stephen king c/d?

That's not fair since I haven't seen it but the book is the first one I ever chose to put down and not finish so I can't imagine liking an adaptation of it.

ST Joshi wrote a big King overview once (which missed out the Dark Tower series if I remember correctly) and was mostly negative. He can be needlessly cruel but I have to admit I got a lot of pleasure out of him completely trashing IT (which I think has several good things going on). But oddly he really liked Gerald's Game, Dark Half and a bunch of others that generally aren't favourites.

wait, do ppl take ST Joshi seriously? I haven't read very much -- mostly his intros to Lovecraft collections -- and based on them I've always taken him for an idiot.

Sometimes, there's certainly a backlash against him happening. I disagree with a lot of his opinions (some of which are very odd), but he deserves a ton of credit for the writers he's helped (living and dead), I think he helped build a scene and sometimes he's one of the only honest prominent voices in the scene. Sometimes he's very on the money.
What's he said idiotic in those intros?

it's ages since i read them, i remember my scornful response better than anything i was responding to

I should also say he deserves a bit of the backlash, but I just hope people don't try to push him out.

Joshi's criticisms of King (at least the ones I've read) are incoherent, and seem mostly a reaction to his bestsellerdom

He put King's "Night Surf" in American Supernatural Tales.

They only thing I've read by Joshi is his introduction to the Arthur Machen collection he edited for Penguin, which was fine as far as it went (he clearly knows a lot about gothic/supernatural literature), though the collection itself weirdly omits Machen's best-known story, The Great God Pan. However, Joshi's reaction to the HP Lovecraft awards controversy was definitely the height of idiocy:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/hp-lovecraft-biographer-rages-against-ditching-of-author-as-fantasy-prize-emblem

yes i just reread joshi's intro to the penguin "call of cthulhu" collection: ward's "fine as far as it goes" and "clearly knows a lot" are precisely fair, though his actual written style persistently irritates me -- with great knowledge comes great comic-book-guy is part of the problem, but he's also sometimes weirdly tin-eared as a critic. for example, he describes "the shunned house" as nostalgic -- i know what he's getting at, that the setting for HPL’s subject matter switched from where he used to live (Providence) to where he now lived, New York (“The Horror at Red Hook” etc), but he’d moved BACK to providence w/in literal months of writing “Red Hook", and, well, "nostalgic" is just so un-reread as a word to use of "The Shunned House" even if you can explain why he chose it.

he then goes on to make a pompous meal of HPL's "philosophy" (the universe is big and the gods are bad: none of them care a fig for humankind) in the context of the prior history of faiths. he is very much NOT qualified to be the comic-book-guy of comparative religion…

more to the point, somewhere else i'm p sure i read him dissing m.r.james -- he omits him from his pantheon in this intro -- and that is quite likely what first riled me tbh

Holy crap... I had never heard of HPL’s ‘on the creation of n___s’ poem before. Jesus fucking Christ, fuck him.

Ward- it gets so much worse than that, but let's take this over to the Speculative Fiction thread.

yes, apologies for minor threadjack

Saw Gerald's game & pretty much agree 100% with LG's take. I thought the setup was really well done; there was an effective rising anxiety going on, the performances were good and you got a real sense of the space. As soon as the hallucinations & memories started it went way downhill and I remembered what was so bad & silly about the book (which it turns out I had kinda conflated in my mind with a short & nasty story I read around the same time - not by king I think - about a woman who is trapped underneath an overweight dead lover for several days)

& yeah the end is so so embarrassingly terrible. It's pretty much intact from the novel if I remember right, in fact the whole thing is pretty faithful except I think the figures taunting/helping Jessie were just voices in her head and there were more of them including a sassy straight-talking former roommate?

Oh also the wrist thing was appropriately excruciating but maybe less so than her THROWING AWAY the remaining water in the glass like a FUCKING idiot

just fucking drink it it takes two seconds and you are literally dying of fucking thirst you dickhead

can't believe a guy who makes a living shouting reductive thoughts about music turned out to be a bad person

haven't seen many of his reviews, but does he really shout in them? The ones I've seen have been, like Treeship said upthread, really innocuous. Like, Mr. Rodgers-levels of subdued. I thought that was his brand—geek who shares dutiful, uncontroversial opinions about music in a soft-spoken voice.

oops wrong thread

Stephen King shouts his reviews on music

honestly surprised King hasn't had a music critic protagonist tbh

would probably be an antagonist tbh

Eaten by a demon raccoon after giving the new AC/DC album a D+ review

xxp he did have a radio & party DJ -- a blind one, no less -- in one of his books. Bag of Bones, maybe?

You got the Eddie Money analog in rock singer Larry from the Stand.

oh yeah, Pennywise did the futterwacken too. That kind of took me out of it

― Number None, Monday, September 11, 2017 3:34 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thB1wJUQRIc

ahahahhahahaha

lol

xxp he did have a radio & party DJ -- a blind one, no less -- in one of his books. Bag of Bones, maybe?

― Monster fatberg (Phil D.), Saturday, 7 October 2017 00:30 (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Black House

My local indie cinema having a king movie month

The list is..... patchy

one here has a decent-looking lineup. i've somehow managed to go this long without ever seeing carrie, so that'll be cool. kinda into the idea of seeing christine or maximum overdrive on the big screen. maybe creepshow?

I guess it's a franchised event so

The poster is good

lol the bfi just did a season of I think basically all of them

90% shit at least obv but man if I were rich

Yeah it's the best kind of shit

Thinner is one of the most compellingly terrible films I've ever seen, in a way you only seem to get with Stephen King movies. Might be the best worst one

The current moment of kingtopia hasn't really changed the hit rate tbh

Only found out recently that Maximum Overdrive was filmed at the same time, in some of the same locations, as Blue Velvet (both were Dino productions) - lol the 80s.

in some of the same locations

i approve of stuff like this, it's oulipian and thickens the textures

How's Creepshow? I heard that's actually ok

It's a hair above average, iirc. Pretty boilerplate, but has its moments, gruesome and macabre. Monster in a box, fuzzy plants from space ...

Yeah, some of them are better than others, but overall I enjoyed it. It's been years since I've seen it though and always get it mixed up with Cat's Eye.

Also has its moments! Cigarette smoking, ledge bet ...

I think Creepshow is mediocre but some people really love it. See it for the funny stuff, if anything.

I bought the reissue of the Creepshow comic this year and was pretty bored.

Yeah, the Amicus Tales from the Crypt movie is my favourite EC comics inspired portmanteau horror flick

Creepshow is kinda like from dusk till dawn in that it's two nerdy guys just having fun

I liked it a lot when I was about 14 but haven't seen it since (& never saw any of the sequels)

It's classic for King's acting if nothing else

2/3 of cats eye is good, the third story & framing device is really dumb & bad

xp: yeah, the Jordy Verrill bit is definitely a highlight.

I saw Creepshow last year for the first time probably since it was new, at a local theater's "12 Hours of Terror" Halloween marathon, and was surprised how much I still enjoyed it. The first segment is a little meh, although it was fun to see a young Ed Harris. But the rest is pretty camp/scary greatness.

I'd be shocked if nobody has made a gif of Ed Harris dancing.

Creepshow is the only certifiable "cult classic" in the King filmography. Carrie and The Shining are the best, but Creepshow is my favorite.

I *really* liked Gerald's Game. It highlighted for me why I like Flanagan's movies so much - a real facility for digital effects, strong performance, and he never loses sight of the adult themes being tapped into, even when it gets silly (eg the Scooby Doo ending, which I gather is derived from the book?)

Also: it was almost uncomfortably timely, *that scene* was appropriately squirm-inducing, and Henry Thomas was really good and infuriating in his few scenes