Stephen King Goes To the Movies: A Review

At current, Stephen King has released seven collections of shorter works, give or take. That “give or take” addendum has to be in there because of the nature of King’s writing. The Gunslinger, the first of the Dark Tower books, can technically be considered a short story collection – after all, the tales came out one at a time in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. But are they stories or are they chapters? The verdict remains foggy. Same goes for The Green Mile, whose chapters were released in chap-book format over a period of six months. The collection is absolutely a novel … but there are some who would disagree.

Then there’s the curious conundrum of Hearts in Atlantis, whose cover categorizes it as “new fiction,” thereby avoiding the question of its nature. It’s a volume of five interlocked works, most of which can be taken alone (with the exception of “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling”), but gain a certain resonance when taken together. Personally? I think the thing’s a novel.

Ah, but then there are even wackier cases. The Bachman Books? Those were five individually-released novels before collected into an omnibus edition. And what of the Octopus Press collection that includes Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and The Shining? There’s no way anyone’s going to sit back and tell me that The Shining is a short story.

So: conundrums, and plenty of them, but at least we can agree on some definites. Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and the new Just After Sunset are definitely short-story collections. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight are King’s two novella collections … forgiving the fact that every piece in Four Past Midnight is longer than Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Dolores Claiborne.

But now in marches Stephen King Goes to the Movies, and I have to tell you, I have no idea what to make of it. It’s comprised of five stories, and taken in this context, I suppose we must refer to them as stories: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (made into the film The Shawshank Redemption), “Low Men In Yellow Coats” (made into the film Hearts In Atlantis, which continues to strike me as odd, since there is a story called “Hearts In Atlantis,” and it has nothing to do with the movie), “Children of the Corn,” “The Mangler,” and “1408.” Two of these come from Night Shift, and one each from Hearts In Atlantis, Different Seasons, and Everything’s Eventual.

So I reiterate: I have no idea what to make of this.

Each story is preceded by a short introductory note – a page or two, in general – regarding King’s feelings on the stories and the movies that eventually sprung from them. The Amazon.com product description raves: “This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia!” I need to make this point quite clear: there is no movie trivia in this book. At all. The closest the book comes to insider gossip is that King alludes to the fact that one of the movies needed a reshoot. Maybe.

There is some fiction trivia here, though, and it’s pretty good. King talks a little – and I do mean a little – bit about where the genesis of his stories come from, along with some writing-process tidbits (I liked his assertion that, despite “Shawshank” pointing to the contrary, he’s usually very good with titles.) There’s also a very, very exciting mention of the fact that Hearts In Atlantis, as a collection, is not quite finished. Here, sir, there are always more tales.

But what else? Unfortunately, not much … and I can’t seem to figure out who this collection is for. New readers who like King’s movies and want to try out the fiction? It might just be easier to hand them Different Seasons and tell them two amazing films and one pretty good one came out of it. Maybe it’s for completists like me who need to own everything by King that’s been put between two covers? Could be, and for a paperback at $7.99, it’s not really a huge investment (although if you’re a lunatic collector, like I was in the mid-90s, you can always pick up the Subterranean Press hardcover for $75. But … really?)

As a book, Stephen King Goes To the Movies just doesn’t make any sense. There are three outright horror stories, one Dark Tower story, and then “Shawshank,” which is neither. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas spread across an entire career. It can’t even rightly be called a “greatest hits” collection, because while most of these stories are terrific, “The Mangler” is merely very good. Among these giants, it can only look small in comparison.

For a collection like this to work, you would need (a) longer, more in-depth introductions to the tales, and/or (b) a different line-up. How about “The Lawnmower Man,” and a discussion about the controversy surrounding that? “The Woman In the Room,” maybe, which was Frank Darabont’s first King adaptation. Maybe a look into why Different Seasons has yielded pretty terrific results, but Four Past Midnight hasn’t given us any films that rise above mediocrity. Or what about “Trucks,” from which King’s own Maximum Overdrive sprang, or some of the more interesting “dollar babies,” like “Paranoid: A Chant,” or “The Last Rung On the Ladder.”

I love Stephen King, I really do. I am looking forward to Under the Dome with a palpable fervor. But putting out a collection of recycled stories without much in the way of new material (a Top 10 list of King’s favorite movies based on his work is the best of the new stuff) just isn’t something I can recommend. The new stuff in Stephen King Goes To the Movies took me all of fifteen minutes to read, and for eight bucks, that’s just not enough.

Surviving the Unthinkable: Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead"

The rule has always, ALWAYS been this: no zombie comics before bed. By “zombie comics,” I of course mean Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s ongoing tale of zombie apocalypse, “The Walking Dead.” By “before bed,” I generally mean not right before bed, moments before you turn off the lights and lie awake in the dark, trying and failing to stave off the general dread that comes creeping in from the shadows like stealthy, implacable hands, until you can’t take it anymore, you just can’t TAKE it, and finally you grab your robe and a warm cup of milk with some nutmeg in it and dash to the room in the house with the most light and turn on reruns of “Friends” until your happy thoughts return. At least that’s my experience.

“The Walking Dead” is one of those conundrums you find sometimes in horror fiction: the story that makes you feel not just scared but actually UPSET, and yet you are compelled to keep reading. The difference between “The Walking Dead,” and, say, “The Shining” (another masterpiece of unsettling fear) is that “Walking Dead” is ongoing. Its journey had a beginning and a middle. And a middle. And a middle. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight … well, I’ll be honest. It delights me and worries me at the same time.

Unlike many other zombie stories, where the focus is either on plot or situation, “The Walking Dead” takes the time to focus on characters. The problem here is that the more we care about them, the more vulnerable we are to their plight. And, man, do they have plight. We have watched our hero Rick Grimes – along with his family and his friends – try to make uneasy peace with the situation as it is, and end up failing each time. Along the way, we have watched the people we care about suffer horribly: some are decapitated. Some endure horrific sexual assault. Some are beaten within an inch of their lives. And these are just at the hands of survivors. The genius of Kirkman’s writing is that, just when you start to forget why these people are in such a desperate situation, the zombies encroach, and they kill you. Hard.

Kirkman’s canny genius is in crafting a bleak, unrelenting story that somehow remains utterly compulsive reading. Every month I wait in giddy anticipation for my slim monthly chapter, and every month I am left with a general malaise, unable to stop ruminating on what I’d just read. It’s not a feeling I’d seek out from any other source, but from this, it not only seems warranted but necessary. There’s nothing like a fictional zombie apocalypse to show you how silly it looks to complain you don’t have enough for that third Starbucks beverage.

This past issue – number 57 – almost hurt to read. After a surprisingly blasé beginning dealing mainly with the best road to take toward Washington, D.C. (where one of the survivors thinks there may exist a way to end the apocalypse), things take a startling turn as Rick Grimes, his son Carl, and new character Abraham Ford get captured by a group of rogue survivors. The group isn’t interested in killing them; they are after eight-year-old Carl for more … carnal reasons. Rick, absolutely unwilling to let his son be taken in this way (or any way), rips his captor’s throat open with his teeth. Even after letting the boy go, the marauders are not spared Rick’s wrath. What follows verges on inhuman, and it is both disturbing and fascinating to watch Rick remain mostly unaffected by what he feels he was forced to do. After losing his hand, most of the people he loves, and – at least temporarily – his mind to this bleak new world, he seems to have come to grips that he will do whatever it takes to hold onto his one small sliver of sanity in an insane world.

Watching Rick kill someone in much the way a zombie would is unsettling on a number of levels, not the least of which is our ability to accept him doing it. We’ve been following Rick for years now, and have seen what has driven him to this point. We’ve lived this life with him, and watched his world crumble out from under his feet. By this point in the narrative, we are forced to ask ourselves if we’d do the same were we in Rick’s shoes. I think the answer might disturb us. One begins to wonder how prescient Kirkman was in titling his comic as it is: who, truly, are the walking dead: the zombies, or the people who are trying to survive them?

The solicitations for the next issue feature only two words of copy: THE UNTHINKABLE. After all “The Walking Dead” has put us through, “unthinkable” is a bold word choice. I have every confidence that Kirkman will deliver. From his book “Invincible,” I get a great, almost lighthearted superhero story every month; from his “Astounding Wolf-Man,” I get more playful horror – gothic mixed with the superhero genre. But here I can count on the unthinkable, because this book has conditioned me to. I am scared, and a little nervous to even pick the book up. But of course I will, despite all my reservations. Because there’s something even more powerful than my unyielding sense of dread:

I just gotta know what happens.

Milk & Doubt

My obsession with Philip Seymour Hoffman knows no depths. Not only is he one of the greatest actors ever, he’s also stone-cold sexy. That strawberry-blond hair. Those searching, blazing eyes. The fact that he frequently appears in his underwear…

Okay, wait. I’ll get back to the point in a second. Hold on.

The POINT is that when I first saw ads for the upcoming film “Doubt,” I was all over it. A morally complex movie with religious overtones that may or may not have a gay subtext starring Meryl Streep and the sexiest man on the planet? I’m there!

Except then it was Christmas Day, and I realized (quite rationally, I think), that maybe “Doubt” wasn’t the best kind of film for that particular day off. We all remember last year’s “Sweeny Todd” debacle and how depressing that was. No, for this holiday, I would leave the choosing of the film up to my friend Mark, upon whom I forced the throat-slicing barber last Christmas. I knew he wouldn’t want to sit through a depressing period film that dealt, at least in part, with gay persecution.

He called me Christmas Day: “Let’s go see ‘Milk’!” So much for my theory.

Mark, his boyfriend Ben, and I all settled down in the back row of the theater to take in the story of Harvey Milk, the true story of California’s first openly gay elected official. I knew three things about the movie going into it: 1. I knew Harvey Milk was assassinated. 2. His killer used something called The Twinkie Defense – blaming his violent tendencies on junk food – to try to get off, and 3. That Sean Penn was likely to irritate me. I have liked Penn in the past, but my bafflement as to why people enjoyed “Mystic River” in general, and Penn’s hammy overacting in particular, has left a stain on my moviegoing psyche.

As such, I really had no interest in seeing this movie. It struck me as Important, and Necessary, and I usually delve into those waters when it’s Oscar season. As the credits began to roll, I wished for the relatively simple year when I went to go see the “King Kong” remake on Christmas.

And then … something changed. I was unprepared for the movie to explicate right at the beginning that Milk was shot. Having that information right up front should have bogged the film down, but instead it renders Milk’s assassination as a fact that we understand and absorb, so that we can better focus on the story.

It’s a terrific story, too, one with which I have only had a passing familiarity. I’ve never been a particularly political fellow, and growing up in the 90s with Barney Frank in Congress, it never really sunk in to me how important and revolutionary Harvey Milk was to gay rights. There’s a point early in the film when a gay man is killed and the cops, who seem to care, refer to the dead man’s companion as his “trick.” (Because cops know the lingo, see.) Milk explains that no, that was his lover of many years, not a trick. And the cops sort of shrug that off.

That resonated with me, as did the way Harvey Milk sort of stumbled into politics. He did it because to not do it was intolerable. Sometimes I forget what a damn struggle it has been – even in my lifetime – to simply be who you are if you happen to be gay. The movie takes on these issues but never gets lost in them. The story remains about the man more than the message, and as such never gets the chance to be preachy. Sean Penn, to my amazement and delight, disappears into his role. He’s so effective that at points it’s easy to forget his tragic end; the film is so oddly uplifting that the assassination seems almost beside the point. (The fact that it’s not comes crashing down in the final violent minutes of the movie, and by that point, you’re conditioned enough to be actually shocked.)

My friend Alonso has commanded that I now see the documentary, “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,” which is now on my forefront of Things To Watch. I’ve never been all that into gay politics, but given the current state of political homophobia, maybe I should be.

Along the same lines of things you’re not supposed to discuss at dinner parties, we move from politics to religion. The Saturday after Christmas, I journeyed downtown, bought popcorn and a sodapop, and treated myself to “Doubt.” Based on the trailers, I was expecting a movie entirely centered around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s priest character and his inappropriate dealings with an altar boy under his tutelage. Instead, what I got was a morally complex story that may or may not have to do with the priest and the boy at all.

At the heart of the movie is Meryl Streep as the Mother Superior of a school she rules with an uncompromising hand. She is used to being right, or at least she is used to being considered right. Her students and the teachers under her watch follow her rule unquestioningly, which she likes just fine. She might never admit that – she would explain that she is simply following her faith – but being right is at the core of her character. She is unused to being wrong, and unfamiliar with changing her stance once she takes one.

This proves dangerous for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s priest character, whose entire being represents change. She doesn’t like him from the start, and as the film progresses, we wonder more and more whether Streep’s character is actually holding true to her convictions, or whether she simply cannot stand to be wrong.

The movie is full of strong performances. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are at the top of their game – I would be stunned if both didn’t garner Oscar nominations. But maybe it’s because the movie is based on a play that they seem to KNOW they’re at the top of their game. The performances are never over the top or Oscar-grubbing, but it often seemed to me that these were Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman delivering knockout performances. Whereas Amy Adams (in the role of a young nun who looks up to Streep’s character) and Viola Davis (playing the mother of the young boy in question, whose role is contained in a single, brilliant scene) never seem to be performing. They steal the movie with acting that never seems like acting, raising the movie up from An Oscar-Worthy Triumph to a watchable, engaging film that is still lingering with me. There’s some obvious stuff in it – light bulbs break and winds gust in at important moments, and the film’s final line seems awkward and too Broadway for a movie – but on a whole, “Doubt” impressed me almost as much as “Milk.”

If you’re a fan of quality films – or just seeing stuff before the Oscars are nominated so you can brag about being a Serious Film Buff – go see both of these movies. You won’t regret it.

Now, when’s that new “Wolverine” movie coming out?

Best Books of 2008

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