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Masterclass.com slash Big Picture. I'm Sean Fennissi and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Stephen King. I'm joined today by Adam Naim and Ringer contributor. Hello Adam.
Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well. Adam is coming to us from Toronto where he will be covering the Toronto International Film Festival for the Ringer. We're going to talk about our top five favorite Stephen King movie adaptations in just a minute because it, Chapter 2, is nearly upon us.
But before that, I just wanted to talk to Adam about what's going to be happening in Toronto. I just came back from Telluride. Obviously Festival season is truly here. Adam, what are you looking forward to at the Toronto International Film Festival this year?
As this is the 21st year I think I'm covering it because I've been covering it since I was 19. I mean, I'm kind of looking forward to it ending. But when you're on the ground in Toronto, we see a lot of stuff very early. So today when I was on my way here to record, I saw all these people from out of town kind of showing up in Toronto and they're very excited and ready to get going.
But we've been watching stuff here for a while and we've also all had our eyes kind of on reports coming out of Telluride, including your tweets and what people are saying from Venice. So it doesn't feel like something's starting. It feels like, as you said, Festival season is already deeply, deeply underway. Adam, thank you for acknowledging my tweets.
I really appreciate that. That means the world to me. What's on your radar? What have you seen that you can sort of hint about that is most exciting?
You put waves on my radar, the tray, Shelton film. That was a really persuasive piece. It's not like I wasn't looking forward to seeing it, but I've now rearranged to want to watch it. You seem quite blown away by that.
I was and I have maybe some regrets about doing so because now I think invariably people will see it and be like, it's not that good. What are you doing? How could you do that? That's the trickiness with Festival coverage in general, right?
The minute that you get excited about something, you have to communicate that and then you tell people something is great. And then they insist upon telling you your opinion is not quite exactly what it should be. Which is why we're all bracing for Joker to be the start of the actual Second American Revolution with insurrection and panic in the streets. There's a certain hyperbole in Festival season that's like, I guess it's fun to instigate it, though I try not to.
It's kind of fun to read it, but it gets wearying in social media, it becomes such an echo chamber of that stuff. And I find that people tend to share that dumb takes way more generously than kind of the smart subtle ones. No question. So, you know, it becomes hard with a movie like Joker where it's not even a question of people saying whether it's bitter bad, they're sort of saying like, is this going to actually change the way that we watch movies and insight armed rebellion?
It just becomes like really tiring. But some of the ones that I'm looking forward to here are ones that already have a bit of a reputation which sound great. Like the safties on Cut Gems can't wait to see it. And I'm looking forward to know Bombak's marriage story.
One thing we've both seen that I'm going to write about in my first Tifte Dispatch, which is just excellent, is Parasite the Bong Junho film, the one the Palm Door at Cannes, which is really good stuff, I think. Brilliant. Played incredibly well. I didn't mention this on the podcast earlier this week, but I went to the third screening of that movie at Telluride, and it was a 9-an screening, and 600 people were turned away from that screening, which is just an extraordinary thing.
Once you've seen the movie and you know what the contents of it aren't just how warped and beautiful and strange it is, the energy around this movie is so fascinating and so great for Bong, right? Oh, it's great for Bong. And I think that without belaboring a parallel to these two movies, that might be worth talking about more later when more people have seen both of them. But in the same way that Alfonso Cuaron, I think, got a lot of credit for going back home and making a movie in his original cultural context with Roma, it's very interesting to see Bong do that, because Snowpiercer and Okcho were very credible English language, almost kind of hits.
Yes. And while Parasite, I think, has the best commercial prospects in North America of any of his Korean films so far, it's very much a Korean film. And it's made something like $85 million in South Korea already, too, which is a very, very sizable hit. I thought I would have read that it's the biggest hit in the country's history.
Is that overstating things? Yeah, I'd have to get a double check on that, but just off the top of my head, it sounds like a big amount of money. Like the top grossing films in South Korea can't approach China dollar for dollar, but it's a big amount of money. And when you consider that some of the audience that it's going to reach in North America is not just that kind of reading reviews, you know, our house audience, but maybe even something somewhat mainstream.
I think it could be a kind of a cross-over hit. And because you have American critics maybe on their way to Toronto listening, I just want to stump Superfast for two really good interesting Toronto films. One is called Anne at 13,000 feet by Kazik Rivinsky starring Derek Campbell, and one is called White Lie by Calvin Thomas and Yona Lewis starring Casey Roll. I think they're actually both going to get a fair amount of attention.
And I just wanted to say their names on the pod and I think that's about it. Okay, no other previews for Tiff then. Nothing that's not super negative and I don't want to be negative, so let's accentuate the positive. Have you already applied your Joker face paint?
I haven't applied my Joker face paint. I'm going to bring my security blanket to the screen in case I'm just too disturbed by the vision of Todd Phillips. A shocking and transgressive look at what's really wrong with incels. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But you know, I think that when you are a professor like this, I'm sure you've had this experience in Telly Rider, New York. When it is a movie like that, all those cliches and kind of boilerplate about the collective experience of watching. The communication movies are the communal experience of watching movies. They become very true.
It's not that they're all good or that they're all bad, but when there's a buzz for a movie, that's what I heard people saying about uncut gems and Telly Rider that it was just electric to just watch it. Yes, although there is the upside in the downside of that because it depended on what screening you were in. I spoke to some people who were working on the movie and you know, one night screening didn't go as well as one morning screening because there were a lot of old people at a night screening, a lot of young people at a morning screening. And so that also dictates similarly with waves.
If you see that movie before anyone else has, you don't know anything about it and you're blank and you're just ready to watch something. And then as soon as the moments of the movie start happening to you and you can hear everyone around you crying invariably, you are influenced by the experience. You know, you come into the different set of expectations. So that's the challenging part of the festival stuff too.
But I look forward to your coverage this weekend. I look forward to hearing about all the stuff I haven't seen yet as well. Should we make an odd transition to the world of Stephen King? I can't wait.
So tell me about your relationship to him as an author because you wrote a great piece on the site, sort of ranking his movies, but also I thought used it as kind of an excursion into what makes his work effective and how it translates to the screen. Were you a big reader of his novels as a young person? Yeah, I think I was. I mean, and I think that that's one of those things where you don't have to pigeonhole yourself in an age group to say that because he's been at it for a good long time.
Right. And you are a, if I think if you're a North American school kid or someone who's interested in pop culture across all kinds of different lines and demographics, you start reading, let's say as early as the early 80s or as late as as now, he's going to come up, right? Because he has this amazing reach and this amazing brand. And in some ways, the movies prop him up even more as a router because you're aware of titles and characters even before you've opened the book.
Right. So he's he's there. I don't think there's very many people who can say that he hasn't been there for them in their reading lives. Maybe they've rejected him or pushed him away, which is fine.
But he's not like hard to find or seek out. No, and it's funny. I guess I probably pulled him close and pushed him away over the years. I very specifically remember growing up with tattered copies of it and the stand and carry that my parents owned.
And that's probably why I picked those movies up because when you see a cover like the cover of it, the paperback, there's something alluring about that to a nine or 10 year old. And so inevitably it becomes a part of our life. I wonder if nine or 10 year olds have the same relationship to King. Do you have a sense of that?
Well, I was probably just based on remembering which of the living rooms I read it in terms of like moving around as a kid. I must have been 10 or 11 when I read Misery. And that was a. I don't want to say like a life changing read.
It's not what made me a writer nor did it turn me into like a psychopathic Annie Wilkes fan. But just there was so much writing in it about writing. And as you look through King's work and a lot of his four words are even a book like on writing, it's a subject that he's interested in like the alchemy and the magic and the craft of actually doing what he does. And I've always thought that there's a bit of a defensiveness in that because he had to read so many reviews saying that he sucked relative to how successful he was.
And the same year he won that National Book Award Commendation, he had Harold Bloom calling him immensely inadequate as a writer. So I think maybe King likes to talk about craft as a way to remind people that he's more than just a plot machine. But I thought what Misery had to say about writing and the difference between writing for yourself and writing for an audience and especially that amazing passage where Paul thinks about the difference between having an idea and trying to have an idea. It's one of those things that's just stuck with me for pretty much my whole life more than the gore or the scares or whatever else.
What about him as a subject to be adapted? You know, I was on a flight recently and I was trying to read Dr. Sleep and it was going fine. And I got a little bit bored and Dr.
Sleep, of course, is a sequel to the Shining. And then to pass the time, I just started listing the adaptations of his work and I came up with quite a few. I missed a couple, but then I back checked and obviously there have been a lot of future films and a lot of TV miniseries over the years. I think that it, Chapter 2 is the 80th adaptation of his work, which is just mind blowing.
How do you feel about the way that he has been interpreted over the years as an author? Because this goes back, I think, 76 and Carrie is the first one. I'm just imagining you reading these out loud to your seatmate. Yes, my poor wife who has to listen to me talk about the mangler.
I mean, I like the mangler. So one is that it's happened in real time, right? The amount of time between the publication of Carrie and DePaul Miss film adaptation is pretty short, you know, like some have taken longer than others, but he's been adapted largely in real time. It's not like there was 50 years of Stephen King readership and then they're like, how do we make a movie out of his stuff?
He's not being reclaimed from the mists of time. It's happening with a certain simultaneity that I think is interesting. He was also so commercially successful from the beginning that a certain caliber of filmmaker dealt with him at the start. I mean, I think you could argue maybe that no single author has had a bigger range of talented to untalented directors in North America, adapt him than King, right?
When you've been adapted by Kubrick and DePaulma, that's already like the top. And then there's a lot of hacky stuff, especially with the TV adaptations and some of the lesser films. But, you know, because the first few directors to make movies of his work were DePaulma and Toby Hooper and Kubrick and Carpenter, a certain baseline gets set, but then dictates, I think, a lot of future adaptations. And I also think that I tried to say this in my piece, like he's a plot machine and that works for movies, but he's also a writer of interiority and that's sometimes harder.
And that's generally what movies tend to cut out of the more epic books. The movie version of Misery is a great example where Paul's inner life is not really represented at all because it's hard to do that. Yeah, I think inevitably what happens is a lot of the sort of psychological or even intellectual meaning of his books, I think is erased when you see them on screen. What they become is they become pot boilers or they become scarefests.
And that's why that's a bigger reason why he has the reputation that he does. No, I don't think he's the world's most sophisticated writer of philosophical ideas, but his movies are often deeply thematic and about something. He seems to be questing towards something and I would in most of the work of his that I've read. And it's hard when you're translating that to make that work.
In some cases, like Carrie, you pull it off because you have a filmmaker who has a very distinct idea of how to and a distinct set of their own ideas coming to the text. And in other cases, you just kind of get a movie that is diverting or entertaining but doesn't really go beyond the surface. Well, he does something that's very hard to do in movies, which is he does this idea of an invisible world, right? And what's really scary is that you can't see what's existing simultaneous to you or parallel to you or underneath your experience, but you're really afraid that it's there.
And then often what will happen in his books is that world kind of becomes visible and then the pressure kind of goes completely out of the books. But they're really good at this idea that something is going on and it's proximate to you. You're almost inside of it without knowing it, which is very Lovecraftian. And I think that in the movies that have been made of this work, that's a very hard thing to visualize because you make it too literal.
You make it too immediate. You show it too much or you kind of show it too soon. You know, we'll get into our lists and talking about why certain movies work in certain ones don't. But to me, the one that works the best is the movie that has the sharpest, the firmest handle on that idea of things going on, even when you can't quite see them, even with the camera lens.
Okay, let's go into our top five. Now, I will say I suspect there will be significant crossover in our top fives here. I prefer when we have a little bit of variance, but because of what you said, which is that four or five of the greatest directors of all time have tackled his work and inevitably those are the people who made the best adaptations of his work, I think we'll have some significant crossover. But why don't you start with your number five?
Sure. And I should also say, I don't know if it'll come up in your top five, but I've already been pilloried online for a movie that didn't make it into my top five. I did write a couple of honorable mentions and maybe if they don't come up in our discussion, we can kind of go back to them because there's one in particular, I left off the top 10 that seemed to piss a lot of your readership off. I'll have a way to address that when we get into my top five.
Good, good, good. So number five, I'm going to guess this is one you don't have, but you might surprise me is Frank Daribon's adaptation of the mist. How do you folks hold up in the story? Big insurance date.
Sorry to hear that. So I actually have this as a tie with Shawshankate, my number five as well. So let's use this as an opportunity to talk about both of those things. Sure.
I mean, I think that to talk about the mist first, that it's really bold. This is really bold when a filmmaker doesn't just diverge from source material or take liberties from source material in a general way, but just completely and specifically rewrites the ending of something. And King's relationship to adaptations has been somewhat ambivalent over the years. He certainly made money off of them.
Sometimes he's collaborated, sometimes not. But he really praised what Frank Daribon did to the end of the mist. And I don't want to spoil the mist because I think it might be even a little undersea compared to some of the other movies on our list. But what Daribon did, I think, took an awful lot of guts, which is he took apocalyptic material and then paid that feeling off instead of pulling back from it.
And I'm not saying the spoiler of the movies that the world ends. I'm saying the spoiler of the movie is that in terms of characters and their relationships and the stuff that we were presented with in the foreground, he didn't pull back. I think it's an interesting comparison with something like Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which is terrifying and frightening and globally scaled and then in certain places, I think pulls back and holds back because Spielberg doesn't have the heart to go all the way with it. And I think Daribon did in this movie and it really elevates it because it's a good spooky creature feature before that.
And then in the home stretch, I think it just absolutely goes hard. I completely agree. So I rewatched the mist last night. I watched the black and white version, which I had never seen.
Have you seen that version? It's really wonderfully done. And I think it makes the movie in some ways more effective because I don't think that the CGI creature feature aspect of it is aging that well, but when you give it, that sort of Vincent Price-esque treatment, I think it becomes a little bit more appealing and a little less visually distracting. And I completely agree with what you said.
I think the fact that Daribon had the, you know, temerity to change the ending in the way that he did and also made it seem more consonant with the kind of story that King is trying to tell is a pretty awesome achievement. And the reason I have it tied with Shawshank is because obviously they're both Daribon films. And I think those movies show the two poles of King. Then you're here for life.
That's exactly what they take. I believe in two things. Disciplined. Help me, John!
In the final. Here you'll receive both. Shawshank is of course based on a shorter work. These are both shorter works.
And Shawshank is ultimately redemptive and posy for lack of a better phrase. You know, it's a very spiritually uplifting movie for a certain kind of person. There's a reason that for years and years it has been sort of voted the number one movie of all time on erroneous IMV lists. There are things about it, of course, that are incredibly saccharin or are uneven or don't quite capture the spirit of the original story.
But the movie has a kind of grandness and a kind of up with people feeling at its end that I love as a counterpoint to the mist, which is really a genuinely dark and cynical view of the way that people think of one another. I think it's not just in times of crisis, but in general. And so I love them. I love that those movies came from the same person, the same author and the same filmmaker.
Yeah, and I think they're a good comparison too because they're kind of both prison movies, right? Yes. And in the mist it's a makeshift prison. It's this supermarket that they've kind of barricaded themselves in Romero style, whereas Shawshank is about the prison industrial complex.
And a much earlier iteration of it, right? Because the way that jail is described and even just the justice system is described in the short story in the period. It's said, you wouldn't make the same movie and cast it the same way today. And Derabant did do something daring in the adaptation and that the character of Red is played by Morgan Freeman.
I mean, in the book, he's named Red because he's Irish in the movie. They turned that into a bit of a joke. It's a pretty good joke actually, where Freeman says probably because I'm Irish and gets a good laugh. You know, everything you've said about Shawshank and everything that people on message board say about Shawshank and people say in my mentions today about Shawshank sometimes in very hostile ways.
I don't disagree. I think enough people really love it and respond to it and are moved by at this point in my life. I don't have to be. Yeah, I think that makes sense.
When I was 13, I found it moving and I don't mean that in an insulting way, which is to say you could only be moved by it if you're 13. I just find that now in terms of how my taste is gone, I don't like a movie that feels like it's chewing my food for me. You know, you're not really given a lot of space to think or feel anything about what's going on. It's really made me be able to kind of filmmaking and it's effective.
I wouldn't call it an ineffective variation on that kind of filmmaking, but I just find it pushy and nudgy. I think that's what I said kind of saccharin and as well acted as it is by the end, I just don't really think they're playing people. I think they're playing as you were sort of suggesting these kind of uplifting emotions and it's I just don't like being worked over like that. One thing I thought about and it occurred to me when I was watching the mist is if Frank Darabont would make the same Shawshank if he were the 2007 version of himself that made the mist change for him in a way that he not just evolved as a filmmaker, but maybe even as a person and take a slightly different approach because if you look at the things that he does later in his career, he doesn't mist.
The Walking Dead is the sort of shepherd of the first season of that show. He works on the shield. He works on a show called Mob City. These are all kind of corrosive and skeptical and even cynical works.
So the idea of like a slightly more cynical Shawshank would have been an interesting experiment. No, that's a great point. And you know, because there was all this stuff this summer, including a piece I did on the site about 1994, right? Because it's the 25th anniversary.
I think you can make an interesting case for where Shawshank sits right in the middle between Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction in that year, right? Which is it is in some ways a harder edge and more brutal movie than Forrest Gump, but of course also more kind of conservative and audience pleasing than something like Pulp Fiction. And in a weird way, it's ended up as more of the populist favorite from that year than Forrest Gump has. That's a fascinating thing.
Because you mentioned it being on these IMDB lists and I actually think Shawshank's legacy is going to be one of the first movies to really prove the Internet's power. Because in the world of print media and analog criticism, it did nothing. And as soon as it became an online kind of phenomenon, it became beloved and kind of canonical. And I think that that's really fascinating.
At the risk of overstating things on behalf of my boss, I really do think that a lot of Bill's columns and writing and sort of personal obsessions with the movie were a factor there. You know, that he found a lot of like-minded people and that it's not a cult. It's much bigger than a cult. It is a mass beloved movie.
And it is a really interesting thing to unpack. I suspect that Bill, without spoiling anything, will be re-examined, Shawshank in some form or fashion on its 25th anniversary later this year. I was unfortunate that by leaving it off the top ten list, it's now just cancelled for everybody. No one can like it anymore.
Sorry, everybody. Cancel. What's your number four? My number four is Christine.
Her name is Christine. I like that. Yeah, so this is the one where I truly divert from you because this is a movie that has never worked for me. What did you like about Christine?
What I like about Christine, and I think what would actually make it an interesting movie to remake or release now, is how intuitively it kind of understands the link between being bullied and kind of wanting to bully or feeling like an outsider and then kind of growing into the worst kind of stereotypes that you might resent. Like, I sort of like the idea that the car makes him cool and in making him cool for a brief period. It just makes him a complete asshole. And I think that it's a nice inversion in a decade full of Revenge of the Nerd type movies.
I think Carpenter goes a little bleaker and a little harsher with it. I just think it's a really witty movie. I like the way that it uses sort of the nostalgia of the 50s in a weaponized way. It's sort of like an anti-American graffiti movie, a kind of anti-cool car culture movie.
And I think it's one of King's better stories. There was that famous family guy, Gigg, where they cut to Stephen King pitching his novel and he's talking about like, it's a scary lamp. You have to trust me. It's really scary.
And at a certain point with King, this idea of like sentient inhabited possessed objects is a little banal, but I like the killer car. I like the feminized possessive killer car. I like Keith Gordon's performance. I think he was cast because he played a similarly nerdy part in De Palma's Dressed Kill a couple of years earlier.
And I'm a noaturist, so I'm a carpenter fan. But I think of all the movies in my top five, I guess top four. It's the one that I think has the least solid overall consensus. And I'm not surprised to hear you say you're not a huge fan.
Well, I think that part of this is based on what we were discussing earlier too, which is I think it's when it gets to you. I didn't catch Christine until four or five years ago. And so by then I could kind of feel the 80s glaze on it. And the filmmaking style and the musical cues and the performances are very kind of trapped in amber and they have that feeling of something that we have.
The medium has just kind of evolved past. Maybe evolved is the wrong word, but it's just moved past. And so I couldn't get past feeling like it was a little bit stilted or even a little bit ridiculous because of what you're describing because of my knowledge of the family guy style bit about what King's thinks do. And I didn't read this story either.
So I came to it and I was like, hmm, this is actually one of my least favorite John Carpenter movies. And so maybe my expectations were a problem there. You mentioned my number four earlier is something that didn't work for you as well, but I had this youthful experience with Misery, which is the first time I saw Misery. I was quite young and was just completely overwhelmed by it and kind of shocked in the good way.
And I was like, I kind of didn't know you could do this in a movie. I didn't know you could make both characters so unlikable and both characters so vulnerable and both characters so sort of deranged and narcissistic in their way. And I was really shocked and moved by. I haven't seen Misery in a long time.
And I do recall Misery as an Oscar movie being a very meaningful moment and Kathy Bates and her being celebrated as something that seemed unusual to me at the time. But I want to revisit it soon because it just is one of those things where you have a sense memory of a feeling inside you of the first time you saw something and it being influential. And I was nine or ten years old when I saw the movie and it persists in a way that some of the movies don't. Well, I mentioned in trying to be fair to it because I gave it an honorable mention and I sort of said, surely not the movies fault necessarily.
Like it's a strong adaptation. Both leads are really good. I love the story that James Con was supposedly like the thirtieth pick for the part. I know it's not great.
I don't think it would have worked with a bigger, bigger star and that's not a disrespect to James Con who's not an obscure actor. He's an Oscar nominee and kind of an icon. But you imagine it with I don't know like Dustin Hoffman or Clint Eastwood or whoever and it would unbalance it. Can I read you the list of people who are off the part?
So this part was originally offered to William Hurt twice, then Kevin Klein, then Michael Douglas, then Harrison Ford, then Dustin Hoffman, then Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfus, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford. Warren Beaten was interested in the role but he wanted to turn him into a less passive character and then James Con came along. That's in Warren Beaten's contract writer, less passive at all times. But no, what I would just say about the movie is that this is one where again it's very subjective for me.
I just love the giant detailed swaths of the book that's not in it. And I don't think the movie is wrong to take it out because you can't spend half an hour on the plot of the King Solomon's Minds-type African adventure that he's resurrecting misery through. And you can't have these internal monologues where he's imagining a sportscaster narrating his trip through the house while she's gone. I just love that stuff.
And it's like a phantom limb for me watching the movie that it's not there. But is misery as a movie better than 90% of the King adaptations? I mean, absolutely it is and the Kathy Bates performance is spectacular. So I mean, I think it's a really fair movie to put in a top five.
I just miss what's in the book. One thing that I had not realized until I started reading about it was that this is the only movie based on a King novel to win an Oscar, which is kind of fascinating. Of any kind? Of any kind.
Really? Yeah, I mean, think about it. I mean, children of the corn swept the Oscar in 1983. If only in a just world.
If only in a just world. You know, I mean, you're probably right. Shawshank was 0 for 7 wasn't it was. Yeah, so that's a very strange thing.
What about number three for you? If the future were in your hands. The house is burning. Would you change it?
The house is burning. Would you change it? The number three is a movie very close to my pre-adolescent and adolescent heart, which is Dave Cronenberg's adaptation of the Dead Zone, which I don't know if it's on yours. It's not.
It's probably right on the outside. I think it's a showcase for the most haunting actual Christopher Walken performance and maybe it was made at the last possible moment before he became a self-parity, which isn't a criticism of Walken because he's also one of the actors he was entertaining as a self-parity. You know, but even in something like King of New York, five or six years later, he's doing a bit and in the Dead Zone, I don't think he is. I think he's incredibly moving as this guy who can see the future in these little bursts and then by the end can see the future in this giant apocalyptic vision and has to ask himself if he can act on that given all of his personal tragedy, can he act to prevent greater tragedy.
And it is also to use a formulation that I often frown on, but in this case, inescapable, it is a very interesting movie to rewatch in quote unquote age of Trump. Yes, I for a lot of reason. I agree with you. And I think to your point earlier about what we can see and cannot see while reading his novels and what we have to imagine versus what ends up going up on the screen when they're adapted.
This is an example where the supernatural aspect of the story is easy to communicate and it's part of the eariness is easier to hold onto and it makes the story work so much better. I think it's also not a mistake that this is produced by Deborah Hill who also produced Halloween because it has a similar kind of focused and unnerving and consistent quality throughout that non-totally adaptations have. No, and it's funny too because it tends to be an odd movie out when people talk about David Cronenberg because it's less obsessive and gory and sort of outrageous than the stuff he was making at the time. But where I see Cronenberg in this film, I see him very vividly is in the loneliness and the fragility of that main character.
Cronenberg's got so many movies about these kind of lonely warriors or these kind of lonely figures up against something bigger than them, but that's also inside of them at the same time. And I think that Walken is just truly heroically haunted. I know at the beginning of the film, it's not in the novel. I don't think he's a school teacher and he's telling his class the story of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman and I find even just his description of that has this feeling to it, this melancholy to it.
And that melancholy is a big part of King. It's something King's really good at. So I find Walken's performance pretty amazing and it pushes it high on my list. Let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor.
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So let's talk about Carrie. Yes. Please. It's the night of the senior prom.
The Bates High School gym is alive with excitement. Everybody is there. Even Carrie White. The girl no one likes.
Oh, sorry about this incident, Cassie. It's Carrie. I don't know if I've ever really had a Bryan DePalma conversation on this podcast. We've been doing it for almost three years and I don't know how DePalma has not come up.
But I'm looking forward to talking to you. One of maybe the greatest thinker about DePalma in my opinion. You wrote a piece earlier this year about his most recent film. He is someone who I think fascinates both of us as a stylist, as a disruptor, as a person who is ever interpreting the medium of film.
Carrie is, where does it stand for you amongst his films? Because I know it's in your top two for King Adaptations, but what about in his career? I think it's my personal favorite of his movies. There's one or two I might place above it for reasons of posterity, like blow out if I had to pick.
But I love Carrie. It's an amazing feat of adaptation. It takes a book that if you've ever read the book is really kind of weirdly jaggedly pieced together, almost as kind of a procedural. It's a very outside way of writing.
It just gets inside of Carrie completely. That's why it hurts so much to watch her hurt and why it's so cathartic to see her fight back and why it feels so complicit at the end when it goes too far. I can't name a movie that makes you want to see revenge happen more than this one. Tarantino wishes he could do that.
I think the other thing too that is a little bit underrated about T'Palma in general is his ability to provoke performance out of actors. You wrote about this in Sissy Space, it's just so unbelievable in this movie and so inside of that character and that part. It's the same thing that people do over and over again in his films, that Chino doesn't scarface, John Lithgow doesn't raise in Caine. He gets Michael Caine to do these things.
He gets John Travolta to do these things. He over and over again elicits these almost hysterical but also pitch perfect performances out of both big stars. It's so staggering to me and this is the best version of that. Absolutely.
With Space, she's completely transparent and at the same time the movie is the equivalent of the guy who made it leaning into your ear and going, see, look what I'm doing. It's very self-conscious. He turns suspense into this really sick joke. He draws out the pig's blood for so long and the whole thing is these variations on Psycho.
Not just that it's the Bates Motel but it starts with the shower scene except where can you go from Hitchcock's shower scene except you make it even more transgressive by having it be menstruation instead of someone being stabbed. The pig's blood bucket falling on her head is like Janet Lee, her in the bathtub at the end. People really mistake this stuff for derivative-ness and for copying. It's not.
It's taking the basic material of people's film-watching experience and taking it in a new direction and taking it further. I would argue too, this is deeply subjective. It's the movie with the best scare of all time. You mean that final moment?
Yeah, because of how well prepared it is and how well timed it is and just how horrible the idea of it is, the double horror of reaching out from beyond the grave and that it's a dream that's never going to end but also the loneliness of it. It's not reaching out to attack. It's just wanting someone to hold their hand and it's really painful. It also is a very specific kind of scare to me that I think is maybe not communicated enough.
My personal relationship with scary movies is I love to be startled and then laugh. When somebody really gets me, I find it personally amusing and that is maybe the all-time example of it's shocking in the instantaneous moment and then I find myself laughing out loud every time I watch it. And he also has a kind of knowingness because he's working so much inside movie history in all of his movies that those kinds of scares are their winks at the same time. Yeah, and I agree with that totally.
I think this is maybe more anecdotal but it's also the film of his, at least for me, that I've had the most interesting conversations with people about over the years, particularly with female viewers, particularly with people of different ages when they saw it for the first time. I have a friend who used to talk about being at the premiere of it the first night and when the moment happened at the end, like three people in a row next to him kind of passed out, like one after the other after the other because they were all just so shocked. So it's just been like a fun movie to talk to people about. So I treasure it very deeply.
If anyone's listening and hasn't seen it, you owe it to yourself. No question. My number two is stand by me. This is really a good time.
Bring something on your neck. Beep yeah. Oh my God. So it's a shocking to me as anybody else that I have two Frank Darabont movies and two Rob Reiner movies in my top five.
But I want to just say that the thing about top fives is these are not the top five greatest movies. These are my top five favorite Stephen King adaptations and much like my relationship to misery, I have a very similar relationship with Stand By Me, which is I saw at a very young age, probably the age of the characters that appear in the film. And it's the kind of movie that just shapes your understanding of adolescence. And I don't think it's nearly as well made as something like the dead zone.
And I don't think it's nearly even as sort of like charmingly transgressive as Children of the Corn. But it is a movie that I think can suffuse your experience of life. And I rewatched it again last night and I'll be perfect. I was a little bit bored.
But I did get a lot of sense memory about the feelings that it gave me when I was a kid. You know, that's why we were doing podcast about movies because we built relationships with this medium a long time ago and we're constantly evaluating how we feel about things today. So I just wanted to give a shout out to a movie that I'm really happy I've had in my life and put it where it belongs in the course of my life. And he's the same I knew thoughts.
I had it in my top 10 and I like it just very much for the same reasons you're saying not quite as much as the ones above it. But maybe the thought with it too coming out is to say that those movies are very much cousins or kind of twins in his body of work, right? That feeling of a different era of childhood, this kind of free, which the show Stranger Things just has shamelessly, you know, revoked, right? You know, you could say Stranger Things plays like a variation on Stand By Me or By It, but just this kind of like endless summer of bicycling around with your friends and seeing things at the adult world from a distance.
It's just that in Stand By Me, there's no malevolent supernatural force dogging them. It's just reality. And that's part of what makes it appealing. I think if you look at a lot of the movies on both of our lists, these actually are not the most supernatural experiences.
You know, these are the films that, you know, Stand By Me, there's of course a dead body that is very meaningful to the story, but that body, it's happening in the real world. It's understandable. It is. And it's one of those movies where I think a lot of the things that make Rob Reiner a good filmmaker because he had a really good run in the mid 80s.
He really did. If you look at, you know, Stand By Me and Spinal Tap and Princess Bride, he has a really graceful understanding of ensemble dynamics. He's really good at scenes where multiple people are kind of hanging out and talking and he gets funny bouncy effects from his actors and the four kids in Stand By Me are just above reproach. They're really good.
All of them. They're moving performances. And of course, there's extra melancholy attached to any time you watch a movie with River Phoenix. That's what I was just going to say.
It is a little bit crushing a lot of River Phoenix. That's such a young age in this movie. He's just so wonderful and hard to not think about the kinds of work that he would be doing right now. Oh, really.
So before we talk about our number one, which we share for obvious reasons, I wanted to just get a couple, maybe a one or two honorable mentions from you that are movies that you know not to be great works, but that you have a lot of things. I was surprised someone on Twitter this morning was giving me shit for liking the Running Man and I'm like, why not? The Running Man's great. It's not the book.
It's really dumb goofy movie. Any movie that created American gladiators by existing is a cultural honorable mention. I really like seeing all the wrestlers in it like Jesse Ventura and Tori Tanaka trying to take Arnold down. Richard Dawson's really good as the host.
The book's better. But I think it's a good cartoony late 80s action movie and I just can't really have a critical relationship with it. I used to watch it when I was home sick from school. I think it rules.
So I haven't read that book. Why is the book so significantly better? Because the book is way more of a kind of fugitive, most dangerous game scenario where he's out in the world. He's not really on a sound stage for most of it.
The movie is much more of a like you are in a carnival-esque battlefield show and the audience is sitting here. I mean, in the movie, it's like a manhunt through different cities and locations. And the main character is also this tiny, scrawny, tubercular kind of nobody. And that happened a lot in the late 80s.
If you've ever read Total Recall, the main character in the Philip K. Dick story is not looking like Arnold either. So as soon as you catch Schwarzenegger, you change what kind of movie you're making. And I like the kind of movie that running man is even if I can't really say it's like a very good movie.
That's interesting. I wanted to just give a shout out to the ABC miniseries adaptation of The Stand. Now, you wrote about Salem's lot very persuasively, which was also a TV miniseries. And I think it's quite good.
That was made by Toby Hooper. And you mentioned one of the all-time great scavers in the history of adaptations that happens in that movie. And I think that for the most part, the TV miniseries adaptations of King Works are kind of bad. Some of them have a nostalgia appeal.
And I think the it miniseries in particular is wedged in the psyches of a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons why the movies have been so successful in recent years. But The Stand is not necessarily a great piece of filmmaking or even a great piece of storytelling. But I certainly recall being kind of blown away by its darkness, by its sheer desire to indicate the evil inside the world.
It's such a severe and apocalyptic story. I really want to see somebody who is a true artist adapted at some point, and it's been rumored for years and years. And the most we have is this sort of six-hour miniseries that has some kind of preposterous performances. But what do you have?
You read the book The Stand? Oh, yeah. And that's kind of his, I don't know, I'm saying something I probably regret. But that's kind of his blood meridian, right?
It's like this is as harsh and as dark and as it's not stripped down. You can't call a book that's a thousand pages long stripped down. But it's pretty elemental. And it really could work in a tremendously, I don't know, indulgent grotesque R-rated movie version.
I have fond memories of the miniseries too, just because when the age I was at when we watched, I think we're around the same age. It felt like something I shouldn't be allowed to watch, just because of how harsh it was. Exactly how I felt. But yeah, I don't think it's particularly great as filmmaking.
And this is another cliche and it tends to get thrown around with more avant-garde authors than Stephen King. But it's just true that some works have a somewhat unfilvable quality to them. And there is something with the scale of The Stand that I think is pretty daunting. And that's why I think The Mist got a bit of that.
Yes, I agree. And I think the Randall Flag figure is very powerful and kind of pops up over and over again in the King mythology. And one of the things I thought that Castle Rock, the TV, Squaz Eye adaptation of his work, failed to do was to sync up all the characters in a way that was satisfying to me, because there are these people who sort of recur over and over again. Also speaking of The Mist, I watched for the first time Needful Things last week.
And that is not a great movie, but it features a hilarious Max on CD out performance as a similar embodiment of evil. He's great. I actually kind of like Needful Things. And that's also a pretty nihilistically bleak movie.
It is. I just want to stump quickly for the best Stephen King movie that has not actually a Stephen King adaptation, which is in the mouth of madness. Which is a great satire of King and his relationship to Lovecraft. And I think it's just funny because every so often you will come across someone online who has mistaken it for an actual King adaptation, which is a credit to how good its satire is.
Do we know what King thinks of that movie? I've never looked. Nobody thinks of most movies because I tend to try and find out. I don't know what he ever said about in the mouth of madness.
I hope that he was, I hope he enjoyed it. There's a great line where you find out that Sutter King, the Jurgen Prochnau character based on King, actually have a character say he outsells Stephen King two to one. So I like that it's not just that he's a replacement for Stephen King. Like he exists in a world where King exists.
And it's such a bizarre experience to be sort of... Yeah, Parodied and admired at the same time. It's such a... But we both know that King's feelings about his movies can sometimes be pretty tender, which I think we're going to have to talk about now, basically.
That is a very elegant transition. Thank you for the segue to our dual number one, which is of course the Shining Stanley Kubrick's Out Now masterpiece. Huh? Yeah?
They really will go in and out of town for the adventure. Sure. Yeah. I guess so.
What's your relationship to the Shining now? What's your relationship to the Shining now? Has an adult man living in 2019? It's still the movie that I think I've watched the most times.
It's the movie I think has inspired the best movie about any other movie I've ever seen, which is Ron the Asher's Room 237, which is a movie that I think in lieu of almost an argument for the Shining. I would just tell people to watch because it kind of makes that argument for all the things that are great about the Shining, including how little it seems to have to do with the novel. But it's just one of those movies that on a molecular level is just in my... It's just in my being.
It's when I... It's the age I was when I saw it and the kind of people I saw it with. It's a movie that my mom always loved. It's a movie that when I was in high school, I thought it would be fun to try to show the girls if they came over to watch a movie.
It's a movie that I have great fondness showing to people for the first time. It's a big one for me. I can't think of 10 movies that mean more to me in my life, so it's not a tossed off choice. Isn't it amazing how it doesn't expire either?
We talk a lot about rewatchability here at the Ringer, but man, it is so easy to return to and to either have fun with or to analyze. You can kind of have that dual relationship to it, where if you want to let it be wallpaper or let it be candy, it can be that, or if you want to let it be something textual and deep that you're focused on it can also be that. So few movies have that dual purpose. Yeah, and it's built right into the narrative, the idea that if you spend too long in a boring place with nothing to look at, but the walls you start hallucinating.
That's kind of the mechanism of the movie, but it's also the way that Kubrick's made it, which is you are watching the wallpaper partially because there doesn't always seem to be something going on in the foreground. He takes so many things about the novel and just pulls them out in the most poetic way possible. It's spacious, but it's claustrophobic. It's nightmarish, but it's all shot during the day.
It's about darkness, but it's a very bright movie. And he also plays havoc with the way the narrative works. It's unbelievably unfaithful, which is one of the reasons I think that King hated it, and he's within his rights to hate it, but I see what Kubrick did. It's not that he improved it, but he certainly made it his.
And if you notice we were reading Dr. Sleep, I laughed out loud on the first page where it's like, Danny remembered going into Room 217 and I'm like, who are you kidding? It's Room 237 now. I'm sorry.
It's not a fair thing to say to Stephen King, but that's the breaks. So one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast with you is because we're not just in front of it, Chapter 2, but we're in front of what is truly Stephen King's boom time. There are a lot of adaptations that are either coming very soon or in the works, one of which is Mike Flining and Dr. Sleep.
I don't know what you think of Flining, and I'm unemired of a lot of stuff that he's done. I've stubbed on him on the site. I think he's excellent. Yeah, he's a good filmmaker, and he actually has made, I think, one of the better recent King adaptations in Gerald's game a couple of years ago.
And Dr. Sleep feels like it's going to be a tough thing to pull off because, you know, and I was talking to a friend of mine at Telly Right About This this weekend. This movie has to both satisfy King fanatics and, you know, people who've read Dr. Sleep and also satisfy the Shining fans.
And I'm not sure that that's truly possible. And this movie's coming out really soon. Do you sense that there will be a difficulty in adapting a book like this that has such an openly hostile relationship to the film? Yeah, I mean, I was amazed looking at the trailer and trying to reconcile the fact that from what I can tell, and again, I have no industry insider info, but it seems King is down with this, but the aesthetic of the flashbacks at least, like it's like the ready player one recreation of the overlook.
And so it really is kind of coming at it from two angles at once. And maybe there's going to be a fascinating tension in that that, you know, this is like a King novel and King approved and Flanagan's a King approved guy, but given his own taste and just given just, you know, the visual language of our culture, he's, he's still drawing on the movie. So it's going to be compelling to watch. I think some of Haunting of Hill House had a kuberickian patience and, you know, trusted in duration to, I wouldn't say it was copying the Shining, but it had some of the same dynamics playing in it.
So maybe that's exciting. Yeah, you know, that was the first Flanagan thing that really didn't work for me. So it's funny that you say that. Maybe that was just because it's sheer length and it's, it's, I thought it had a kind of ponderousness that most of his movies don't have, you know, we're also getting another same one's lots of, and I wonder if the era that we're about to enter with the onset of its massive success is more remake time than new adaptation time.
You know, we've seen remakes of Carrie, we've seen remakes of a couple of the classics, but like, are we so far from a misery remake or a standby me remake? Well, I mean, this is, this all this ties back to the thing that always becomes a larger conversation. It often is for you in this podcast with other subjects. I mean, that in a good way, which is just that we are in this era of, you know, how much mileage can you get out of a single piece of IP, right?
And also, you know, who's nostalgia are you stroking? Like this year was fascinating. I wrote about it for the site, the remake of Pet Sematary, which is a remake of a movie that's barely 30 years old. And, you know, it did not need to be remade.
It was a wonderful movie. Yeah, I like the original Pet Sematary. I didn't much like the new one, though. I think those directors are pretty talented.
But, you know, you have like 30 years. Is that long enough ago to really say, you know, it's time to to recover this territory? I think that those windows, as you suggest, might kind of start shrinking as we start looking at things from the age of the world. Like literally old movies, which is a crazy thing to think about that your childhood is now the era of old films.
But the shining, I think, in line with what it's also about thematically, and this is a cliche too, but it's true. It's genuinely timeless. One last question for you, Adam, before I let you go off into the World of the Toronto International Film Festival, as many great Stephen King adaptations as there are. There certainly are a lot of bad ones.
What do you think is the worst movie that's ever been made of? Stephen King book? I got to say maximum overdrive. Oh, good.
Okay. So I was hoping we would get a chance to talk about this. Why do you say that? Because it's just really bad.
It's just one of those unfortunate things where the nature of the threat and the special effects technology of the time resulted in something. I don't know. I don't know. There's like this mid 80s cycle of like truck, core horror movies, you know, like dual in the hitcher and stuff.
And maximum overdrive just doesn't just just just never did it for me. I also think my favorite good bad one. If my mom ever listens to this, she'll like them. Showing it out is the TV movie of the Langoliers.
Oh, yeah. Terrible facts on that. The carnivorous flying meatballs. Oh, my God.
Pretty, pretty bad. And you? Well, it's funny that you say maximum overdrive because that's the only movie that has been written and directed by Stephen King. And boy, it really doesn't work.
My pick is Dreamcatcher. And oh, yeah. So let's talk about Dreamcatcher. I mean, Dreamcatcher is really one of the more underrated mega flop failures of the 20th century, 21st century.
This is a movie that is written by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. And here are the stars, some of the Morgan Freeman, Thomas James, Jason Lee, Damien Lewis, Timothy Olafont. So a really great cast, arguably the greatest American screenwriter of all time. Lawrence Kasdan, who's made literally a 10 charming, interesting, sometimes even great films.
And this movie is kind of a piece of shit. It's really stupid and gross. And I can't fit a life of me figure out what was appealing to any of the people who are really interested in this movie. I mean, I can't figure out what was appealing to any of the people participating in it.
I hadn't read this book, though. Did you have a Dreamcatcher relationship? Not a Dreamcatcher relationship, but a good anecdote. I'd actually blocked it from my mind because I should have chosen it as the worst one.
When I saw that, it was a special screening sometimes at the University of Toronto studios would do kind of sneak previews for the kids. And I was freelancing as like a 20 year old or 21 year old. And I actually asked the Warner Brothers, I think it was Warner Brothers, the rep, if the reels had been out of order. And she thought that I was being like a shitty trolling like student.
I was just like genuinely confused because there's this part in the film where all of a sudden, you've seen the movie, you know what the part I mean. All of a sudden, there's just like a hill with monsters on it being bombed by fighter planes. And you're watching it going, this was never set up. I've never seen these things before.
I didn't know the military was on this hill. What did I miss? Like what has been cut out of this movie? I mean, the book I've never read it, but it was written in a heavily medicated state.
You know, it was after he'd had this horrible accident. And maybe the movie communicates that better than we could have ever known. I guess so there is a kind of scatological panic in the movie that I think is the shit weasels. We're just like so absurd to imagine William Goldman trying to interpret the shit weasels.
You know, like Adam, this movie was shot by John Seale, you know, the English patient and Mad Max Fury Road. This is insane. And it has hanging around on the periphery like, you know, prime Morgan Freeman. Yes.
And it just it's it's insanely bad. If we ever do the unwatchables here at the ringer, we will have to have to put Dreamcatcher on that list. Yeah, good call. Any closing thoughts?
No, not at all. This was fun. I can't wait to look at Twitter and see now who wants to kill me because of the Shawshank Redemption. But you know, maybe they'll listen to this and they'll soften a bit.
I will stand this right. What's the line about Hope? Hope can keep a person alive? This is what I'm hoping.
Well, I'll be hoping for you as well. Adam, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you and have fun in Toronto. Yeah, thanks so much.
Thanks, of course, to Adam Naaman for coming and chatting about his favorite Stephen King movies. Please tune into the show next week where I will have an interview with the director of The H2F2, Andy Muschietti, returning guests. We'll also be talking about his movie a little bit. We'll also have some more Oscars talk when we get the first reflections on Toronto with Amanda Dobbins.
And then later in the week, we'll have a review of Hustlers, the absolutely delightful new Jennifer Lopez's Tripper drama, and an interview with the director of that movie, Laureen Scafarias. So stay tuned to the big picture. Thanks.