Doctor Sleep. (15.)
Directed by Mike Flanagan.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Kyliegh Curran, Rebecca Ferguson, Cliff Curtis, Emily Alyn Lind and Zahn McClarnon. 152 mins.
In preparation for seeing this, I thought I should show my wife The Shining so she would understand who was who and what was what in this adaptation of Stephen King's follow up novel. After the less than an hour she was begging me to turn it off because it was so scary; indeed so scary said she didn't want to see this, even though her beloved Ewan McGregor was in it. Don't worry, I reassured her, this is based on the Stephen King novel; it isn't going to be scary at all. Sure enough, an hour into this she turned to me making an exaggerated yawning face.
The book Doctor Sleep is part of Stephen King's campaign to reclaim The Shining from Stanley Kubrick. He hated the film version because it wasn't true to his book and went so far as to make his own faithful TV mini-series version before publishing the 2013 novel, catching up with young Danny as an adult. In approaching this film adaptation writer/ director Flanagan (Oculus; TV's The Haunting Of Hill House) has sought to reach an accommodation between King and Kubrick. He's trying to do right by one of the great genre writers of all time but the yellow poster for the film - MacGregor in the Jack Nicholson pose, looking through the gaping axe wound – is an admission that the film is the main lure for audiences.
So it's a tug of war between King and Kubrick, which King wins by a margin of two to one. The book takes up the first two-thirds of the film before its characters are transplanted into a sequel to the film. As a movie, Doctor Sleep is a jolly good read. Watching the film introduces you to Danny (McGregor) now a recovering alcoholic working in a hospice, a young girl (Curran) who has enormous psychic abilities and a travelling group of shining vampires, led by Ferguson, who cheat death by feasting on "steam," the psychic abilities of shiners, you can imagine the rapid turning of pages during tedious commutes.
On screen though it is a long dull film of a long King novel. The acting is good enough and it tries to be earnest and honourable but like most King adaptations, it can't work a way around the problem that King doesn't often write about things that translate visually to the screen, particularly here where the plot revolves around ESP and psychic abilities. There was a time when the conventional wisdom was King's book didn't translate well to the big screen, and it's still true. Apart from the Shining and Carrie, Shawshank and The Green Mile, Stand By Me and The Mist, Misery and The Dead Zone, what has Stephen King ever done for the movies?
The parts where the film recreates Kubrick's film are the most fun, though nowhere near as much fun as the scenes where Spielberg did it in Ready Player One. The fun is probably because they feel transgressive, that these new characters and performers are trespassing on hallowed ground. The Overlook Hotel is arguably the most effective set ever used in cinema; almost everything people love about the film is down to the spaces, and the manipulation of performers within that space.
Its closest antecedent is 2010, a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey made in the 80s adapted from Arthur C Clark's follow up novel. The result was the same as this: a plodding but perfectly respectable book adaptation that was a totally inadequate sequel to the Kubrick film.
Directed by Mike Flanagan.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Kyliegh Curran, Rebecca Ferguson, Cliff Curtis, Emily Alyn Lind and Zahn McClarnon. 152 mins.
In preparation for seeing this, I thought I should show my wife The Shining so she would understand who was who and what was what in this adaptation of Stephen King's follow up novel. After the less than an hour she was begging me to turn it off because it was so scary; indeed so scary said she didn't want to see this, even though her beloved Ewan McGregor was in it. Don't worry, I reassured her, this is based on the Stephen King novel; it isn't going to be scary at all. Sure enough, an hour into this she turned to me making an exaggerated yawning face.
The book Doctor Sleep is part of Stephen King's campaign to reclaim The Shining from Stanley Kubrick. He hated the film version because it wasn't true to his book and went so far as to make his own faithful TV mini-series version before publishing the 2013 novel, catching up with young Danny as an adult. In approaching this film adaptation writer/ director Flanagan (Oculus; TV's The Haunting Of Hill House) has sought to reach an accommodation between King and Kubrick. He's trying to do right by one of the great genre writers of all time but the yellow poster for the film - MacGregor in the Jack Nicholson pose, looking through the gaping axe wound – is an admission that the film is the main lure for audiences.
So it's a tug of war between King and Kubrick, which King wins by a margin of two to one. The book takes up the first two-thirds of the film before its characters are transplanted into a sequel to the film. As a movie, Doctor Sleep is a jolly good read. Watching the film introduces you to Danny (McGregor) now a recovering alcoholic working in a hospice, a young girl (Curran) who has enormous psychic abilities and a travelling group of shining vampires, led by Ferguson, who cheat death by feasting on "steam," the psychic abilities of shiners, you can imagine the rapid turning of pages during tedious commutes.
On screen though it is a long dull film of a long King novel. The acting is good enough and it tries to be earnest and honourable but like most King adaptations, it can't work a way around the problem that King doesn't often write about things that translate visually to the screen, particularly here where the plot revolves around ESP and psychic abilities. There was a time when the conventional wisdom was King's book didn't translate well to the big screen, and it's still true. Apart from the Shining and Carrie, Shawshank and The Green Mile, Stand By Me and The Mist, Misery and The Dead Zone, what has Stephen King ever done for the movies?
The parts where the film recreates Kubrick's film are the most fun, though nowhere near as much fun as the scenes where Spielberg did it in Ready Player One. The fun is probably because they feel transgressive, that these new characters and performers are trespassing on hallowed ground. The Overlook Hotel is arguably the most effective set ever used in cinema; almost everything people love about the film is down to the spaces, and the manipulation of performers within that space.
Its closest antecedent is 2010, a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey made in the 80s adapted from Arthur C Clark's follow up novel. The result was the same as this: a plodding but perfectly respectable book adaptation that was a totally inadequate sequel to the Kubrick film.
