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domino harvey wrote:I had no earthly idea Cell finally got made

Same here! And I see it was released and everything and has a Blu-ray coming out in September. The hell?

It has a perfect 0% on Rotten Tomatoes out of 24 professional reviews

Sounds promising!

JJ Abrams-produced Castle Rock coming to Hulu, believed to be anthology series of King adaptations

I didn't realise this until a brief trawl of imdb, but apparently there is an adaptation of Gerald's Game currently in the works directed by the guy behind Ouija: Origin of Evil and featuring Carla Gugino in the lead role. I wouldn't have thought it would be that cinematic an adaptation (for those unfamiliar the basic premise involves a woman left handcuffed to a bed in a secluded cabin when her husband has a heart attack in the middle of a kinky sex game, with only her ingenuity and a Jean M. Auel novel to save her! Think Misery but someone even more confined to a bed!), but then I could perhaps see it working if handled in a 127 Hours manner!

Considering the Evil Dead remake already used the same imaginative yet repulsive finale, this film won't even have the audacity of that to drive it. I'm not sure I can think of a worse King novel to adapt!

Personally, I'm still waiting for a Shawshank Redemption reboot with an all female cast.

With the lone exception of The Shining, adapting King to cinema has always been misguided, so…

Huh? Carrie? The Shawshank Redemption? Misery? The Green Mile? Stand By Me? Christine? That is one spicy take you've got there.

I'd say most are somewhere between awful and mediocre, but there have been some really solid adaptations that still stand up, including a few mfunk lists (I'm not bowled over on The Green Mile but I'll add 'Salem's Lot and Creephshow to that). The first half of the TV version of It is also pretty solid. The last... not so much.

CSM126 wrote:With the lone exception of The Shining, adapting King to cinema has always been misguided, so…

Didn't King loathe Kubrick's adaptation?

I loved the miniseries when I was way too young to see it really. And the cast - Richard Thomas, John Ritter, Annette O'Toole and of course Tim Curry. I'm going to rent this on iTunes, Amazon, whatever.

thirtyframesasecond wrote:

CSM126 wrote:With the lone exception of The Shining, adapting King to cinema has always been misguided, so…

Didn't King loathe Kubrick's adaptation?

I think he's come around a bit on it now.

Any proof of that?

I think that as recently as last year he called it "A big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside of it." And last month, he replied to a Blumhouse post asking what your top 5 Stephen King "joints" are (ugh) that had a still of Kubrick's film as the thumbnail with "Not this one." on Twitter.

So in other words, he is coming around.

mfunk9786 wrote:Huh? Carrie? The Shawshank Redemption? Misery? The Green Mile? Stand By Me? Christine? That is one spicy take you've got there.

I would also add Dolores Claiborne to the list of solid King adaptations. Granted, I've never read the book (perhaps this summer), but I've always thought the film stands well on its own. I love the color schemes used to differentiate between present day (moody grays and blues) and flashbacks (vibrant reds and oranges), and it contains one of Kathy Bates' best performances.

I recall the film of Dolores Claiborne being very faithful to the book, leaving out only one element that ties the book to Gerald's Game. I haven't seen the film since VHS but I recall liking it, too.

mfunk9786 wrote:Huh? Carrie? The Shawshank Redemption? Misery? The Green Mile? Stand By Me? Christine? That is one spicy take you've got there.

I'd add the Dead Zone to a list of great Stephen King adaptations and The Night Flier to a list of really fun ones.

Apart from a stupid, uninspired ending, Apt Pupil is terrific, and King himself has said that he liked the 1988 iteration of it starring Niccol Williamson that had to be abandoned mid-production.

beamish13 wrote:Apart from a stupid, uninspired ending, Apt Pupil is terrific, and King himself has said that he liked the 1988 iteration of it starring Niccol Williamson that had to be abandoned mid-production.

I remember absolutely loving the trailer for Apt Pupil - I must have seen it 25+ times in the theater in the year leading up to its release - and remember nothing about the film itself, which I saw in its initial release but not since.

Apt Pupil is probably the best Ray Parker Jr theme song that never got picked up!

The Mist has been adapted as a new TV series on Spike.

I recently watched The Green Mile again for the first time in a few years, and its grown on me quite a lot. It perhaps suffers from being less 'grounded' coming straight after The Shawshank Redemption from the same director, Frank Darabont, but this feels like a great adaptation, tying the Shawshank-style period prison environment more tightly into the fantastical side of King's work. The lengthy runtime and sentimentality that could be an issue are balanced out by an incredibly dark streak (fitting for a film about child murder and executions), but I really think that that coda in the retirement home is what really makes the film both so resonant with King's other works (echoes of The Golden Years, even The Jaunt), full of sentimentality but on reflection it has an incredibly dark aftertaste. Spoilers follow:

Its a film about people meeting their deaths in various ways: defiantly, scared, cruelly murdered, badly executed. The horror of being alive yet with the mind already clouded and the person you knew absent. The whole magical figure at the centre of the film provides potential uplift, but with a dark edge: the mouse getting magically resurrected has been through the most horrific experience possible (and been to oblivion and brought back. Its not in this film but it raises inevitable thoughts about Pet Sematary! 'Luckily' it was too late to bring the murdered girls back from the beyond).

Then the story becomes rather religious, about someone entirely good and empathetic (though a little slow. Perhaps being a truly good person is only possible that way) constantly taking on other people's 'diseases' (of the body and mind) and slowly being drained of his purity. Or at least regularly infected. He gets used over and over (even by our heroes) as a tool to serve their purposes. But his 'gift' also means that he cannot die, at least for a while, so he's almost begging to be put out of his misery, and released from the misery of the world itself, and the need for constant service of those afflicted/corrupted in all sorts of ways. John Coffey's execution is almost the equivalent of Jesus on the cross, with the onlooking guards surrounding and almost protecting him from the crowds, uncomprehending in their cruelty. The guards releasing him from his endless duty.

And then there's the modern day coda when Paul reveals his ultimate horror, of extended life. Living beyond his time, past all of his relatives and friends, and the world he knew. The ultimate apostle in some senses, witnessing and accompanying so many through their executions before their natural time but with no idea of when, or even if, he might ever die. The retirement home as the new Green Mile. In this film the ultimate horror actually isn't death, even that of being executed, even wrongfully so. Its the terror of living on endlessly without respite. Generational conflict (or problems created by one generation having to be solved by the next; or decades long hidden childhood traumas becoming unavoidable again) feels like an important Stephen King theme, and it often seems as if he finds the idea of being outside that natural order of things (time travel, different parallel universes, hermetically sealed off environments existing apart from the 'normal' world) to perhaps be even more horrific than actively facing up to traumas. Stopping the clock, or at least extending a lifespan beyond its natural limits is perhaps the ultimate horror in the King universe. There's that sense that everyone needs some sense of closure from what they've seen and experienced!

That surprisingly dark on reflection ending makes all the 'magical realist' sentimental aspects work entirely in context. (It also suggests that King really likes Of Mice and Men, which became even more obvious when he eventually released his 'lost Richard Bachman' book Blaze in 2007)

Trailer for Gerald's Game, which will be released on Netflix on September 29.

James Wan is adapting Stephen King's The Tommyknockers next.

I love Stephen King but this book is baaaaaaaaaad. So bad even King himself thinks it's and I quote "awful".

I read it when I was maybe in 8th grade and thought it was decent then, although like so many King books it loses it's way towards the end. Can't really imagine re-reading it now though. Now the miniseries, THAT I remember being awful in real time.