The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Critically-acclaimed movies based on Stephen King tend to be few and far between. Yet the valiant attempts to adapt never seem to subside, and now it is spreading into television, which has largely replaced movies without tons of explosions.

I first saw this movie back in 1994 in the theater. I was visiting a friend in New York and had no idea it had any connection to Stephen King. At the time I definitely didn't think it would become the award-winning basic cable staple that it turned in to. Now I think I should have had shirts made bragging that I saw it "first". Oddly enough I never saw it in its entirety again until this summer, so when it came up in this project, I was actually pretty excited.

Clearly a good deal of time passed between my first viewing of the film and reading the story. Therefore, I felt that the movie messed around with the source material to make the story more cinema-ready. However, on the second viewing I think I'll take that back. I think Shawshank culture (see below) made me forget that much of the grit from the original stayed in the movie. There are a few understandable consolidations of various events, but nothing sending the plot in a different direction. Red and Andy still reunite at that hard-to-say place on the Mexican coast. Ahhh....

Speaking of which, Shawshank culture is amazing. Some genius managed to manipulate it into a rom-com trailer:

And although released in the middle of the 16-bit era, here is the 8-bit video game version:

God bless the Internet!

Apt Pupil (1998)

Different Seasons spawned three movies (an impressive 75% conversion!) and two of them were good. This was not one of them. It wasn't bad, but just okay. The source material definitely sets a high bar, so expectations may be to blame.

"Apt Pupil" is technically the subtitle of the story "Summer of Corruption" and true to form there are no winners in the story. Both Todd, the punk kid turned Nazi sympathist, and Dussander, the Nazi turned scared old man, begin their respective journeys toward their inevitable suicides. Clearly the producers, in spite of Brad Renfro's involvement, were not going to go this dark. Instead, they decided to make Todd more resilient. Since Dussander was a Nazi, he still dies; nobody is going to miss him. Todd, on the other hand, has grit. He fights back against French. So instead of deciding to go out in a blaze of glory after being exposed, he concocts some dirt on his old counselor to ensure he lives to see another day.

I'm still trying to puzzle out where the movie fell flat. The story is a good deal more gruesome that the movie. Todd and Dussander kill a lot more "winos" than the movie depicts. Also, the intricacy of the writing just doesn't lend itself to a plot that would fit neatly into a normal movie running time. Yet at the same time to really feel just how far these two fall you need to read about all the nightmares and evil deeds, not just some representative acts or consolidations for the convenience of making it under the two hour mark.

Anyway, watching Apt Pupil isn't the worst mistake you'll ever make, but bear in mind that the original story is way better, though not for the faint-hearted.

Different Seasons (1982)

It was truly a joy to read my first 5-star Stephen King book since The Long Walk. For the most part the books typically are 4-star territory while the movies average around 3. Longtime followers of this blog will know we've gone through some real dogs, such as the other Bachman books, or books that cater to way more die-hard King junkies than I think I'll ever be (Dark Tower). Of course, there are some unexpected gems along the way, like Cujo. Given my unexpected enjoyment of that book, I suppose it isn't a huge shock that I'd go for this book pretty strongly.

I think we are hitting the first nexus in the Stephen King writing career story. Given his early success with just about every 1970's novel he wrote under his own name, any publisher would be perfectly content to pigeonhole him into horror fiction. He writes about people with supernatural powers that cause them pain and trouble (Carrie, Firestarter, The Shining, The Dead Zone) and monsters in our midst ('Salem's Lot, The Stand). All of these depend on the reader accepting that there are things more powerful than our boring old physics will actually allow. In the case of the former, these folks will ultimately triumph over adversity, while in the later they will largely be suppressed by "regular" people, but not destroyed.

In Danse Macabre, King stepped away from the veil of fiction to reveal a writer not comfortable with simply producing stories that run one way or the other. Nor did he feel that writing "literary fiction" meant something boring. We got an inkling of what else he could do in the mixed-bag Night Shift story collection, but Cujo was probably the first effort under his own name where he left the supernatural behind. Although you could run with the monster-in-the-closet concept and graft the idea of supernatural possession on to a dog, that is a stretch. He was ultimately a rabid dog thrust into a web of poor decisions by fallible humans. Nothing supernatural here, the cereal professor might say.

Therefore, Different Seasons is a continuation of King stretching out beyond horror, but not stepping into the dull. Unlike the last collection of stories, these are all original and "novella" (he mocks the term) length. Aside from the last story, it is all regular people, albeit in unusual situations. Shawshank is just your basic prison, featuring a guy who didn't do the crime he's serving the time for. A kid obsessed with Nazis decides to have a little harmless fun teasing an old man trying to hide his past indiscretions and both end up going more than a little deviant. Four boys in Maine want to see a dead body, a story captured in the reminiscing of a "serious" fiction writer. Finally there's a place in New York City where one can escape to hear a good story, even if the story is a bit strange.

As you can see, these can all be played straight, just from reading the single-sentence summaries. King takes them all in directions only he can do, so none of these turn into boring works of serious literary merit for serious literary journals. They aren't hack jobs though, which is the whole point King is trying to make here. There are no crutches to be found. The boys don't accidentally cross into Jerusalem's Lot and meet up with vampires. The warden isn't into black magic. Even when the final story, "The Breathing Method", breaks the boundaries into horror territory, one can easily say it's just a story within a story and no more real than the last campfire story you heard as a kid.

Having not read ahead, but being aware of what's to come, it is clear that King wasn't ready to leave the supernatural behind altogether. We'll take a break and prepare ourselves for the return of the possessed vehicle in the next book.

In Progress: Different Seasons

I know I appeared to dismiss progress reports in my last post, but I figured each of the four original novellas that make up Different Seasons deserve just a few thoughts.

"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption": First off there is no "the" in this title. You have simply watched the movie too many times. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie again, as the last time I saw the whole thing was in the theater when it was a brand new release. I feel like the tone is the same, but some events may have been moved around to make the narrative flow better. Most of this story is a ninety page manuscript smuggled out of prison up the narrator Red's posterior. I have no idea how that is possible, but I'm pretty sure it smelled wonderful.

"Apt Pupil": This is the longest story of the four and since I've heard the movie was mediocre, I was afraid this was going to be a slog. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised. No, there is nothing "pleasant" about this story. It involves Nazis and is telling we the readers that even 30 years after World War II, it is a poisonous ideology. What starts as a little harmless blackmail by a hyper-privileged 13 year old causes an old man fleeing his past to revert back into it, dragging the kid down with him. There are no heroes here. I went back and forth over who of the two was the worse. In the end the corruption gets everywhere, like radioactivity. Sharp readers will notice a brief connection to "Shawshank" that has no real impact on the story. I'm wondering if the others have any linkage.

"The Body": After a brief jaunt out to Los Angeles, we come back to Maine. The only connection I found between this story and the others is a few references to the Shawshank prison. In fact, this story has a stronger connection with Cujo of all things, thanks to being a proper Castle Rock story. Probably the biggest takeaway from the story is how closely the movie followed it. Some things are a little more fleshed out and a few other things are moved around, but it's really close. The bittersweet nostalgia fills every page and it really makes the readers think fondly of that time, even if they weren't alive, or nowhere near the area. However this is Stephen King, so it has its own fair share of creative cursing, purple prose, and gore. Like its fellow collection stories though it is not horror.

"The Breathing Method": Now we leave Maine once more, this time for New York City. This is really two stories in one. Maybe King was still trying to get some of the Dark Tower story structures out of his system. The "outer" story is the more clever of the two, about a man finding a home away from home with a lot of strange stuff in it, and mysteries abound. It is not a horror story. However, this strange place is built around storytelling, so the "inner" story that makes up the bulk of the tale is straight up horror. In fact, King acknowledges this is the great exception to the non-horror tone of the collection. I can see why this one didn't get the movie treatment. It's not that it is a bad story, but it would be hard to convincingly adapt.

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982)

My big plan to do "in progress" posts for each book is kind of running out of gas. For anyone who cares, here is what I was thinking about 50 or so pages into this book:

"I really have no idea what any of this is about, so you'll be getting "straight from the gut" reactions here. So far, the book is a Russian nested doll and if I'm tracking things correctly, I've just read a story within a story within a dream. Is this Inception? Does time flow backward? Is the whole book going to be like this?"

So we are just going to move ahead to the finished book post and you can carry that confused snapshot with you throughout the rest of this.

It only took me until now to finally read a Dark Tower book! Stephen King frequently states that he regards this series as one giant book. The rest of the volumes are way bigger than this one, so there is much work to be done. Some of the reviews I've read about this, the opening "chapter" of the megabook, is that we should not judge it too harshly. It is different than everything that comes after it. For one thing, it is actually five short stories, with at least the first one long enough to qualify as a novella. These stories were all previously published in somewhat altered forms in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I can only imagine what any reader that missed the previous installments was thinking reading these stories back then. Also, from what I can tell, King himself cleaned up the original version of this book to make things a little more consistent. It wasn't done to Stand-like proportions, so I'm not too worried about what changed. However, I was a little surprised to find out that the five stories do not differ substantially from how they appeared in F&SF, meaning the we aren't flashing back into the story proper; the original story treats it as a flashback as well. There is essentially no added connective tissue for the sake of making the book flow. This is to say the book does flow in spite of five different publications. Better for the book readers like me than the magazine readers, I suppose.

Going into this, I knew pretty much zilch about the Dark Tower. Although, thanks to hearing a few things on a podcast and seeing a movie trailer well before approaching this book, I sort of knew what was going on here. For the uninitiated, this book literally drops the reader in the middle of nowhere. I'm not misusing the word "literally". It is the middle and it is nowhere. As I wrote it my halfhearted progress report, the first story, the novella "The Gunslinger" is something like three flashbacks nested in one another. Although it shows a writer like King flashing some mad skillz, it is quite confusing. On the other hand, it does get us out of the middle of nowhere, as I don't think anybody needed or wanted 90 pages of chases in a total desert.

Two other stories, "The Way Station" and "The Slow Mutants", also turn on flashbacks. The non-flashback content, as the titles appear to indicate, is a bit ho-hum. The flashbacks, about Jake's previous life in New York City and Roland's in a fantasy novel respectively, are the meat of the story. If you don't care for flashbacks, "The Oracle and the Mountains" and "The Gunslinger and the Dark Man" stick to the present and reward readers who wondered what the big deal was with a magic jawbone. The present day stuff is a good deal more confusing than the flashbacks. For one thing, NYC is familiar territory for most, even if you've never been there. Roland's story is pretty much boilerplate fantasy. The scenes in the present make the reader wonder what the hell this "middle world" is. Did it used to be normal and turned weird? How does anyone get here. The point where Jake is sacrificed while they are traveling inside a mountain in the penultimate story nearly broke my brain. Was this some kind of subway station and our present is their distant past? How does a bridge get inside a tunnel? Are they in Wario's gold mine?!

Hopefully I'm not the only reader who walked away from all of this with more questions that answers, but I'm giving the book a wide berth. It needed a lot of tweaking (but not a full overhaul) from its original published form. It also never intends to stop at a satisfying point, as the next six books appear to indicate. Since it's one big book, the story will simply carry forward in the opening pages of The Drawing of the Three, published five years later. Therefore, I will not think of a witty closing line to this post, but rather just continue where I've left off here.

The Running Man (1987)

Although I've experienced some pretty awful movies done in the name of Stephen King, I think this is the first full-blown "action" movie of the project. If your movie features a pre-Twins Arnold Schwarzenegger, then I guess it is kind of a requirement. And of course, with an action movie, you get lots of corny one-liners, and this movie is full of them.

On the scale of 0 to Lawnmower Man of how much this movie deviates from the book, I'd give this an 8 or 9. It feels like an adaptation done by somebody who read the tease on the back cover and ran with it. Where the book is more like "The Fugitive", the movie fashions itself as "Smash TV", the hit arcade game of 1990, crossed with "American Gladiators". In fact, this movie was a big influence on that game. Where the book focuses on the grim dystopia of the outside world, the movie struts the glamour of the studio, barely acknowledging the crummy world it exists in. On the other hand, while reading the book was a bit of chore, the movie, while not good, was fun in its own ridiculous way.

The Ahnold version of Ben Richards is not a regular guy. In fact he's a straight up hero and police officer with a good heart that the system decides to crush. He does not enter the game willingly, but rather gets put in after his ultimately-unsuccessful prison break. Just to make sure nobody thinks he's a hero, they show the audience doctored surveillance footage of him massacring (not saving) hundreds of innocent people in Bakersfield (???) that looks suspiciously like the first scene of the movie. I guess they have super sophisticated cameras. The game itself isn't a real-world hide-n-seek game, but a real-life video game where the contestants fight "boss"-grade characters to their deaths. Judging from the rather horrified reaction of these bosses getting killed, it seems like they usually win. In fact, any incident of a contestant winning is quickly proven to be patently fake. Of course against all these odds, Ben Richards does not die, not by his own hand or those of others. Instead he bests the hopped-up American Gladiators (including Jesse Ventura, as a reluctant fan-favorite), beating not only the game but launching a revolution over everything wrong in the world. It's a feel-good finish, but not exactly original.

I can't leave this without a couple casting notes. First off, there is no way you can watch classic Family Feud after seeing Richard Dawson in this, and I mean it as a compliment. The guy best known for kissing female contestants in ways that would invalidate any potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination is dropping F-bombs and stage managing on-air death like a stone cold gangster. For all the failings of the movie, Dawson's casting was a stroke of brilliance. On a smaller note, Mick Fleetwood plays a guy named Mick who seems pretty bummed that bands like Fleetwood Mac aren't around in this parallel hell-world. I'd say he's probably pretty happy with our boring wold of tepid reality television, or at least consoling himself with the take from the latest world tour.

The Running Man (1982)

Ages ago, I read The Long Walk, my first Stephen King novel. This was so long after the outing of Richard Bachman that my copy didn't even bother to advertise it that way except in the fine print underneath King's name. I remember thinking that maybe I was more drawn toward the gritty Bachman style than King's more typical supernatural horror system. Now having read the other three books in the opening Bachman quartet, I think it is safe to say that probably isn't the case. Unfortunately, as was the case with Roadwork and Rage, The Running Man just isn't that good a book.

The Running Man is Bachman's return to the vague dystopia with an appetite for extreme entertainment last seen in The Long Walk. This time around, things are much less subtle. Things are totally dysfunctional and the air is literally not safe to breathe. Whereas the other novel hinted and nudged at what was wrong with the world, this one liked to shove hard. Things are pretty crappy in 2025 and it is thrown in readers' faces at every turn. The TV (er..."free-vee") tells us what do say, do, and believe. Well, actually I guess that isn't too far removed from today. That and the continued popularity of "reality" shows, though even the most gratuitous in our timeline don't touch the visceral entertainment of The Running Man.

I like to joke that every contestant on "American Ninja Warrior" is fighting against unimaginable odds in life, and that just their mere appearance on the show neutralizes all that pain. Nobody just accidentally ends up on the show, and certainly nobody gets on the show that has benefited from immense privilege or luck. So is the case with Ben Richards, who turns to the games as a way to pay his way out of a terrible situation of a sick child and no way out of the gray slums. Of course they don't just take anybody, so he pushes his way through a boot-camp winnowing process that earns him a spot on the most popular (and deadly) of the shows, "The Running Man". This show doesn't need fancy sets, and almost the entire populace gets to play along. Ben just needs to survive endless pursuit by the Hunters and the general population of informers, who earn rewards for their tips. Ben can't just hole up in a panic room for 30 days to earn his billion dollar grand prize. He needs to record himself and advertise his whereabouts twice a day. Furthermore, the producers of the game like to get the bloodlust flowing by heavily editing his footage to make him come off as a raging maniac. The good news (for Ben) is that there is so much disgust with the way the world works that he finds a few allies along the way, some more willing than others to render assistance. He also manages to uncover a vast conspiracy about air pollution that he does his damnedest to advertise through the show. Eventually he goes head to head with the Hunter-in-Chief himself, Evan McCone, culminating in a spectacular plane crash right into the heart of the Network's game headquarters, killing everyone (I warned you there all spoilers here, so sorry/not sorry).

In the right hands, there might have been some compelling story here, but the tone of the novel rings crass for the most part. First and most glaring is the technology. A lot of pre-1990's science fiction suffers from this and the stuff between (let's just say) 1960 and 1990 haven't aged enough to become cutely anachronistic. Therefore it is pretty laughable that Ben needs to wear a bulky body-cam with physical tapes that must to transmitted through the postal service. Now, it may sound like I'm making fun of Bachman/King for not anticipating the Internet, but I think it suffers more from being a rather contrived way of forcing Ben to not just play an advanced game of hide-and-seek with the Hunters. On the other hand, I can't really say what I would do, so I'll try to be generous. Second liability of the book is the characters. Bachman characters are not renowned for being King's most fleshed-out characters, but the cast here was pretty cardboard, especially the women and minorities. It is most ridiculous when we get to the climax and the supposed Uber-Hunter McCone turns out to be the world's stupidest negotiator, who refuses to call Ben's bluff but then claims he knew all along it was a bluff. Finally, the overall tone of the book is pretty choppy. Ben kind of comes off as a jerk, blowing up a building in a total-overkill moment, then pretty much ruining everyone he came into contact with. By the end, Ben doesn't even have anything to live for, learning that his wife and daughter, the very reason he was putting up with all this crap, were dead. I will tip my hat to Bachman though, that Amelia getting sucked out of the plane, though also very crass, was the most I think I've laughed at anything written by King.

As we will see in the next post, this was the only Bachman book to date that earned the movie treatment. The basic premise of the novel, merging dystopia, game shows, and the future was probably utterly irresistible. The novel in itself is a little thin on glitz, however, to make an exciting movie, plus the heavy amount of interaction between the game and the everyday world probably would send the wrong message, so the movie version is very different. Not Lawnmower Man different, but, as we shall see, different. Paging Arnold Schwarzenegger....

In Progress: The Running Man

In a note that was meant for Roadwork but never seen because it never had an "in progress" post, I mentioned I was reading the first four Bachman books in an omnibus edition with the exception of The Long Walk, the only one I already owned prior to getting this book. All Bachman books are available as individual volumes except for Rage, hence this book is here for the sake of being complete. What I'm getting at in the page numbers won't make any sense. This book is about 150 pages on its own, but starts on page 530 of the omnibus. However, it is conveniently broken down into 101 chapters, so I'll use that to mark progress.

February 25 ("75...and counting"): It looks like Bachman/King decided to revisit an unclear dystopia, a little reminiscent of The Long Walk. However, this one doesn't lack much subtlety thus far. At this point the game has just started so I have no idea where this is heading. Like any good Stephen King themed game show, I suppose death is inevitable?

February 27 ("63...and counting"): I guess it wouldn't be a very interesting book if Ben just decided to lock himself in a panic room. In fact, that's the reason they make him use his body camera to force him to reveal his location. Of course in this future there is no Internet so he sends the tapes via US Mail. But did he really have to blow up the poor YMCA just to get the Hunters off his case?!

Bachman may be trashy, but it sure reads fast! I polished off the book a couple days later. Spoiler alert: he dies.

Cujo (1983)

I inaugurated the year in movie-watching with Cujo a couple weeks ago. As with the book, the movie is not as bad as the reputation it carries of a psycho-dog killing random people. In fact, I was a little surprised by what seemingly-minor things were retained from the book, while other major plot points were cut. I honestly did not expect to see the Sharp Cereal Professor, but there he was foolishly pushing Red Raspberry Zingers. Meanwhile, Charity and Brett get out of town and you never see them again. Other changes I rolled with, given the running time of the movie was quite compact, such as Steve being some kind of family friend, already known to Vic. I also believe nobody was sad about omitting Steve leaving a....ahem...."gift" on the upstairs bed when he trashed the house.

Of course, there was one huge change from the book, which came from Stephen King himself. In the book, the big shocker is the death of Tad. On one hand, killing off children, even in the 1980's, was still a touchy area for movies. However, according to the vast amount of ink and pixels devoted to this change King apparently carried a heavy amount of regret for his decision to kill Tad in the book, so he "atoned" for it in the movie. Make no mistake, though, this movie is still really scary, probably the scariest one I've seen yet. I'm usually pretty good at separating real life from what's behind the screen, but the terror of being trapped in a car with a screaming child on the inside and a rabid dog on the outside is downright visceral.

Location, as you know, is always an area of scrutiny for me. I believe to date in this project, only one movie purported to take place somewhere in Maine was actually filmed in Maine. Alas, that was the wretched Graveyard Shift, proving location only isn't going to save a turkey. Cujo, as was the case with many of the early King movies, was filmed in California, in locations north of the Bay Area, with a bit of Utah thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, it doesn't look much like Maine, although if one disregards that, the redneck-chic of Joe Camber's garage/hovel is pretty much the way I envisioned it when reading the book. Again, this is one of the earlier Stephen King movies, the third one (after Carrie and The Shining) to be made into a feature film, just a few months ahead of The Dead Zone, in fact. To date this was one of the fastest page-to-screen jobs in King's bibliography.

Finally, an unusual little challenge for a movie like Cujo, even if it isn't all non-stop dog-killing-man action, is how to handle your animal actors. There are places that go into way more depth on this, so I won't repeat it all here, but let's just say that the actor-dog was quite the opposite of the role he portrayed. The silly dog ruined many a scene because he wanted to lick off the tasty "gore" put on him by the makeup department! I wonder if an outtake reel exists somewhere. It just might soothe any stray nightmares this movie left with you.