Dreamcatcher

[altariel]

Fantastically scathing review of Dreamcatcher in Thursday's Evening Standard, reproduced here for your reading pleasure (spoilers, obviously). Thanks to Steve for scanning it and sending it over to me.



Stephen King hits rock bottom

"No way is there going to be a worse film than Dreamcatcher this side of midsummer. It's as if Stephen King - for he is the origin of this stupefying SF horror - sold off a job lot of plots that he couldn't fit rationally together, and William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, respectively screenwriter and director (may God forgive them), hammered them into the shapeless, incoherent, bloody awful swill they have brazenly put their names to.

Look herein, if you have money to waste before the video trap closes on it, and you will see: a) a going-nowhere plot about four buddies who have befriended a feeble-minded kid and been endowed with telepathic powers; b) a stranger who stumbles flatulently into their holiday cabin in the woods and almost immediately gives birth to a many-toothed homicidal worm out of his arse while sitting on the loo; c) a mad American general (I shall show him no mercy, but name Morgan Freeman) who goes rogue, hijacks a helicopter and starts shooting up his own men sent to cordon off the mutation invasion of fanged turds.

None of this crap makes even as much superficial sense as my brilliant precise suggests. It is worse than an incompetent fiasco: it as a contemptuous one, too.

The public will stand anything, is the message, if the right names are connected with it and a bundle of praiseworthy opinions culled from the quote-whores of the printed media.

I don't think I have exposed myself to that risk."



Can't wait to see it.

Comments

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

Fantastic! That's a must.

Re:

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it sound amazing? I read the book and enjoyed the first half, but it suffered from the usual SK novel problem, i.e. the editor should have taken out a third of it, rather than keeping as much text as possible in order to slap an extra two dollars on the price.

Re:

[altariel.livejournal.com]

He's *definitely* a much better short story and novella writer - even recently he's done things like 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon', and the longer novella in 'Hearts in Atlantis'.

But he can't sustain the long books any more, there's not enough stuff. Which I think he could do once - 'The Stand' is my favourite of his books.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

annamilton said:

Gone are the heights of Carrie and Misery and The Shining, alas, alas.

Altariel, Misery is all you need to know about the life of the prowriter--you're at the mercy of the violently insane, and as you go along, more and more of the keys of your typewriter pack in.

Seriously, I often think about "Can you, Paulie?" (the disquisition about what is or isn't a legitimate story development).

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Misery is all you need to know about the life of the prowriter--you're at the mercy of the violently insane, and as you go along, more and more of the keys of your typewriter pack in.

Sounds very much like the PhD process.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

As one of the traveling showmen in "Huckleberry Finn" said: "Positively no ladies nor children admitted...if that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansaw."