All right. Dreamcatcher.

I remembered watching Dreamcatcher on cable in my undergrad days, but there was an odd fuzzy quality to the recollection. I knew it was bad; awful, in fact.. but I could not recall why.

I now understand the reason: I blocked it out, like a traumatic memory or painful physical injury. There are some things the conscious mind isn’t meant to retain experience from.

Dreamcatcherthe book is, according to the resident King-expert of the household, kind of a mediocre King book. Dreamcatcher the movie is a regurgitated blend of bits and pieces from an entire series of preivous King works, whether they be TV shows or films or the written word. Take one pinch of The Green Mile, a dollop of Stand by Me, a shake of Tommyknockers, a dash of The Stand, burn on the stove for an agonizing two hours sixteen minutes, then hit yourself in the face with a bat until you lose consciousness.

But, you ask, what is it *about*? What’s the story? Why do you hate it so much, and how can we seek revenge on an uncaring universe for allowing it?

The movie is ostensibly about a group of four friends from Maine, now living in the Northeast and going about their middle-aged lives. They grew up together and had wacky adventures, like Stand by Me without the talent or the drama, but moved on eventually. Oh yeah, they also have mild superpowers, which are never properly explained, and only crop up as plot devices.

The four men are jerks, and you largely wish they’d die. One works as a therapist and is a telepath, but hates his own life so much he abuses his telepathy to drive one patient to suicide. Whee! Heroic!

Another can find lost objects and uses this ability to try and score one night stands. A third is a teacher who’s too dumb to notice his students cheating so he spies on them with his telepathy to catch a poor kid who slipped up, which, eh, I dunno. It’s more moral than the shrink. Did I mention you’re really supposed to like these guys?

Eventually teacher-dude gets hit by a car after being lured into traffic by a vision of a mentally handicapped guy in his underwear. Seriously. That leads in no particular way to the film cutting to six months later the four of them going to a cabin for a getaway, as they do every year or so. Teacher man is remarkably spry for someone who should just now be getting the last pins pulled out of his spine, if he ever walked again, but we’ll move on. It’s a vacay, let’s not be downers.

At this point you’ll notice the characters dropping a ton of slang terminology to establish that they have their own cliqueish language. This is something that can be established in a book without great difficulty but would take considerable skill to do well on screen. Don’t worry; there’s no such skill. It’s just mind-numbingly annoying.

Eventually weird stuff starts happening. A snowstorm is moving in, one of the four almost kills a hunter, another two have a car accident avoiding a woman sprawled in the road, the forest animals start fleeing, etc. There’s a painful and crass extended sequence involving the near-killed hunter, who is having extremely severe gastrointestinal problems, which are apparently hilarious.

Lo and behold, it’s an alien invasion. Or something. There’s a bright red glowing fungus that sometimes turns into giant worms that rip out of your ass and kill you.

Yeah. You read that correctly. Fungus – worm – assbursters. In case the Alien reference isn’t obvious, when the Evil Military Commandos show up, we’re informed they call the fungus plague ‘The Ripley’.

Which strikes me as odd, since Ripley is the *cure* for Alien infestations, as any fan of the Alien movies could tell you.

Morgan Freeman is utterly wasted here as a crazed mass-murder inclined Man in Black who’s been putting down alien invasions for decades. Yes, decades. It’s so common they have set procedures and everything. The alien invasion model works like this: land your ship somewhere, infect the local animals with red fungus, a vanishingly small number of people hatch worm thingies, and…. somehow… they conquer the world.

Apparently the overwhelming majority of people heal from the fungus within days. It doesn’t control their minds or make them a threat, and it poorly tolerates cold. So on the Pandemic Horror scale, we’re talking somewhere between Mumps and Athlete’s Foot. But it’s a big deal, and Freeman thinks it’s time to kill the entire, mildly-infected town, before someone gets out with it. His Courageous Subordinate disagrees and plots against him to Save the Townsfolk.

So add in a generous portion of Outbreak to the mixture mentioned earlier.

If this isn’t confusing enough, it gets worse. Zip! Flatulent Hunter dies and a worm thingy kills one of the four idiot stars. Bang, zoom, another one of the cast of four is infected by a slug which is working for a Grey alien that turns into a cloud of spores and takes over his mind. Luckily he has an elaborate Mental Library system he can hide inside. The guy who can find things is coerced into finding a way for Infected Teacher Dude to get out of the quarantine zone, so that he can contaminate Boston’s water supply with a plague that many people would find preferable to the flu. Morgan Freeman uses bad CG helicopters to blow up a bad CG alien ship as the alien Greys beg for mercy in childlike voices. Infected Teacher kills the Guy with the Tracking Ability for reasons that aren’t explained, and the only one of the four still standing is the Bad Shrink, who falls into military custody and convinces the Courageous Subordinate to break him out and find their mentally handicapped friend, who has superpowers far beyond theirs and can save the world.

Seriously.

So that’s what they do. Freeman is busted by the slightly less insane regular military, and he breaks out to follow his personal Brutus in a helicopter via a magical tracking device. Subordinate and Bad Shrink retrieve his childhood friend, who it is revealed gave them all superpowers by accident finding a lost girl from his special needs school. His superpowers leaked out, ala The Green Mile. So he’s not just your mentally handicapped Deus Ex Machina, he is by extension Jesus.

Bad Shrink and Subordinate take Mentally Handicapped Jesus to stop the Possessed Teacher from contaminating Boston’s water supply. Morgan Freeman tries to stop them with a helicopter, which Subordinate shoots down using his sidearm. They both die, mercifully. Which leads to a three way confrontation over the completely unsecured Bostonian water supply between the three old friends, only one of which has a legitimate medical excuse for being this dumb.

Then the Earthshattering Truth is revealed. Their friend isn’t Mentally Handicapped Jesus. He’s actually an Alien Starbaby sent here to save mankind from bad alien invasions. Which I guess makes his whole life a lie, or an act, and allows me in non-PC terms to call him:

Retard Alien Jesus.

Retard Alien Jesus saves the day. Roll credits. Eat a gun.

I hate Dreamcatcher.

Next Week: Secret Window, which doesn’t suck
Last Week: Hearts in Atlantis

More below, etc.

So, Hearts in Atlantis. What to say, what to say.

First, the title is a bit odd, since the story this movie is based on isn’t “Hearts in Atlantis” but a different story from the volume named for that tale, in this case, “The Low Men in Yellow Coats”. My roommate likes it because it ties very indirectly perhaps into The Dark Tower cycle.

Hmm. This is an unusual movie, I have to say. It feels more like a book than any other film I’ve ever seen… something about the way it flows, stretches out in connected vignettes or something.

The movie opens with a middle-aged photographer, Robert Garfield, receiving a letter explaining that his old friend has died and containing a pitcher’s mitt. Garfield goes to the funeral where he learns that another old friend he had been eager to see there also perished some time before, and that starts a flashback to our main tale..

Inside the flashback, Hearts in Atlantis concerns a young Bobby who lives with his fashion-plate mother in 1950s America somewhere in the northeast; most likely Maine, but I forget. In his spare time he longs for a bike and hangs out with his best friends, Sully and Carol, who we’ve already learned eventually drift out of his life and, of course, die. Bobby’s own life is somewhat derailed from its previous course as a new boarder moves in to the apartment above his own, a mysterious old man named Ted Brautigan, apparently on the run from someone or something.

No points for guessing who Hopkins plays.

Bobby builds a friendship with Brautigan, who hires him to watch for pursuers in the neighborhood, under the guise of having the paper read to him each day. Brautigan seems harmless enough, though he does display odd flashes of knowledge he shouldn’t have, and occasionally goes into what one might call a trance or seizure, seeming to see things at distance.

As the summer goes on, Bobby and his friends deal with neighborhood bullies, a budding relationship with Carol, and his mother’s absenteeism and sporadic neglect. Brautigan helps them out with a few of these issues and some life lessons, and all goes fairly smoothly, until his pursuers show up.

I won’t go on from there, to avoid plot spoilers. I will admit to loving how the men chasing him are depicted and described here; shadowy figures that feel out pain and grief, who can only be kept off your trail if you clear your mind of darkness and focus on your happiest moments. A sort of psychic bloodhound that smells pain instead of blood. Fascinating.

Added bonus for King movie fans, the man who plays the adult Bobby, David Morse, was also Brutus the prison guard in The Green Mile.

Overall, Hearts in Atlantis is a fairly easy recommendation. It won’t change anyone’s life, but it’s pretty well put together, and works for an evening’s entertainment.

Not like next week’s Dreamcatcher at all. No sir.

Last Week: The Green Mile
Next Week: Dreamcatcher

Looks like I can’t quite fit the full size images in this page format, so click through to see them in all their glory. This flickr-resize isn’t bad though.

Well, that’s all for this time. Off to work on Needful Things I guess.

So, Frank Darabont hit bigtime success with his version of The Shawshank Redemption. Naturally a few years later, for his second stab at being director, he went back to the King-Prison-Story well to do The Green Mile.

Ok, so it’s not so ‘naturally’. Most directors don’t do back to back King films, as we’ve seen. But Darabont and King are apparently good friends; Darabont even did one of King’s ‘Dollar Baby’ independent movies; there’s a connection there.

And in any event, it paid off again, if less grandly; The Green Mile was generally well-received.

So, what’s it all about? The Green Mile is a period piece, concerning the summer of 1935 in some Deep South state (apparently the movie hints that it’s Louisiana, but it’s not explicitly named). Our main character, now an old man in a nursing home, recounts his days in 1935 heading up the guards running Death Row, and dealing with a series of men entrusted to their care (only to be killed, by them, later) as well as a horrific bladder infection, a friend’s ill wife, and a new sadistic prison guard, transferred in seemingly just so that he could kill another human being. All that before the strangest inmate he ever stood watch over arrives…

I can’t talk much more about the movie without spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you skip to the end.

Ok. The real story, beyond the day to day stuff, concerns the inmate John Coffey, who arrives that summer slated to die in the electric chair for the murder of two little white girls; Coffey, a gigantic black man, was found with the two girls dead in his arms, bloody, raped and murdered. So, given that, and this movie being set in The South, he’s very lucky not to have been lynched or torn apart by dogs or something.

Coffey at first seems to be a stereotypical gentle giant; perhaps even borderline retarded. He’s extremely subservient to authority, timid, even childishly afraid of the dark.

It shortly comes out, however, that Coffey has amazing powers; he can heal the sick, and even, in the case of a small mouse at least, revive the recently dead. When found at the scene, so to speak, with the little dead girls, he repeated over and over that he ‘couldn’t take it back’, which everyone thought was an admission of guilt; in fact, he was talking about a limitation on his power, that he can only ‘take back’ injury or death for so long after the event occurs. Coffey was, in fact, merely trying to help, but no longer capable of saving the girls in question.

Cutting straight to the chase, John Coffey is a Jesus figure. In fact, it’s strongly hinted that he is Jesus, returned to Earth after his crucifixion as a black man. (The reference to him ‘falling out of the sky’, in that he had no traceable past, was a bit blunt; far better are the inexplicable scars he carries all over his body, for which Coffey can’t account)

The movie generated some controversy over the apparent ‘Magic Negro’ figure that Coffey represents, but I am personally shocked that there wasn’t any racial backlash over Black Jesus. I mean, Morgan Freeman playing God in a comedy got some people very upset; here is a serious, dramatic Black Jesus portrayal. Considering that the state executes Coffey, it serves as a double insult to your crazy arch-conservative types in America, who are usually in favor of state sanctioned execution (which is particularly odd for Christians; I mean, their savior was unjustly executed, in the religious story anyway. One would hope for some empathy toward prisoners out of that)

I remember watching this on cable and not liking it as much, but for whatever reason, the Sunday we watched it I found it pretty powerful. Yes, Coffey is a bit one-dimensional, but I think it works; he’s merely the vessel for this *thing*, this far greater presence than himself, which occasionally peeks through the human skin it’s wearing as a disguise on Earth. There are occasional flashes of insight, and some almost Old Testament wrath, that speak to the real power behind the throne, so to speak. Does this enhance or detract from the ‘Magic Negro’ criticism? Personally I’m not sure. Coffey’s human agency is diminished, but he arguably doesn’t serve as a subservient character to the white narrator either. If you take that tack, then you’d have to say that Jesus was a ‘Magic Jew’ to the various gospel writers. That might be fair; a lot of Christians seem to take that view of their religion, that it’s all about them, their needs, their forgiveness. Accept Jesus in *your* heart and be saved, right? The social justice stuff can follow later, or so it appears.

So, yeah. I watched a movie about Jesus around Easter, and it was based on Stephen King. That’s pretty religious for an atheist actually. I liked it too, in spite of my burning hatred of Tom Hanks. Go figure.

Next Week: Hearts in Atlantis
Last Week: Apt Pupil

More below the cut.

Ok, so, Apt Pupil. It stars Brad Renfro, who was really popular as a kid actor in the 90s, briefly, and Ian McKellen, who is awesome in almost anything. It was directed by Brian Singer, who… ok, let’s be honest. Singer sucks. But at least he is smart enough to cast McKellen in things, as he later put him in the X-Men movies as Magneto.

(Aside: that was simultaneously great and stupid casting. Great, in that he cast two Royal Shakespeare Company alums as major roles, stupid, in that he got them backward. McKellen would have been better as Xavier, and Stewart as Magneto. Think about that; you know I’m right).

The movie resembles his later works in some respects. Questionable pacing, flashy camera trickery. Distracting use of color. You get the idea.

At least it doesn’t feel cheap, like X-Men 2, where you started to wonder if they’d run out of money halfway through.

Apt Pupil is based on the King novella, obviously, and concerns a young (in the movie, not so young) boy (played by Renfro) who becomes obsessed with the Holocaust after realizing his neighbor is, in fact, a fugitive Nazi death camp administrator. He eventually collects enough evidence to blackmail his neighbor (McKellen) in order to learn his secrets; the kid’s morbid fascination has gotten the better of him, and he wants to hear all about the stuff they won’t tell him in school.

At first, his neighbor is very reluctant to indulge this request. He seems to have genuinely put that life behind him, and is now an old man, friendly but introverted, locked up in his house and not bothering anyone. However, the threat of being turned over to the Israelis for trial and certain execution loosens his tongue, and he begins to teach his young blackmailer about the whole sordid, gruesome mess he had overseen.

There’s a fascinating premise here that is largely overlooked in the film version. Can a person who commits great evil reform, without repenting? Can you simply walk away from a past like that, and go back to being a mild-mannered, civic-minded taxpayer with a neat lawn and tidy house, watching Mr. Magoo cartoons? Or is the evil always there, just below the surface, bottled up and looking for a way out?

In either case, the blackmail and story time gives it an opening, and the elderly German gradually redevelops a taste for violence and cruelty, as his student starts to run into the limits of his own tolerance for human depravity, even by proxy.

Some of the genuine tension in watching a story like this is marveling at a protagonists’ stupidity. Here you have a stupid, fixated kid poking a mass murderer with a stick to see how he’d react and get some spooky bedtime stories. It’s infuriating, but.. he is supposed to be a stupid kid. Still, at times you want to yell at the screen seeing it, like when a character runs from the knife wielding killer UP THE STAIRS in a horror movie.

Instead of, you know, out the front door.

Irritating a mass murderer is like that. The ‘mass’ part there should alert you as to the risk to one’s personal safety.

Well, eventually things get more complicated, and the kid gets blackmailed in turn, and the whole situation goes to hell, as one might expect. (Gee, who’d have thought tangling with the SS could go so badly?). There’s a fairly major change from the original ending, and David Schwimmer makes an appearance playing the same uptight douchey guy he always plays. Hi David!

Overall… feh. It’s ok. There are a few genuinely disturbing scenes, and McKellen is great. But he always is. (See his Richard the III sometime, it’s amazing).

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Next Week: The Green Mile
Last Week: The Night Flier

I might do so this weekend if things are slow at some point, but, you know. real life and all.

Still, we got it eventually.

Surprisingly watchable too.

The Night Flier would seem to have a bunch of strikes against it from the start. It’s based on a short story, which means that a lot of padding is necessary to make it into a full length movie. It wasn’t a big movie, and didn’t make much of a splash.. I’d never heard of it until I started to assemble the SWS list from IMDB.

Then there’s the fact that it’s not available new on Amazon, and after that, Netflix kept bumping it back from the top of my queue, which they do sometimes when they don’t want to admit that a movie is out of stock. (Happens a lot with anime discs, but that’s a topic for another time)

It gets worse once you have the actual dvd; it doesn’t look like much in your hand, cheap and silver without the fancier decoration a lot of dvds get; it has some printing on it that looks like the professional version of Lightscribe. Then you put it in your player and the lamest animated dvd menu in years comes up. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve seen dvd menus made in iMovie that blow this away.

So after I hit play here at the old dvd watching lair, I was fully prepared for another Mangler. Instead.. The Night Flier is a pleasant surprise. Moderately interesting, nicely paced, and up until the end, devoid of cheap tricks and sillyness.

The Night Flier admittedly only goes as far as it does thanks to the work of Miguel Ferrer. He carries this movie, which makes sense as he’s far and away the most important character. In the original story, really the only character. Ferrer plays Richard Dees, a sleazy photojournalist working at a sleazy tabloid that, shockingly enough, does a lot of original reporting. He comes into the picture irate that the photo he scored of a dead two-year old toddler was cut from the last edition of the tabloid.

Classy guy.

Dees is offered a new assignment by his editor: to track down an apparent serial killer who’s making his way down the Eastern Seaboard in a single-engine plane, hitting up small private airfields and killing people who work there.

A serial killer who apparently fancies himself a vampire.

As a side note, King has once again hit upon a unique, and yet very real, setting for his story. Invisible to the public, and supported by a fairly massive federal bailout program, America maintains a huge network of private airfields around the country. The money to do so comes from, believe it or not, a tax on every commercial plane ticket sold, of up to 15%. This money goes into a slush fund, some of which is used to build and refurbish these tiny airfields, which are mostly used by the ultra wealthy and their Lear Jets, along with Congresspeople and of course the occasional hobbyist with a small plane.

Your tax dollars at work. Literally!

So there’s an entire shadow transportation infrastructure out there in this country, but very few people know it’s there or take note of its existence. What if a murderer did?

Dees doesn’t think much of this assignment at first and turns it down. He figures that, with the FAA on the trail of a suspicious plane and pilot, including their plane’s ID number, it’s only a matter of time before the killer is caught. His editor disagrees, figuring that Dees is the best man for the job, being a dedicated sleazemonger, good at his craft, and owning a private plane himself. But after Dees’ intransigence he hands the case off to a new hire and that’s that.. until another killing comes up, the pilot again gets away, and Dees’ interest is piqued.

I won’t go any further than that storywise, for those who haven’t read it, because it is quite good and mostly faithful to the original despite the expansion. The junior cub reporter and the tensions at the tabloid rag are inventions but harmless enough. The movie, carried by Ferrer’s acting, is quite good up until a somewhat doofy ending that goes off the rails. Black and white plus fog machine does NOT equal spooky.

Still. Far better than I was expecting, perfectly suitable for a slow night. Recommended.

Next Week: Apt Pupil
Last Week: Dieting made simple with Gypsy curses, it’s Thinner

(Sooo much easier to do this one than Misery)

Real life gets in the way a lot.

Ahh, Thinner. Rarely has a movie relied more on its special effects, and even more rarely have those effects so unambiguously succeeded.

But let’s back up. Thinner is our twenty-fifth SwS film; it stars Robert John Burke as Billy Halleck, Joe Mantegna as, surprise, a mobster, and Michael Constantine as Tadzu Lempke, a superpowered Gyspy. It was directed by Tom Holland, who apparently did a couple of King tv miniseries.

Thinner is one of the simplest and most straightforward horror movies we’ve seen so far in Sundays with Stephen. What I mean by that is that Thinner is almost pure ‘horror’ as a subject; it eschews family drama, or comedy, or, for the most part, action sequences, and instead follows a single horrifying thread all the way through in a very low-key manner. Thinner puts the audience on a long slow slide toward something awful, and then it guides you there, but slowly, without a lot of unnecessary flashiness or cheap tricks.

Thinner concerns one Billy Halleck, a very talented lawyer in a small Massachusetts town, who also happens to be morbidly obese. Halleck’s a compulsive eater, and he’s half-heartedly trying to lose weight at the start of the film, but to little avail. He’s far more successful at getting his latest client, Ritchie Ginelli (Mantegna) off on an attempted murder for hire rap, a feat that earns him Ginelli’s considerable gratitude.

Unfortunately for Billy, on the way home from a celebratory dinner out, he and his wife make the mistake of getting frisky in a moving vehicle, and Halleck runs down an old Gypsy woman who was in town with her traveling troupe. Whoops.

Halleck’s friends in the police and local judiciary quickly fix matters, and he gets off without so much as a warning, until the leader of the Gypsies, Tadzu Lempke, puts an ominous curse on Billy: “Thinner”.

Billy begins rapidly shedding weight, and then more rapidly, uncontrollably, and is forced to seek out and confront Tadzu in an attempt to save his life.

Thinner‘s a pretty great movie, really. I wasn’t expecting that back when I originally purchased it. The performances are solid, the directing is low key, and the special effects work, especially regarding Halleck’s dramatic transformation over the course of the film.. is amazing. And very, very believable too. You could bill Thinner and The Machinist as a double billing in Dramatic Weight Loss Theatre, though after sitting through both I think everyone in your audience would be ill.

The acting, as I said, is pretty good here. Mantegna even gets to put an interesting spin on his mobster du jour; Ritchie is a very likable murderer, a man who’s good at his job and takes pride in his work, and is extremely loyal to his friends. It’s not often that a Mafia killer is the most sympathetic character in a film (outside of the Goodfellas-Casino-Godfather constellation of movies).

There are lots of nice little touches in the movie, twists on what the movie itself references (gypsy curses) as something of a cliche storyline. Halleck’s an interesting figure, a loving father but also a selfish and vindictive individual, and half the time you’re not sure whether to root for or against him. I usually like that kind of moral ambiguity in my movies, and Thinner is no exception.

Thinner‘s quite short, coming in at just about 90 minutes, and it’s a solid picture, so if you have a spare evening and want some straight horror without the silly splatter and buckets of blood, by all means, give it a try.

Next Week: Night Flier
Last Week: Delores Claiborne with Kathy Bates and a lot of blue