Sunday, April 2, 2017
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Ghost in the Shell (2017):
I’m a
harsh critic when it comes to remakes, especially when I love the original
work.
Unless the remake/reimagining has something that adds to it, making it
exceptional, I’m a purist to the source material.
I’ve
been a fan of Mamoru Oshii’s original Ghost in the Shell ever since I saw it
on its release in 1995.
In
2008, he revamped and improved upon the movie with new CGI and released it
again as Ghost in the Shell 2.0.
I
recommend anyone who appreciates intelligent science fiction stories,
especially those, like Blade Runner,
that focus on the clash between humans and A.I., to watch Ghost in the Shell 2.0.
For me,
the bar was set very high with Rupert Sanders’ live-action version of Ghost in the Shell.
I was pleasantly
surprised: I love it!
The original story has been tweaked and characters have
been expanded upon, but it’s a minor difference.
This is a faithful retelling,
with improvements to character and plot development, an excellent soundtrack,
and brilliant effects.
Many of the visuals were shot-for-shot for the original
Manga version.
I’ll
happily add this one to my movie collection.
I’ll be
posting a more in-depth blog on both the anime and live-action versions of Ghost in the Shell at a later date.
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Shining Alternative Endings Revealed:
Tony Sokol
News
March 31, 2017
Stanley
Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining had almost as many multiple endings as
the Overlook Hotel had ghosts.
Stanley
Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted hotel story The Shining is a classic horror
movie in spite of the director’s intent. The author is on record as saying he
was more than merely disappointed in the liberties the filmmaker made. One of
those variants was perpetuated to avoid a cinematic cliché, the ending. Jan
Harlan, who executive produced the film, and novelist Diane Johnson, who wrote
the screenplay with Kubrick, gave up the ghost about some of the different
original endings that Kubrick considered for The Shining.
King’s
novel ends with Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in the film, trapped
inside the Overlook Hotel as it was devoured by flames. His wife Wendy (Shelley
Duvall in the film), his psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd in the film), and the
psychic Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers in the film) all survive the night. In
the 1980 movie Jack whacks Dick with an axe and freezes to death in the
Overlook Hotel’s wooded labyrinth. The hotel is left standing.
“The
ending was changed almost entirely because Kubrick found it a cliché to just
blow everything up,” Diane Johnson told Entertainment Weekly. “He thought there
might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more
interesting.”
“Danny’s
relationship with his father was the thing that most interested Kubrick,” Jan
Harlan told EW. “He was emotionally involved with the point of view of a
little boy who is afraid of his father. I remember Kubrick saying that visually
he could imagine a small yellow chalk outline on the floor like that they put
around the bodies of victims. And Kubrick liked that image. But he was too
tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do.”
Johnson
explained that there were versions of the screenplay where Wendy killed Jack in
self-defense, and where Jack killed Danny.
“In the
book, nobody gets killed except Jack,” Johnson told EW. “And Kubrick really
thought somebody should get killed — because it was a horror movie. So we
weighed the dramatic possibilities of killing off various characters and did different
treatments. We actually talked it over in detail the possibility of having
different people getting killed.”
In
spite of the slaughter of innocent victims, the director didn’t want to leave
audiences on a cute and cuddly note.
“The
maze chase grew out of the topiary animal hedges that move around in the book,”
said Johnson. “Kubrick thought topiary animals might be too goofy and
cute, but he always liked the idea of a maze. Kubrick didn’t want it to be too
gory, he thought a lot of blood was vulgar. He wanted it to be mostly
psychological. Of course, there’s the image of the blood coming out of the
elevators, but that was more ornamental and metaphorical. So there was some
discussion about trying to find a way of ending it without a lot of blood.”
Kubrick
didn’t necessarily envision the movie as a genre picture.
“Stanley
was fundamentally not interested in a horror film,” said Harlan. “He doesn’t
believe in ghosts. When the book was offered to him by Warner Bros., he said,
‘Well, all right, it might be challenging to do this, but I must have the
freedom to change whatever I like.’ Stephen King was perfectly happy with that
[at the time], it’s obviously a prerequisite to making a film. And Stanley
certainly changed it drastically.”
One of
the treatments saw Hallorann get possessed by the Overlook Hotel as in a
different twisted ending.
“We
always had the powers of the hotel in mind,” Johnson said. “So the hotel would
have been warping Hallorann’s mind for quite a long time. It was an attractive
idea that Hallorran is good [throughout the film] then he gets there and is
possessed by the hotel into a monster surrogate for Jack.”
Johnson
and Harlan told EW about the deleted and destroyed hospital scene which spiked
the ball and confused audiences at early screenings in New York and Los
Angeles.
“The
tennis ball is the same thing as the photograph — it’s unexplainable,” said
Harlan. “It makes Ullman now another ghost element. Was he the ghost from the
very beginning? The film is complex enough because nothing is explained. That
non-explaining is what was bad for the film initially.”
“The
fact they were left puzzled was exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted. And when
the film [screened for critics] and wasn’t well received, Warners quite rightly
suggested, ‘It’s enough, just take [the hospital scene] out.’ So Stanley did
it. He’s not stubborn, especially since this is a film mainly to entertain
people. But Stanley was actually very sad that he misread the audience, that he
trusted the audience to live with puzzles and no answers, and that they didn’t
like it.”
As to
the puzzling coda to the film, the photograph showing a smiling Jack standing
at the forefront of a Fourth of July ball in the hotel’s Colorado Lounge in
1921.
“The
photograph was always in the ending,” said Johnson.
Monday, March 27, 2017
Forty years after its release, Stephen King's novel 'The Shining' still elicits frightening memories:
The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park,
Colo., was the inspiration for Stephen King's "The Shining." King
stayed in the hotel on the final day it was open before closing for the winter.
King wandered the empty hallways and he and his wife were the only ones in the
dining room at dinner. "By the time I went to bed that night, I had the
whole book in my mind," King later said. (Trine Tsouderos/Chicago
Tribune/MCT)
Photo
by Trine Tsouderos
-----------------------------------------
by Shawn Ryan
in Life Entertainment
Times Free Press
January 27, 2017
When
Chris Dortch was an adolescent, he snuck a copy of Stephen King's "The
Shining" into the house.
"Stephen
King was someone that my parents didn't really police for me," he says.
A bit
more investigating might have been in order.
"I
read it when I was about 12 years old and absolutely terrified myself,"
Dortch says happily.
He took
that terror and turned it into a lifelong love of horror in all forms — books,
movies, TV.
"That
book meant a lot to me," says Dortch, director of the Chattanooga Film
Festival and founder and programmer for the Mise En Scenesters film club.
"I'm a sucker for a good ghost story, and it's one of the books that put
those hooks in me. It sent me down a major rabbit hole."
On
Saturday, "The Shining" (novel, not film) turns 40 years old. When it
came out in 1977, King was in the process of building the name that would
become internationally synonymous with horror. It was his third book after the
telekinetic teen in "Carrie" and the vampires of "Salem's
Lot."
"What
stood out to me about 'The Shining' was that it was a work that had so many
levels so much going on," says Robert R. McCammon, a compatriot of King's
who has written 22 novels, including such critically acclaimed books as
"Boy's Life," "Swan Song," "They Thirst" and
"Speaks the Nightbird."
"I
think that right off the bat after reading it I thought it was truly a great
piece of literature," he says. "I know that King's work has been
described by some critics as being 'pop' for the masses and, while I don't
think there's anything wrong with writing a book that everyone might like to
read, I certainly disagree with that assessment of 'The Shining,' which I
believe is a deep book about the nature of evil that stands out as a 'shining'
example of what true literature is a book that can be appreciated on many
levels.
"There
are so many 'small' moments in the book that add up to the larger picture of
evil," McCammon says.
King,
dealing with his own drinking problems when he was writing "The
Shining," used his personal issues as elements in the plot, which focuses
on a family of three — father, mother, young son — who are caretakers and the
only people in a huge, isolated hotel in the middle of the Colorado winter. The
hotel, however, has its own designs on the family, or is it all in the head of
the alcoholic father?
"Sometimes
you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the
reasons why you make up the story," King said in "The Stephen King
Companion." "When I wrote 'The Shining,' for instance, the
protagonist of 'The Shining' is a man who has broken his son's arm, who has a
history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two
children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward
my children. 'Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed?'"
Local
attorney Tracy Culver doesn't remember being terrified when she read the novel
as a young adult, "but there are things in it that have stayed with me
throughout my life."
"I've
never looked at a hotel corridor the same way or, for that matter, a hotel
shower. It doesn't matter whether it's a low-end hotel or high-end hotel; when
I first go into the bathroom, there's always that moment of ," says
Culver, a collector of Stephen King first editions who figures she has about
30.
Jen
Litton recalls reading "The Shining" when she was about 24 and found
it "more intense than scary."
"It
makes you look differently at hotels, but it didn't make me lose sleep at
night," says Litton, director of operations and trading with the Patten
Group.
Still,
she recognizes its standing in the world of horror.
"I
definitely think it kind of set the course for the horror genre in this kind of
supernatural or internal struggle motif," she says. "It upset the
balance between reality and fiction in what could really happen inside
someone's mind,"
"It's
so rich with imagery and internal conflict and different interactions, it goes
beyond just beyond a scary book."
The
book was turned into a film in 1980, helmed by world-famous director Stanley
Kubrick. But it raised serious hackles in the King universe. Some said it was
masterpiece of horror while others, many of whom had read the book, trashed it,
complaining that it downplayed the supernatural elements of the book in favor of
the psychological. Right after it was released, King said he hated it but later
softened that stance.
Nathan
Bounds of Cleveland says "the book did a much better job of getting inside
the main character's head, which isn't surprising, since that's one of the
central advantages a book has over a movie.
"It
made you feel his hangovers, his addiction, his obsession, his slow loss of the
ability to distinguish reality from illusion," says Bounds, a recent
graduate of Chattanooga State Community College. "The scares were less
blunt, less dependent on surprise, more creeping and subtle.
"It's
definitely worth the read, and now I'm thinking I'm going to reread it
myself."
Daniel
Griffith has read "The Shining," but "it's been a long
time."
A local
documentary filmmaker, film preservationist and owner of Ballyhoo Pictures
which focuses on, as its web page says, "Making Movies about the Making of
Movies," Griffith agrees that fans of book tend to "kind of disregard
the Stanley Kubrick film because it added an element to the story that explored
something much more psychological than supernatural." For his part,
though, he thinks that decision made the film more interesting.
But for
Dortch, it all comes back to the novel's scares. Reading "The
Shining" compelled him to read Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of
Hill House" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," among many
others.
"I
read everything I could get my hands on," he says, but King remains at the
top of his personal list.
"There
isn't a day when I don't reference him. I referenced 'Cujo' just this
morning."
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