Tocky on 7/2/2009 at 17:09
Stand by Me was originally titled "The Body" and was better as a short story. Sometimes the movie is better as it was with "The Dead Zone" and sometimes not as with "The Running Man" which was a light years better story than the movie portrayed because it didn't actually portray it at all except loosely in concept.
King meanders and that is his biggest fault but when he has a thing to say he does it well. Very rarely does it approach the level of classic literature but that isn't so terrible a thing. Nobody can deny he is imaginative.
Jason Moyer on 7/2/2009 at 17:48
Shit, "The Running Man" was King too? Jesus. I was just discussing that with a younger guy at work last night, trying to explain Smash TV to him. :D
june gloom on 7/2/2009 at 18:12
Running Man was by Richard Bachman, King's pseudonym.
Try and find a copy of The Bachman Books- they feature the first 4 books by Bachman, including The Running Man. The others are The Long Walk (one of my favourites), Rage (you can't find this anymore because of Columbine), and Roadwork (kind of shit.)
EvaUnit02 on 7/2/2009 at 18:35
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Rage (you can't find this anymore because of Columbine)
Still on sale in Britain, AFAIK. Just import it.
P.S. Maximum Overdrive is a terrible film, but it's got a "so-bad-that-it's-good" thing going on.
june gloom on 7/2/2009 at 18:45
It's not. It's out of print everywhere. Newer editions of the Bachman Books don't have it either. A shame, 'cuz it's a good story- if quite a bit chilling.
Tocky on 8/2/2009 at 01:49
A whole site dedicated to dislike? Doesn't that make it win somehow?
Anyway, back to King, the biggest dissapointment to Kubricks Shining for me was leaving out the topiary scene. The series also did not get it right. Seeing the things move is not what made them scary. Taking your eyes off them and noticing they HAVE moved is the scary part. Questioning your own senses and coming up short an explaination other than crazy is unsettling.
demagogue on 8/2/2009 at 04:10
I liked Kubrick's The Shining, but I didn't have any illusions that it wasn't undermining the impact, even much of the point of the original. They're two different beasts doing different (mutually-undermining) things, but I appreciated that.
I totally understood King's opinion about it and don't begrudge him it; I just wasn't sympathetic to it in my own opinion. I'd rather the movie we got in Kubrick's own voice than something more fidelis where he was pushing another voice through his own more than he was comfortable.
It just fits in with my general view that stories are usually better off being recreated in their own media and in the creator at-hand's voice, or it's going to look strained, like most movie adaptations always seem to look.
On that note, I don't have much of an opinion on the Twilight phenomenon. I've gotten into vampire and gothic lore before -- living in Austin, doing madrigals and RenFests, the kind of music and games I've been into, PC and paper. But this hasn't tapped into that part of me at all. Maybe it really is a generational thing. It just doesn't seem to have the same ... pedigree, for lack of a better word, that some past gothic things have had IMO.
Queue on 8/2/2009 at 17:39
Quote Posted by Tocky
Anyway, back to King, the biggest dissapointment to Kubricks Shining for me was leaving out the topiary scene.
Budget and special effects problems kept this out.
Starrfall on 9/2/2009 at 18:46
I once read a short story he wrote based on the Dark Tower series and found his writing style so obnoxious that it killed any desire I might have had to read anything else by King. Not every damn sentence needs to be at least three lines of descriptive nouns punctuated with a minimum of three commas and ideally two dashes. I like some of his
stories, but the writing I can leave.
My Twilight experience is limited to knowing (
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2014390/) this guy's sister.
