The Shining Miniseries Hilarious Review

Started by Fernando, June 09, 2003, 11:57:59 AM

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Fernando

Not mine, is from a guy of usenet, I swear you'll laugh.

"I just don't know why anyone could prefer Kubrick's film over the
awesome miniseries. I mean all Kubrick's version has going for it is
Jack Nicholson, depth, complex metaphor, awesome cinematography, a
haunting score, a real budget, and one of the greatest directors of
all time.

"On the other hand, the infinitely superior miniseries has everything
going for it: the guy from Wings, the superb acting of Elliot Gould
and Marvin Van Peebles, simpler dialogue, lots of ghosts in cheap
makeup, CGI, a happy ending, and a screenplay penned by the guy who
directed _Maximum Overdrive_.

"All that depth and complexity in the Kubrick version just makes my
head hurt anyway. I don't watch movies to have to think! If I wanted
to do that, I'd go back to elementary school. And, besides, there was
way too much violence and bloodshed in Kubrick's movie. And why does
Jack have to keep using the F-word on his murderous rampage? Can't he
just say "darn" like in the miniseries?"

Gold Trumpet

I get in semi arguments all the time with a guy I work with who of course hates Kubrick's version because it is nothing like the book. He loves the mini series and tries to inflict his view that the movie should have adapted the book straight on because it was so good. Reason I say semi argument is because I've never read the book or watched the mini series. I'm considering watching the mini series to have an opinion but refuse to read the book because to judge the book against the Kubrick's movie is unfair. Books are the greatest source for information and it always looks more impressive than movies because movies can only do so much. Also, straight adaptation is the biggest bore. It brings no mystery or identity to the movie. All answers and expectations are just found in the book so any meaning or value that can be found in the movie is gone due to the book. Way too many people believe in this straight adaptation but the trick is to adapt it and make it new, which is really how to complement the previous work because it says the previous work can inspire something new. A story that is adapted straight actually hurts the story because all the magic in its words and imagination in telling the story is lost when done in a movie because it fixates the audience on a certain specific image instead of what they can create on their own through imagination. I know this is ramble but I've been in too many arguments on this specific thing that I always end up going into this explanation. But as I said before, I'm considering watching the mini series.

~rougerum

Derek

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

jonas

Kubrick is my favorite film maker.

Now, I'm a big King fan too and the Shining is a great book. BUT, the book works well as a book and Kubrick's movie works better as a movie.

If you've seen both versions (as I have) you can see why Kubrick made the changes where he did, and all for the better.

Kubrick was a big reader and he knew what works on screen and what doesn't, and I think he proved it with the Shining.
"Mein Führer, I can walk!" - Dr. Strangelove

ElPandaRoyal

QuoteI mean all Kubrick's version has going for it is
Jack Nicholson, depth, complex metaphor, awesome cinematography, a
haunting score, a real budget, and one of the greatest directors of
all time.

What the fuck?...
Si

Sleuth

I like to hug dogs

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: SlobhHe was not being sarcastic

Are you serious?

TheVoiceOfNick

Quote from: SlobhHe was not being sarcastic

um... i'm confuselled...  :roll:

Fernando

Since this thread was brought back to  life I'll post this here.

Article on the NYT: WATCHING MOVIES WITH NICOLE KIDMAN
(A little long but worth it)

February 22, 2002

WATCHING MOVIES WITH NICOLE KIDMAN

A Perfectionist's Pupil With a Major in Creepy

By RICK LYMAN

SANTA MONICA, CALIF.
THE first time Nicole Kidman saw "The Shining," she was 14 and spent
most of the movie paying more attention to her 16-year-old boyfriend
than to what was happening on the screen. "I was meant to be going
roller-skating at this rink in Sydney," she said. "But we decided to
ditch that and go see a movie. I really wasn't supposed to be in
there. I was too young, as I recall, but he got me in. I looked older.
And I kind of watched a bit of the movie, but really, I made out
through most of it."

Later, she watched it again. By this time, she was a film actress
herself. She and her husband at the time, Tom Cruise, had rented a
huge, ancient chateau in France and were staying there all alone. So
they decided to rent this 1980 film, which also takes place in a big,
remote, nearly empty building, and late at night they slipped it into
the VCR. "We purposely watched it that way, to magnify the
experience," Ms. Kidman said. "It was terrifying."

Since then, Ms. Kidman not only got to know the movie's revered
director, Stanley Kubrick, but also worked for him in "Eyes Wide Shut"
(1999), a movie that made almost as much news during its production as
it did after its release because of the long, painstaking shooting
schedule that the perfectionist Kubrick maintained. Sitting near the
back of an otherwise empty screening room in Santa Monica and munching
from a basket of chocolate- covered pecans that were a gift from her
publicist, Ms. Kidman prepared to watch "The Shining" for the first
time since she had worked with Kubrick, who died in 1999, shortly
before the release of the film.
Misha Erwitt for The New York Times.

"I've seen most of Stanley's movies many times," Ms. Kidman said. "And
obviously, by working with him, we talked a lot about all of his
films. `The Shining' isn't necessarily my favorite Kubrick film, but I
do love it. What interests me now, and why I want to see it again, is
in terms of horror as a movie genre and what Stanley was able to do
with it. Great directors are often able to go into a genre and really
elevate it, and that's interesting to me. It was the same when David
Fincher made `Seven,' really elevating that serial-killer thriller
genre. I think that's really fascinating, how great directors can do
that."

Although 2001 had brought the breakup of her marriage to Mr. Cruise,
it was followed by a wave of sympathetic media attention and two
significant critical and box-office hits. First came Baz Luhrmann's
"Moulin Rouge," a lush and frenetic attempt to resuscitate the movie
musical by mixing contemporary songs with a Belle Époque setting. Ms.
Kidman played Satine, the consumptive star at the Paris nightclub of
the title, and sang, danced and swung her way through the film. Later,
in August, a smaller-scale horror film, "The Others," in which she
played the mother of haunted children in a creepy mansion, became one
of the sleeper hits of the summer and began arguments in Hollywood
about which film would eventually earn her an Oscar nomination. In
December, she was declared Entertainer of the Year by Entertainment
Weekly magazine. A month later, she won the Golden Globe for best
actress in a musical, and a month after that she was nominated for an
Oscar for her role in the same film, "Moulin Rouge."

So, all in all, it's been a passable year.

Predatory Cameras

Ms. Kidman, tall and slender, brushed back her russet hair and popped
another pecan into her mouth, stuffing it into her cheek with her
tongue to slowly savor the powdery chocolate coating. "Back when I
first saw this, I really wasn't aware of moviemaking in terms of
moviemaking," she said. "I would just sit and watch movies. But now,
it's interesting to watch some of them again, now that I'm aware of
how it's all done, technically. Ooh, look, this is scary, isn't it?"

The film (based on a novel by Stephen King, which it resembles in only
a few plot elements) had begun, and its opening credits were under way
— a long, slow, gliding shot from a bird's-eye view overlooked a car
as it made its way along an otherwise deserted mountain road, higher
and higher up the pine-flecked ridges while low, ominous music played.
At one point, when the car made a precipitous turn on the cliff-
hugging road, the camera did not follow it but kept flying out and
over a pristine mountain lake. But it was the slowness of it and the
music that made the camera seem almost predatory, stalking from above.

We had our first view of the Overlook, a huge hotel high in the
mountains with a kind of frontier luxe design and a gigantic hedge
maze on its front lawn.

"It's become such an iconic image, don't you think?" Ms. Kidman said.
"This big, creepy hotel high in the mountains. How often since this
movie came out have you seen something in a movie or a television show
and thought, `Oh, it's just like `The Shining'?"

In the opening scenes, we meet Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a
former schoolteacher applying for a job as the hotel's winter
custodian. Torrance and his family — his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall),
and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) — would be snowed in all winter as
the mountain road leading to the hotel became buried. Not a problem,
Torrance tells the hotel's manager (Barry Nelson); he is beginning a
new career as a writer and needs a long stretch of peace and quiet to
begin work.

Using New Technology

Two things immediately become apparent: as in many Kubrick films, the
line readings are strangely flat, not to the point of unnaturalness
but just enough to give them an odd feel. And the director clearly
fussed about the framing of his shots, as everything appears posed and
arranged.

"Stanley is the master of that, I think," Ms. Kidman said. "He was
very precise about his framing, mostly because of the way he wanted to
use the Steadicam in the movie."

The Steadicam was a new toy back in the late 1970's when Kubrick was
making "The Shining." He was not the first director to use it, but he
was among the first. And he certainly pointed the way to how it could
become not merely another tool, but also a kind of gateway into a new
visual style.

Essentially, the Steadicam is what its name implies: a steady camera.
Previously, directors had to use expensive and unwieldy cranes or
lines of track to get smooth, bump-free camera movements. But the
Steadicam attaches to an elaborately engineered harness on the camera
operator's shoulders and can be moved about freely — backward,
forward, sideways, up and down — without the slightest murmur or
shaking.

In "The Shining," Kubrick made these ostentatiously smooth camera
movements, which were still relatively new to audiences at the time,
into a motif for the film. The steadiness of the camera movements
mixed with the grisly subject matter into a persistent mood of creepy
unease, especially when juxtaposed with the odd, often emotionless
line readings.

"Stanley would always tell us he was not interested in naturalness,"
Ms. Kidman said. "He was not interested in a sort of documentary style
of performance. He liked it to be slightly odd, slightly off. He would
never say that directly, about wanting it to be odd. He would never
talk in that kind of detail about what he wanted to achieve in his
films or what they were about, but it was apparent."

A Strained Naturalness

As Torrance talked to the hotel manager and his staff, in those
fussily arranged frames, the tinge of artificiality in the line
readings made it seem as if everybody was trying a little too hard to
seem natural. Even in the next scenes, between Wendy and Danny, back
home and talking about their move up to the Overlook, the clear
affection between them is subtly tinged with the same sense of stilted
portentousness.

So when the horror begins to creep into the story, it seems to flow
directly out of the strange atmosphere that all these techniques have
created. First, we learn that the previous caretaker at the hotel had
apparently suffered a mental breakdown during the lonely winter and
had gruesomely murdered his entire family. And then we discover that
Danny is a lonely and friendless little boy who has taken to talking
to what his mother believes to be an imaginary friend named Tony. The
little boy takes on a high- pitched, raspy tone when he speaks in
Tony's voice, and he curls one of his index fingers up and down in
time to Tony's lines.

"I love how all of these scenes play out, so easy and very confident,"
Ms. Kidman said. "You know there is something odd about it, but it's
done with such precision and intelligence that you know the director
is in complete control. And that thing that the boy does with his
finger — do you see that? Stanley said that the boy came up with that
during a casting session. He just started doing it, so they wrote it
into the script. It was so right and so creepy. Isn't it?"

Not Just Feelings, but Ideas, Too

Ms. Kidman, who was just about to head off to Sweden to begin work on
a new film, "Dogsville," for the director Lars von Trier, said she had
been studying about Bertolt Brecht lately and come to believe that
there was a connection between Brecht's approach to his characters and
Kubrick's.

"Brecht's view of theater was that by creating naturalism you were
asking the audience to become emotionally attached to the characters,"
she said. "What Brecht felt, and what directors like Stanley or Lars
or others are saying, is that what they are doing is about ideas. It's
not about becoming attached to the characters or imagining that it's
really happening to you, as you often do when you watch a movie. I
think it's true. That's what Stanley liked about a performance. It
didn't have to be real; it just had to be slightly heightened,
slightly off. Stanley was an ideas director. His overall ideas were
always very profound and unusual — you know? It certainly applied to
`2001' and to `Eyes Wide Shut.' But every film he made was about more
than just feeling for the characters."

The peculiar line readings even begin to feel almost comical, in a
dark sort of way, as the subject matter becomes more grisly. Long,
expository passages as the hotel's previous murders are described to
Torrance in a matter-of-fact way take on a distinct funny tinge, for
instance, as does a later scene when Wendy is shown the contents of
the hotel's walk-in freezer and listens to a long, seemingly pointless
laundry list of its contents.

"You really get that slight black-comedic thing, don't you?" Ms.
Kidman said. "That is definitely no accident. From getting to know
Stanley, I know that this is very much from his sense of humor. It's
so unusual; that's what I love about it. And once you begin to hear
the comedy in it, you pick up on more and more of it as the movie goes
along. It really draws you in."

The First Ugly Flashes

The first signs of strain in the Torrance family are felt as they
drive back up to the Overlook, The forced cheerfulness of Mr.
Nicholson's earlier scenes with the hotel manager are a sharp contrast
to the sense of anger and tension as he drives and listens to his wife
and son prattle on.

"The happy family," Ms. Kidman said, chuckling. "Look how irritated
Jack looks. You can just tell that he feels trapped in that car. Let's
face it, Shelley's character can be a little irritating. She doesn't
do anything wrong; she can just be a little irritating." Mr. Nicholson
snaps at her, dismissively. "Oh, things are going well in this
relationship," Ms. Kidman said. "But this is what I love about Jack's
performance in this movie. He is so bold in the way he does it. Look
at how mean, how awful, he is to her. He doesn't hold back. In no
sense is he winking at the audience and saying, `Oh, I'm not really
like this.' He just goes for it. Such a good combination, Stanley and
Jack. Who would have guessed it?"

By this time, the audience has been let in on a secret about Danny
that none of the other characters know. Tony is more than a harmless
imaginary friend. He is a real, spiritual presence — "a little boy who
lives in my mouth" is the way Danny describes him — who tells Danny a
lot more than he has shared with his parents, including giving him
visions of blood and carnage at the Overlook.

One particular vision is repeated three times during the film. It
shows an elevator lobby at the Overlook while, in torturous
slow-motion, one of the elevator doors glides open, releasing a
torrent of blood that gracefully sweeps through the lobby, splashing
the walls and carrying the furniture toward the camera like flotsam.

"This stuff is just so fantastic," Ms. Kidman said. "It just shows
what you can do with an image."

She had just finished a film — "The Others" — in which there were
several crucial scenes involving child actors, playing her young son
and daughter. And she found herself repeatedly amazed by the
performance Kubrick was able to draw from Danny Lloyd.

'This Child Is Perfect'

"God, he is so good," Ms. Kidman said. "And his scenes are often so
long and really depend on his performance. It's so difficult to get a
child to do that. This child is perfect."

One way Kubrick was able to nudge the boy in a certain direction was
by concealing from him the movie's actual subject matter, which was
deemed too gruesome for someone so young. Ms. Kidman said she did not
know what the boy's experience on the film had been. (Ms. Duvall, who
was called upon to reach and maintain a pitch of almost manic terror
in several scenes later in the film, described the experience as
hellish, Ms. Kidman said.) But she was not surprised that Mr. Lloyd
did not pursue an acting career into adulthood and made only a couple
of films more. "His parents were smart," Ms. Kidman said. "Child
actors don't fare very well in Hollywood."

Ms. Kidman was particularly taken with a long scene between the young
Mr. Lloyd and Scatman Crothers, playing the hotel chef, who is giving
the boy some ice cream before the hotel closes down for the winter and
he goes down the mountain with the rest of the staff, leaving Danny
and his family alone. There is a moment in the scene when Mr.
Crothers, whose character also has psychic powers, begins to
communicate telepathically with the boy. The stunned Danny sits there,
transfixed. "I love how he doesn't blink," Ms. Kidman said. In this
scene, Danny is informed that he has a gift known as shining, and
there are others like him in the world, although he is right not to
tell his parents everything about it, or about Tony.

"He just lets the scene play," Ms. Kidman said, referring to Kubrick.
"He always did that. On `Eyes Wide Shut,' he'd let things play and
play, even when there was nothing but silence, and I'd think, `Ooh, no
way this is getting into the movie — it's going on way too long.' And
then that would be the exact take that Stanley would decide to use."

In "The Shining," it adds to the creepiness, she said. Audiences are
accustomed to scenes of a certain length; often they are awaiting the
cut to the next scene with the same anticipation as someone who
listens to a certain kind of music and comes to anticipate a chord
change. So when the cut does not come at the anticipated point, it is
felt subliminally, and focuses viewers' attention, makes them feel a
little adrift, even tense.

The scene between Mr. Crothers and the boy also showed how Kubrick was
intent on giving little pieces of information visually, frequently
reinforcing it by showing the same things several times. "He always
said that you had to make sure the audience understood key pieces of
information to follow the story, and that to do that you had to repeat
it several times, but without being too obvious about it," Ms. Kidman
said. "Here, in this scene, look at how there is this rack of knives
hanging in the background over the boy's head. It's very ominous, all
of these knives poised over his head. And it's important because it
not only shows that the boy is in danger, but one of those very knives
is used later in the story when Wendy takes it to protect herself from
her husband."

Many Takes, for a Reason

Kubrick was infamous for his perfectionism and for the number of takes
he would make of seemingly ordinary scenes, in many cases more than
50.

"There was a reason Stanley would do that," Ms. Kidman said. "He
believed that what it does to you, as an actor, was that you would
lose control of your sense of self, of the part of you that was
internally watching your own performance. Eventually, he felt, you
would stop censoring yourself. It's exhausting and difficult, so you
do need to have a passion for the film that you're making and a belief
in him. People would ask me, wasn't it torture to spend so much time
working on that movie? And I said, no, it wasn't. It really wasn't. We
were working with one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and we
were able to be in his orbit for that period of time. It was amazing.
It was liberating."

By the movie's midpoint — when the creeping terror begins to seep out
into actual visions of carnage, and Mr. Nicholson's performance edges
toward psychosis and mania — it is clear that Kubrick had found a way
to use the Steadicam to draw out his scenes. Frequently, the camera
would follow characters from one room to another, out into a hallway,
back into the room. Scenes would go on and on.

"Stanley would never say, `Let's cut something'; he'd always let
things play out," she said. "And he would choreograph scenes like this
so carefully, down to very tiny movement, because he was so intent on
the framing of the shots even as the camera was moving from place to
place."

While there is music throughout the film, often foreboding classical
pieces, long stretches are almost silent, or played only to the sound
of ambient noise. In one scene, when Torrance is supposed to be
writing, the camera focuses on his unattended typewriter. Instead, in
the background, we can hear a thumping noise, almost like an ax
hitting a tree, and when the camera moves it is revealed as Torrance
bouncing a ball off the wall.

The most striking instance of the use of sound, though, comes in one
of the film's most famous shots: that of the boy on his
plastic-wheeled, low-riding tricycle, zipping around the hotel's empty
corridors. The scene is shot with a Steadicam using a rig that Kubrick
had specially built for the film, so the camera glides along at just a
few inches off the floor, just behind the boy, chasing him through the
labyrinth of the hotel. The sound in the scene is very specific; a
soft rustling as the plastic wheels pass along carpeted hallways
interspersed with a grating sound as they rattle over the wooden
floors in between.

"It's so logical, of course," Ms. Kidman said. "That's what it would
sound like. But it's so perfect; it really brings us into the scene.
That's where Stanley was a master. He would just notice the small, odd
details."

Claustrophobic in a Big Space

As Torrance begins to deteriorate mentally — and to have some
frightening visions of his own, all leading him to the notion of
killing his family — the sprawling hotel, buried under huge
snowdrifts, begins to feel more and more claustrophobic. And Wendy,
first in denial and then in growing panic, realizes that her husband
is not only unhinged but also a threat.

"This is where I think Stanley is really able to elevate the horror
genre," Ms. Kidman said. "He takes his big idea, that of the father
figure, the protector figure, becoming a villain, turning into someone
you are afraid of. I'm really noticing that this time through. The
first time you watch a movie like this, you are caught up in being
scared about what's coming next. But when you know what's coming next,
you can pay more attention to how it's constructed and how well
thought out it is."

There is one scene — in the final third of the film, when we know that
Torrance is fighting the growing urge to kill his wife and son — in
which Danny is sitting on his father's lap. Mr. Nicholson is rubbing
the boy's back as he asks subtly threatening questions, and the boy is
almost slumped over as he sits there. "Look at this," Ms. Kidman said.
"Stanley doesn't cut. This is so hard to do with a child. Usually, in
scenes with this kind of intensity and subtlety, you'd have to edit
around. And it's such a long scene. There is only one way this scene
could have happened, and that is because of the chemistry between the
director, the other actor and the child. This is what all the hard
work was about."

When the boy suddenly looks over and asks his father, "You would never
hurt Mommy, would you?," Ms. Kidman gasped with emotion. "Oh!" she
said. "That is so powerful. And it was all one long take."

The Dam Bursts

Mr. Nicholson drew barbs from critics at the time for what some felt
was the over- the-top nature of his performance in the film's final
half-hour, when he degenerates from a taunting madman into a
screaming, grunting beast with an ax. But Ms. Kidman rejects that. "I
simply don't agree," she said. "I think he is being very bold. Is some
of it over the top? Perhaps. But I don't think the movie would have
worked half as well as it does if he'd played it down."

Just as compelling, she said, is the way Ms. Duvall's character comes
apart — and then pulls herself together — in the final scenes.

"Her voice is so high-pitched that when she starts whining and crying,
it seems almost comical," Ms. Kidman said. "At first, you sort of want
to laugh, and then you cringe and then you scream."

There is the famous scene in which Wendy discovers that the book her
husband has been laboring on all winter is actually page after page of
the same childish sentence: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull
boy." She rips the pages away one after the other while, unknown to
her, Torrance is sneaking up from behind.

"It drives you mad, doesn't it?" Ms. Kidman said. "A great shot, a
great moment. And yet it's funny, too, in a twisted sort of way.
Shelley is just wonderful here. Look at her reaction. She's not
screaming or anything, just getting more and more frantic. He's coming
up behind her, isn't he? Oh, I can't bear it. I really can't bear it."
A short scream escaped from Ms. Kidman when Mr. Nicholson's leering
face suddenly appeared on the screen.

"It's like the dam bursting on his insanity," she said. "The whole
movie has been building up to this. And look at how cruel he is to
her, how he mimics her. It's wonderful, how cruel he is. And Shelley
is having to show so much fear, so much terror, without a break,
without a cut. It's so intense. It's like a dream, you know? Where
you're in a dream and you're kind of stuck, you can't move, and
something is coming after you."

'I Can Hear His Voice'

In the film's last few scenes — when the evil spirits of the Overlook
take physical shape, so that even Wendy can see them, and the blood
spills one last time from the elevator shaft — Ms. Kidman said she
could not watch any of "The Shining" now without feeling the
director's presence. "I can feel him in everything," she said. "I can
hear his voice. I know exactly what he would have said. I can sense
his particular tastes."

She set down the basket of chocolate pecans and took a few deep
breaths.

"Stanley challenged me on every area of my life," she said. "He taught
me so much. I can't even put it into words. What would really be
interesting is to take a long stretch of time and watch each of his
films, one after the other. Here is an example of a movie that just
gets better every time you watch it. It's funny how that happens, when
you have a really good film or a good book or even a good painting.
There is always something else to see in it."

TheVoiceOfNick

After that article, I think i'll go and take a nap... I haven't read that much in one sitting since I was back at school...  :P  Good article though...

Fernando

Kidman was asked about Kubrick in an interview, here's what she said about him and you can find the entire interview here.

THR: What about Stanley Kubrick and "Eyes Wide Shut"?

Kidman: I am still not able to be objective about that film (released in 1999). There are moments that are so caught up in my memory of Stanley and the making of the film and the world in which we existed, Tom and myself. It was so incestuous, and so I don't have objectivity on the movie. It was too much a part of my life. I became too consumed with him (Kubrick), and now, everything is imprinted on me when I watch the images on the film -- the imprint of Stanley and the day we were shooting a particular scene, or what led to us making that choice. I just have no way of judging it. All I know is, that was an epoch of my life; it was almost cathartic to work with him, a philosopher and one of the great thinkers of our time. I would have done more films with him. Part of me wants to give over everything that I have to it (the director and the work), and that's dangerous. And it doesn't necessarily mean longevity. Another friend of mine said, "You dance too close to the flame."

THR: Where were you when you learned of Kubrick's death?

Kidman: I was in New York, and I actually thought that was him on the phone because we were meant to talk the night before, and I'd thought, Oh, I am too tired. I was making croissants for my children -- I had just learned to make chocolate croissants -- and I dropped the tray and did everything you are not meant to do before small children. It was so frightening -- the first person in my life who was so important, who one day was there and one day was gone. That night, I went to St. Patrick's (Cathedral) and sat there for hours, and it was so cold in New York -- one of those very surreal experiences, and I just lit candles and prayed.

Myxo

Stephen King's strong suit has never been visual storytelling. He imagines a story wonderfuly on paper, but somehow his idea of plot development and campy dialogue don't work that well when he tries to carry his work over to the big/small screen. It works when I'm reading it at 1:30 in the morning though. I feel invited into Stephen King's brain.

I got a chance to see "Storm of the Century" recently. Yes, I actually sat through the entire mini-series. Talk about a let down.

The more King has his hand in a project, the worse it turn out it seems. Re-making The Shining is blasphemy.