Good! But Prepare For Subtleties.
The problem seems to be that some people can't handle the delightful subtlety of some of King's work. Light on plot, sure, but that's not the point. There's a single POINT of plot and everything else is only there to frame it and illustrate it. King thrives in a terrible sense of wrong. Disjointed, twisted, tied-in-knots, all of it ...wrong-but-real. Especially in the short-stories and novellas, King hyper-focuses on a POINT of something terrible and wraps detail around it.
Some adaptations are better than others. This one is really not bad. It's pretty good. The sense of wrong is prevalent, but not insistent. I love the concept of knotted, non-linear time. But even that isn't all of it. (And if you want to look, there ARE sub-plots in the relationships between the characters. But they aren't the point!)
I'm a country-boy. I grew up in farm country. And not even truly LARGE farms, by national standards! As a kid with wide freedom to roam, (free-range, as they say) there was a fear, a wariness of things like the wide corn fields. They are so huge, so endless. Half-way through you start to wonder if you are lost, how you might get out; the doubts begin to creep-in and fear takes root. Things turn sinister as the leaves of the corn give you sharp, paper-cut-like pain, drawing blood as you run through it. ...And that's in the day-time. Try it at night... and the Unknown can grow to fill the edges of the whole world. I know it. I loved it. And I carried a cheap samurai sword everytime I went out to the woods or the fields after dark.
There's some of that in this movie. And with an actor that makes a really good bad-guy. And special effects that do very well to portray a terrible, amorphous, unnameable concept.
This is a well done move. Salute to the director, who took a short novella of treacherous ideas and made a decent 90+ minutes.
Some adaptations are better than others. This one is really not bad. It's pretty good. The sense of wrong is prevalent, but not insistent. I love the concept of knotted, non-linear time. But even that isn't all of it. (And if you want to look, there ARE sub-plots in the relationships between the characters. But they aren't the point!)
I'm a country-boy. I grew up in farm country. And not even truly LARGE farms, by national standards! As a kid with wide freedom to roam, (free-range, as they say) there was a fear, a wariness of things like the wide corn fields. They are so huge, so endless. Half-way through you start to wonder if you are lost, how you might get out; the doubts begin to creep-in and fear takes root. Things turn sinister as the leaves of the corn give you sharp, paper-cut-like pain, drawing blood as you run through it. ...And that's in the day-time. Try it at night... and the Unknown can grow to fill the edges of the whole world. I know it. I loved it. And I carried a cheap samurai sword everytime I went out to the woods or the fields after dark.
There's some of that in this movie. And with an actor that makes a really good bad-guy. And special effects that do very well to portray a terrible, amorphous, unnameable concept.
This is a well done move. Salute to the director, who took a short novella of treacherous ideas and made a decent 90+ minutes.
- brkamp
- Dec 6, 2019