stephen king c/d?

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

Agreed on all of that. I almost never flinch at OTT gore, and *that scene* made me avert my eyes. I texted my wife while I was watching this (she had no interest) and said "Elliot from ET is in this and he is NOT nice."

The ending is, indeed, right out of the book, almost verbatim from the page. Weirdly, the makeup for that character matched in my head how I always pictured Baldanders from Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" books. Like it was pulled straight from my brain.

He's also really good as a very different character on Better Things.

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 book was p disturbing when i read it aged about 12.

I'm a third of the way into Revival and, if I hadn't already heard about the ending being ultramegableak, I honestly would've assumed I was reading something more along the lines of the novellas in Different Seasons. It doesn't code as anything even slightly resembling horror at this point. Which is probably a great way to set the stage if you really want to pull the rug out from under someone.

Oh, yeah. Keep a-readin'.

he never loses sight of the adult themes being tapped into, even when it gets silly

i absolutely didn't feel this -- i felt he never really had them genuinely in sight in the first place (the gerald-related themes or the childhood-related themes); to me they felt like atmospheric devices at best* and after "that scene" they p much vanished from the film's concerns (the "letter to my younger self" device was more an evasion than anything, less effective even than the daft scooby-doo conclusion**, bcz so sententiously pious; in general, "bad device but straight from the book" isn't a much of a get-out clause when you're making a film)***

*i minded this less re the S&M-to-save-a-marriage tbh; we were never given the slightest hint of a reason to mind abt gerald, but he was such a charmless up-himself pill i didn't care (in a better film i wd perhaps have been more torn) -- i was really bothered by how plotline functional the damaged childhood was though -- it ended up feeling there to set up a sleight-of-hand so that you assumed Moonlight Man was figments, palpably affective yes, but only bcz she had good historical reason to be afraid of the dark
**i also disliked the acromelagy = you are seen as a monster by others = actually fuck it yr the worst kind of monster all-round (tho as i said upthread, there was a moment -- where MM echoed what jessie had said to him -- that you could read as a kind of mirroring and hence a brief glimpse into his hell and misery, the idea that she had perhaps been a haunting figment to him
***the fact that several different ppl have said they really liked it probably means i will rewatch at some point, through another's eyes, as it were -- maybe there's enough distance from the unrelieved dislikability of literally every character except the excellent dog

i also disliked the acromelagy = you are seen as a monster by others = actually fuck it yr the worst kind of monster all-round

The use of a character w/ acromegaly was a bit distasteful but I liked there being an explanation as an extension of revealing what's hidden - Gerald and his rape/domination fantasies, the truth of her childhood abuse, the true nature of MM, and how silence and ambiguity can work to oppress

I also liked how the dog was handled, and tbh it's one of the few survival movies of this kind where nothing the main character does was inexplicably stupid

last is def true, yes -- in a desperate pinch she was good at level-headed puzzle-solving, coping and just keeping on keeping on

(when she ended up where she ended up, and the torchlights were bobbing thru the wood, i had a flashback to texas chainsaw, where the central character -- also good at keeping on -- escape and flees, but straight back into their clutches…)

um hello she THREW AWAY THE WATER 😤