X-Men movie(his last score) as Singer's regular was tied up in a gig, yes, it is somewhat understated , but it is still very good, and at it's best harks back to this Dead Zone s/track. Thinking of the moment when Logan lowers his claws in the bar, that is so like the DZ s/track.
(Incidentally, there was this crazy but nice guy at my art school who was obsessed with doing oil paintings of me, and when i would visit his studio to pose, he would blast Micheal Kamen soundtracks out of his ghettoblaster while he painted very intensely, lol, a bit like Nick Nolte in Scorsese's life lessons, I guess i was Patricia Arquette, and i did actually wonder if the guy was into me at one point, but no, he was just transfixed by my Modiglianic face!)
Anyway...lol...I kind of feel like wathcing the DZ again now, but god damn, that print needs a remastering. They could get a better print off my frickin vhs if they just removed the fuzziness!
and those opening crdits of the title of the movie, how good is that? Any first time viewer of the dvd would think, man, this print is not so good, and...holy crap, big black triangles are appearing on the screen and eating up the picture, wtf is this jigsaw puzzle doing...oh, ok, it's the name of the movie appearing onscreen.
I even got through that whole rabble without mentioning the fact I always flinch bad when that cop headbutts those protruding open scissors!
Oh, and it is good to see Captain Dallas from Alien in the role of the Cop Captain, cause he is sporting the exact same beard, so I suppose you could do some kind of link up those two movies there if you wanted to. He gets so freaked out by the fact his collegue headbutted some scissors that he changes his name and joins the space race. So, TDZ is a prequel to Alien. i actually spoke about this theory of mine to some guy in a bar who was telling me he used to direct the old Hovis bread adverts, and he said, ach, so it's been done already, fug it, I'll make a prequel or sequel to the other spacey sci-fi one that everyone still talks about then.
t
as the devil.
nothing wrong with that, but it has nothing to do with King's The Running Man.)
