stephen king c/d?

now, eh, i'm sure i'd enjoy rereading some of the good ones.

oh yeah and know what's annoying? the american version of lars von trier's "the kingdom" is called motherfucking "STEPHEN KING'S KINGDOM HOSPITAL"!!! what the fuck is that shit?!

"I read the Mist today, and boy was it scary!"

If you can find it, there's a audio dramatization of the Mist available on cassete. The cool thing about it is that it's in three-dimensional sound, which gives the story an extremely spooky effect.

This is so true. His were the first "adult" books I got into reading, as a kid. (I remember learning about most aspects of sex -- except the nuts and bolts, of course, which my mom taught me -- from Stephen King books.) And I think he made for a pretty good segue into the more usual fiction, when I became a preteen... (Because, y'know, he writes about couples and relationships and people musing about their lives and all that shit... just with monsters.)

And I remember "It," which I read in sixth grade, as being one heck of a great book.

I think his stuff in the last decade or so is unbearable nostalgic crap, I still think his first 15 years had a few genuinely great novels (The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary seem to stand up the best) and a boatload of really scary scenes (the Lincoln Tunnel sequence in The Stand, Ben's Hubie Marston nightmare in 'Salem's Lot).

At this point, though, I'd wager that most of his stuff made for better movies, at least when real directors (as opposed to Frank Darabont) were at the helm. Carrie, The Shining, and Christine are all way beyond the source material. And Cujo, The Dead Zone and 'Salem's Lot are all great movies in their own right.

Dude, did you see my post upthread?

I stopped caring before the first chapter of Delores Claiborne ended (tho that movie was good).

Short stories: great. Dark Tower also good in principle (the first one was only good enough to get me vaguely interested in the seond one, which was great), but if it turns out that I'd have to read all his other books to understand the next volume, I'll be pissed off.

You have to reckon he's jumped the shark when he starts making TV miniseries of all his longer stories, including The Shining. Apparently the film was fine, but not what he was looking for.

And Christine to thread!

1. The Shining
2. The Strand was good as I recall though the middle 500 pages dragged a bit
3. He wrote some book about dragons. I forget what it was called but dragons are so awesome.
4. His short stories I think are generally excellent, and much different from his fiction. They're published in the New Yorker and other such magazines quite often. He had an excellent one about highway restroom graffiti.
5. Also he got hit by a truck, which is so crazy. Then he wrote lots of memoirs about being hit by a truck. The one celebrity we have in the whole state of Maine gets mauled by a drunk driver. I thought we should have put his giant creepy head on our state quarter, but apparently that wasn't taken into consideration.

>Anyway, 4mph isn't very fast

True. This is the beauty of the contest. The 100 starters can go on for quite a while before the 1st person is shot, which is obviously a sobering event for the remaining 99. Only after about 48 hours things start to go a bit crazy. People start to freak out, as one would expect. Dunno why that story stuck with me for so long - it's a disturbing concept.

-- s1ocki

Stephen King signing on to the Kingdom remake is the only thing that got it made; it's been in and out of production for years, so I assume they're tagging it with his name because they aren't confident in it except as a King vehicle (whereas a Johnny Depp movie is a Johnny Depp movie, and you really don't need the Inspector 13 tag.

I haven't seen Dreamcatcher and don't know if I will, but coming so soon after the extended discussion of "trunk novels" in Bag of Bones (which, love it or hate it, is considerably different in scope, tone, and approach), and King's subsequent accident and public difficulties with returning to writing, I half-assumed it was a trunk novel itself. It certainly reads like one.

(xpost)

No, we have Dean Koontz for that.

i mean the thing with stephen king is he's really good at writing really readable stuff, and he has some neat ideas, but man oh man does he repeat himself. which is kind of interesting in a way, i guess. it's like he applies whatever good idea he has to the basic mold of "writer in maine" and lets it rip.

(obviously that applies more to the novels)

I was back home last week mpls/stpl where there are actual used paperback sections and picked up three I’ve never read (insomnia, the dark half, bag o bones).

i liked insomnia!

i love the Dark Half! one of my top-tier faves.

Bag of Bones is decent! one of his better late-90s novels imo

Insomnia is pretty good iirc though it’s been a good 20 yrs since my last read thru.
Fair bit of Dark Tower crossover.

the imagery of the three bald doctors in Insomnia still gives me the willies

I don't remember much of the book but am definitely looking forward to The Long Walk.

^ this is how my sunday afternoons go at 44

Twenty years ago I was buying the dark half at a secondhand bookstore and some asshole came up to me and told me the ending, so I’ve never bothered reading it. (I got Salem’s Lot instead.)

endings don't really matter in Stephen King books though

Yeah or at the very least if you need books to have good or even sensible endings, you won't be a King fan.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXED-hOXEAA9cOY.jpg

lmao

the imagery of the three bald doctors in Insomnia still gives me the willies

The fucked up one with the rusty scalpel, yeah? Didn’t help that I had the music from Columns playing in my head which made him a little less sinister.

I had about three years between reading this and the last Dark Tower book and when Patrick Danville showed up I YELLED. You could not have paid me to guess which book’s characters showed up there. (I would kind of been hoping for Eyes of the Dragon if you asked me).

i kinda like that the lads from the eyes of the dragon are still out there doing their thing

I ended up in maine last month and we were only like half an hour from bangor so had to get a picture standing in front of this gate, which had a red balloon tied to it obviously:

https://i0.wp.com/bdn-data.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2023/01/King-at-gate.jpg

it’s only right to do so

Looked this up on Google Maps and noticed that the street view pegman for Bangor turns into a person with a backpack and walking stick. Anyone understand this reference? I can't think of a Stephen King thing that it could be.

Possibly some promotional thing for the upcoming The Long Walk movie?

In the end it's all just about recycling IP, but kinda conspicuous that the loosely similar "The Long Walk" and "The Running Man" should both get big screen adaptations the same year. I still haven't seen the latter, but the former was pretty impressively grim if ultimately sort of superficial. Still, given the limitations of the story, I was impressed by how well they pulled off a movie that is more or less literally just walking and talking ("The Long Talk"). In some ways it felt very similar to "Stand By Me" (the movie).

Yeah, no way am I watching nü Running Man.

I figure The Long Walk got resurrected because it's an antecedent of Squid Game.

Squid Game, Running Man, Battle Royale, Long Walk, Hunger Games ...

Those too, but The Long Walk and Squid Game both have gunmen blowing the heads off of losing contestants.

nu-running man was bad. i had some mild hopes for it since it's an edgar wright but nope

I am actually kind of intrigued. Even the negative reviews I have read have seemed largely positive, as in, the cast is good, it's fun, it's just not a good movie. It's not like the Schwarzenegger movie is a good movie either, but I enjoy it.

I did see somebody observe that this feels like the first Edgar Wright movie that feels like a work for hire.

i mean it's not the worst movie i've ever seen, it's somewhat functional as a piece of entertainment. powell isn't bad but i do think he's miscast - they make a big deal about how character is the "angriest man in the world" and powell is not really the ideal actor to represent that, he has no edge at all. the action is pretty good but there's way too much time between action sequences that's focused on boilerplate character building and generic "you've got to fight against the man!" political messaging.

the project overall feels misbegotten. a movie about an all-powerful TV network and/or a movie satirizing violence in media do not seem relevant in 2025, those are very 1980s concerns. it could've worked if they went with a more gonzo return to 1980s action movie approach but they didn't. it also feels like there should be more robocop-y satire but aside from one fake game show you see near the beginning they mostly play it straight. colman domingo is the best part of the movie, he's really the only guy going over the top in the way it feels like the movie should be.

Even then, they couldn't cast the 2025 equivalent of Richard Dawson as the host? In fairness, I'm not sure who that would be...

oh my god steve harvey

holy shit that would have been incredible

Oh, of course! Might've actually sold me on the film.

Ok, I had a couple of hours to kill, lol, so actually just saw it. NA pretty much on the money. It wasn't terrible, and I suppose works as a functional piece of entertainment, but barely so. In fact, it's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with it, because something is definitely wrong. Script? Something lost during editing? A lot of the other movie did better, at least as I remember it, and much of this movie I kept thinking how much of a better fit Paul Verhoeven would have been for the material at the height of his powers. But then, Total Recall is, oddly enough, not unlike The Running Man for much of its duration.

edgar wright made baby driver let's be real

The End of the World, Scott Pilgrim, Last Night in Soho...

He's made a lot of terrible films

oh no

scott pilgrim is unimpeachable im not having that

I'm only lukewarm on his first two as well tbh

Baby Driver is in the running for the worst movie I’ve seen that everyone else seems to like.

otm

there are movies he's made I didn't like, like baby driver, but nothing he's made that I hated, I don't think

he was not the right director for this one, though, just like dude was not the right star.

Baby Driver Scott Pilgrim is in the running for the worst movie I’ve seen that everyone else seems to like.

scott pilgrim is a good entertaining movie
I still haven't seen Last Night in Soho

He's best with Pegg and Frost, that's for sure.

Last Night In Soho looked really good but I don't remember any of the plot. Baby Driver could have been good, and almost was for a minute or two here and there. I've never seen Scott Pilgrim because the only movie I want to see with Michael Cera is one where he's beaten with a sack full of doorknobs for 90 minutes.

michael cera is good actually

Stephen King's son has a new novel out but it looks a little too epic for me, meaning that I'm unlikely to complete it ("sprawling").. getting good reviews however

i’ve read a Joe Hill novel or two, he’s v good!

Oh, one more thing about the movie, what's with the fucking product placement? Not even satirical, it was outright embarrassing. Puma, Monster, Liquid Death? Like, in the case of the latter two, pretty much literally commercials.

I've read one or two of Joe Hill's novels and some of his story collections. He's got a very different voice from his father and is more willing to swerve into outright weirdness, like his story about the kid whose best friend is a living balloon.

I'm about two thirds into "King Sorrow"

Definitely the most Kingian book that Hill has written, in that it's a decades-spanning epic about a group of friends dealing with an ancient evil while fucking up their personal lives (and there's about a million references to the old man's work)

Starting to flag a little, but there's plenty to enjoy if you're a King/Hill fan of any description description. Memorable villain

Baby Driver is in the running for my all-time most hated movie. From Spacey to the needledrops to lousy car chases, zero redeeming qualities.

cera gets beaten up for a reasonable % of scott pilgrim fwiw