Dissecting the Flat Arc of The Shawshank Redemption

As is the case with countless institutions currently, these are strange times here at Tuesdays with Cory, and for lack of both theatergoing capability and streaming options that interest me, I suspect that I’ll spend the next few weeks (at least) doing deeper dives into some of my favorite movies and what I feel makes them good.  This week I’m starting with The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 gem from Frank Darabont that you’ve surely heard about already, if only because it’s the top rated movie on IMDb.  Ironically, the film – which is based on a Stephen King short story – was initially a box office failure, only ballooning in popularity during its rental phase in 1995. Nowadays, of course, it’s on USA or TNT just about once a month, and for good reason, but I want to talk about one particular aspect of The Shawshank Redemption that I think makes it dramatically interesting, and it’s an aspect that I think sets it apart from many of its contemporaries.  Based on the title, you can probably surmise at this point that I’m referring to its use of the flat character arc.

Hope is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies.

Character arc is something you hear about a lot if you’re even peripherally interested in drama and the theory behind it, with the basic idea of course being that the main character (protagonist, hero, etc.) experiences some kind of change throughout the story being told, with this change – gradual or otherwise – culminating in some kind of psychological or moral revelation at the end.  In more character-driven stories in particular, this revelation forms the climax of the story, as it reveals the truth behind the lie that the character believes and has made many mistakes while believing.  But what about a character like Andy Dufresne, a character who overall does very little changing throughout his time at Shawshank, instead affecting change in others and in his surroundings with his constant mantra of positivity?  As this excellent video essay describes it in the context of the wildly different Paddington 2, the main character in The Shawshank Redemption instead has a flat arc, not to be confused with a positive or negative one.  I shouldn’t characterize Shawshank as being incredibly unique in this regard, as there are plenty of other well-known movies and franchises (Back to the Future and The Hunger Games are two prominent examples), but it’s an aspect of these movies that I don’t think is typically thought of when trying to describe what makes them good, or better yet, which parts of them stick in your mind.

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t wanna know.

Because in my experience, when I think about Shawshank, or when others do, they don’t first think about Tim Robbins or Andy Dufresne.  They’re more likely to think about Morgan Freeman‘s Red – and sure, you might be able to chalk that up mostly to an excellent use of his legendary larynx in near-constant voiceover, but I think some small sliver of that is also owed to the fact that he’s the movie’s actual vehicle for change.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say The Shawshank Redemption is a movie primarily about him, nor would I say that he’s the “hero” or protagonist of the movie (I would argue that this is the case for the source material, though – in the novella, Red is the sole narrator), but the movie’s primary self-revelatory moment – in which Red basically tells a parole board to go screw themselves, only to be rewarded by his honesty and frankness with freedom – belongs pretty much solely to him.  Red begins playing his role in the events of The Shawshank Redemption as a man with little hope, or better yet as a man who finds hope dangerous within the slowly institutionalizing walls of the prison.  Meanwhile, old Andy – often surreptitiously so, to be fair – clings to the power of hope throughout, from his first night as the strong silent type to his slog through literal shit at the end, imparting it upon others like Red while grappling with it in only the most occasional of moments.  By the final act, especially when coupled with the perspective shift after Andy’s departure from Shawshank, Red certainly feels like the protagonist. Quite the switcheroo.

That feeling when you take a shower after your 20-minute workout and feel like the lord of all creation.

And sure, maybe the climax of the movie as far as you could define it still belongs to Andy, coming at the moment when he finally achieves his escape, holding out his hands to feel the rain on his bare skin as Thomas Newman’s score swells triumphantly, but it’s hard to characterize this as a particularly powerful change to Andy’s persona.  Overcoming a 20-year obstacle? Sure, and there’s certainly dramatic import in that. Changing? Not really. To put it a different way, and to couch my argument more firmly in the word “change,” The Shawshank Redemption is not about a change that takes place within Andy, even if the occasional doubt creeps into his psyche towards the end.  Instead of it being about what he learns, it’s about what others learn from him.  The Warden learns that his judgement cometh (and that right soon) when Andy outplays him, the entire prison system learns about the value of persistence when Andy sends constant letters in hopes of getting a prison library, and in perhaps the most on the nose learning moment, Tommy gets his GED, owing largely to the efforts of a patient and willing teacher in Andy.  The story focuses on Andy in that we the audience are anchored to the hope that Andy will never lose his way.  Our attention isn’t kept by the fear that he won’t change to overcome the obstacles laid before him; our fear is that he will.

I like to think the last thing that went through his head – other than that bullet – was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.

There are a lot of things to which you could ascribe The Shawshank Redemption‘s (eventual) success.  In fact, if you read Darabont’s novelization of the shooting script (and specifically the “Mutatis Mutandis” section featuring his closing remarks) you’ll find that the movie may have actually found its footing by rejecting a lot of the writing that was done before the cameras started rolling, flat arc or no.  But what The Shawshank Redemption (along with other aforementioned films) shows is that replacing the lie the character initially believes with a truth that they believe throughout can be an effective dramatic tool, especially when paired with a strong cast of malleable secondary characters, a predominantly negative setting, and a misdirection-laced third act.  What we get out of Andy’s struggle to teach others is the message that hope, as initially believed by the other inmates, isn’t a dangerous thing, but a good one, and it’s a message that it seems we need now more than ever.

What’s your favorite flat arc film?  Talk to me, folks. In the meantime, I’ll cook something up for next week.

Doctor Sleep – Review

With the Oscars behind us, I took the opportunity a couple of weekends ago – on Valentine’s Day, in fact – to watch Doctor Sleep, an early November release from writer-director and horror guru Mike Flanagan (Hush, Gerald’s Game) looking to capitalize on the dregs of spooky season, via Redbox.  Doctor Sleep is based on a Stephen King novel of the same name, and acts as a sequel to The Shining, and I’ve read said novel, so as is often the case with adaptations I’ve read the source material for, I spent a somewhat bloated two and a half hours searching for narrative inconsistencies (and if we’re lucky, improvements).  How romantic!

Kinky.

Doctor Sleep finds Ewan McGregor – who is actually less than two years older than the original child actor, so yay for accuracy – as an adult Daniel Torrance who’s still (forever) haunted by the events of The Shining, and who copes (at least in the beginning of the story) with crippling alcoholism.  His nomadic lifestyle ultimately leads him and his shine to Frazier, Maine – Maine being a constant haunt of author Stephen King’s – where a helping hand or two push him towards sobriety and, ultimately, a job as an orderly that allows him to use his shine to ease the deaths of hospice patients (hence the moniker of Doctor Sleep).  The resurgence of his shine leads him to contact with Abra (Kyliegh Curran), a teenaged girl with a shine far stronger than Dan’s, and whose talents have also attracted the attention of the True Knot, an RV-roaming group of immortals led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) who feed on the shine of children.  What ensues is a conflict both mental and physical that carries Abra, Dan, and his friend Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis) well into harm’s way, culminating in a reluctant return to where Dan’s journey started.

Probably the fastest fan-service pitch that Doctor Sleep can throw right here.

As a whole, the cast of Doctor Sleep is more than adequately convincing, especially in the case of the seasoned talent of McGregor and the guiles of Rebecca Ferguson, who I really haven’t seen in much else besides the Mission: Impossible movies.  Sprinkled in are some fun throwback roles ranging from minor (Alex Essoe recreates Shelley Duvall‘s Wendy Torrance with startling accuracy, especially vocally, and in some critical scenes, and is joined by Roger Dale Floyd as young Danny) to integral (Carl Lumbly‘s Scatman Crothers impression is pretty dynamite) to not-so-great, but we’ll get to Jack’s return a bit later.  The roles are granted life by a sharp script with solid dialogue, albeit often colored by some very strange accents (Cliff Curtis’ mix of New England and Southern is downright bizarre, and Ferguson’s kind-of-English accent seems inconsistent but may be intentional to cloud her origins, but props to Bruce Greenwood for a spot-on Boston dialect), and are scored by some fine work from frequent Flanagan collaborators The Newton Brothers, who puzzlingly don’t have the same last name, nor is either of their last names Newton.  Their creation is for the most part as minimalistic as ever, featuring little more than persistent heartbeats to raise tension and classic horror movie stringwork.

What I look like after my second cup of coffee.

Doctor Sleep‘s main drawback in my mind is probably what many – especially Kubrickian cinephiles – would describe as a strength: it seeks to please both fans of the book (me) and fans of the iconic director’s 1980 classic (not me).  This is especially true of the last half hour or so of the movie, which strays completely from the book’s story, instead opting for a baffling extended Jack Nicholson cameo that doesn’t feature Jack Nicholson (after all, he’s retired from acting) and an entire Overlook sequence that doesn’t even track with the ending of The Shining in book form, in which the spooky hotel is completely destroyed by its own antagonistic and creepily personified boiler.  In fact, the best part of this film’s ending was probably seeing that fiery destruction realized on screen now, 40 years later, but that bit of fan service failed to atone for the countless omissions of subplots (for one, Dan is actually revealed to Abra’s half-brother in the books, which does a lot to account for the origin of their extra-strong shine; for another, Flanagan’s creation fails to adequately account for what may well be the central narrative thread in the novel: Dan’s struggle with alcoholism, how it gives him a connection with his father, and how it affects his shine) and especially its seeming need for useless deaths.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  You’re my only hope.

But Flanagan’s creation is visually stylish no doubt, and possesses genuine scares and suspense of a variety of flavors.  It can be awfully hard to convey mental and internal struggles on-screen in a way that compares with the way that Stephen King can so convincingly write about them – this is one of many issues I had with Kubrick’s legendary film, and probably a big reason why King himself describes that film as “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it” – but Flanagan does a decent job with it.  This pervasive quandary, though, is also probably why the film version of King’s sequel to one of his most emblematic works features so much more carnage than the novel’s: it’s easier to show, and in most cases probably more impactful, especially when it’s as horrifyingly visceral as the True Knot’s cycling, or the Baseball Boy’s torturous demise.  In my mind, the single scariest moment in the film portray’s Dan’s waking nightmare of sleeping next to the undead bodies of a recent one-night stand and her toddler-aged son (a setpiece that is again the result of a sadly omitted and recurrent subplot in the novel), but this could simply be the effect of me having familiarity with the novel.  Either way, my main point is that when you’re trying to decide what the scariest moment of a movie is, it’s probably decently scary, and in the sense of being a compelling horror movie Doctor Sleep does its job.

Apparently Danny Torrance is a Trivial Pursuit fan.  Who knew?

Doctor Sleep is bursting at the seams with Easter eggs and fan service for any fans of both Kubrick’s The Shining and Stephen King’s bibliography (did anyone else catch all the references to Ka?), and while it’s at least a half an hour too long, it’s fair to say that it’s a fun ride.  While its attempts to please all crowds can be frustrating, especially to viewers who feel strongly about one origin story or another, they’re without question creative, not to mention well-executed.  If you’re a King fan, or even just a horror fan, it’s a winning diversion, especially given the currently low cost and commitment of a Redbox rental.

The Horrific Magic of Stephen King

Stephen King.  The man responsible for such dramatically moving films as The Shawshank Redemption, such schlocky films as Thinner, and such truly bone-chilling masterpieces as Carrie, Misery, and countless others.  King’s novels and short stories – both old and new – are constantly being optioned at Hollywood conference tables, and he has even gone so far as to create what he calls the “Dollar Baby”: an arrangement in which he allows students and fledgling filmmakers to create movies based on his work for the cool sum of $1.  While the only real notable name to be born from this practice is that of Frank Darabont, who directed and provided the screenplay for Shawshank, it’s a cool thing, and a good way to give back to a form of media in which he has seen undeniably prolific success, both on the big screen and the small (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Castle Rock, which I reviewed the first season of here, and which just got a great-looking Season 2 trailer).  As an ardent King fan (thanks to an amazing girlfriend, I own hard copies of every one of King’s novels, though I certainly haven’t yet read all of them), I want to take this week’s post to discuss my experience with King’s work both on the page and screen and maybe try to determine in the process what makes his shit smell sweeter than most, to quote one of my favorite characters of his.

Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.  That’s goddamn right.

All told, I’ve seen 11 movies adapted from King’s work: The Shawshank Redemption, IT (2017), The Shining, Carrie (1976), The Mist, 1408, Pet Sematary (2019), The Dead Zone, Misery, Secret Window, and Thinner.  This may sound like a fair few, but given that a quick Google tells me that his work is responsible for at least 81 movies, I’m barely scratching the surface, and better yet I haven’t seen some of his more recent contributions, IT Chapter Two and The Dark Tower (which was reportedly pretty rough for being the kickoff of one of his most beloved series) among them.  In the interest of superlatives, the best on that list is probably The Shawshank Redemption, and Thinner is undoubtedly the worst.  Scariest award goes to IT (followed closely by Misery: the Kathy Bates spook factor is insane), while Johnny Depp‘s Secret Window probably owns the title of least memorable.  As for my favorite story among them, it has to be The Dead Zone, and while the movie wasn’t exactly my favorite (Christopher Walken as the lead is quite a choice, though I do love Martin Sheen as the antagonist), that may have been because it’s definitely my favorite of King’s novels that I’ve read so far (a quick count shows that I’ve read 12, though I’m in the middle of the monstrous IT to make it an ominous thirteen) and so I feel quite the connection to the source material.

Martin Sheen’s political tyrant in The Dead Zone – a far cry from the soothing tones of Jed Bartlett.

I feel like I need to devote a solid paragraph to The Shining, simply because it’s one of King’s best-known works, best-known films, and is complex enough to probably be deserving of its own standalone post.  To me, Stanley Kubrick‘s 1981 film, which in most circles is lauded as something of a cerebral masterpiece, is wildly overrated, and serves as a cautionary tale about placing style over substance more than anything else.  Visually it’s fantastic in a lot of ways, and Jack Nicholson is no doubt fabulous as the deeply troubled Jack Torrance, but Stanley Kubrick’s seeming insistence on changing major plotlines, completely omitting critical setpieces and subplots, and overall just failing to scratch the surface of the Overlook’s menace and the devilish cocktail it brews with Torrance’s alcoholic psychosis is nothing short of maddening, especially considering that the novel itself – while admittedly involving quite a lot of internal conflict, which is at times hard to put on-screen – doesn’t seem so hard to adapt, especially for someone of the acclaimed director’s talent.  Instead, what we get is a product that’s at times scary, sure, but could in actuality be a lot scarier, especially psychologically, taking its main female character and dumbing her down beyond recognition and reportedly also driving her bananas during production.  Perhaps Kubrick’s eschewing of King’s thematic intentions with the novel is why King himself has reportedly always disliked the film, and I don’t think that’s about an artist refusing to see beyond himself.

Hello, Danny!

One thing The Shining does get largely right, though, is its portrayal of a fatally flawed character, and to me, this is the key to King’s greatness as a storyteller.  Anyone who has read more than a few King novels or novellas will tell you that in most of his stories, the scares – while certainly potent in their own right – are secondary to what they bring out in the characters experiencing them.  King’s heroes lie well beyond imperfect, his villains often have surprisingly soft centers, and his monsters are human, and the unifying factor binding them all together is that readers (or viewers) can relate to them at at least one point in the story – and when we can relate to the people being creeped out, we’re more likely to get creeped out ourselves.  Maybe it’s not that simple, and maybe King isn’t even as good at creating everyday-human-seeming characters inhabiting strange worlds as he could be, but I’m not sure how many times I’ve read the work of an author who does it better.  Indeed, this is probably what makes IT so long; I’m already almost a hundred pages in and all we’ve really spent time on is how many pill bottles Eddie Kaspbrak has in his medicine cabinet.  His verbosity – no doubt present in such imposing tomes as 11/22/63 and The Stand, in spite of the fact that one his main mantras in On Writing was to not use too many words when a few will do – may turn people off, sure, but I’m of the mind that it’s all serving a purpose.  After all, how hard can we really root for a guy like Andy Dufresne – one of my favorite movie protagonists of all time – without feeling like we know him first, or even feeling like we’ve known him for years?

My ankle bones hurt when I look at this picture.

Stephen King isn’t a god, and he has a number of missteps in all facets of his career that prove that, but as an aspiring storyteller, he serves as a role model for me (though maybe without all that drug use in the 80s that gave us Cujo and The Tommyknockers).  How he manages to consistently shine a light into such deep and dark depths of the world, humanity, and the recesses of his own mind is beyond me, but it seems to hit the page in a way that more often than not lends itself equally well to the film reel.  With Doctor Sleep due out a month from now, and with IT Chapter Two still active in theaters, it appears that his reign of terror is far from over.

You’ll float too.

Author’s Footnote: One of my motivations for writing this post, besides the obvious fact that we’re now entering the height of spooky movie season, was the King-related contest that USDish is sponsoring, in which you can be paid $1,300 to watch 13 King movies and report on your experience.  I’m looking to hone the statement for my entry, and if this sounds like your cup of tea, I’d encourage all reading this to do the same, though I’ll admit I hardly relish the added competition.

Pet Sematary Review

Friends and readers (and everyone in between), rejoice!  I’m back this week with an actual movie review, albeit one that came out a whole three and a half weeks ago (again I have to ask that you all cut me some slack – these are the lean times, and they’re almost over with the summer movie season kicking off later this week).  Pet Sematary is a horror film that draws its scares from Stephen King‘s 1983 novel of the same name, and it’s also a remake of a 1989 film of the same name, which by all accounts got reviews as middling as the 2019 rendition wound up settling into.  Indeed, I’ve been perplexed by the path to critical consensus that this year’s Pet Sematary followed, initially earning rave reviews at SXSW that hailed it as one of the best King adaptations ever, prompting its Rotten Tomatoes one-liner to simply read “Sometimes, remade is better” in a clear nod to one of the lines delivered by John Lithgow in the film and the film’s trailer.  Where it ultimately landed in both the general critical sphere and in my own mind, though, is a far different place than that, and I want to delve into the reasons for that for a few paragraphs.  Disclaimer: I have neither seen the 1989 rendition of Pet Sematary nor read the source novel, though I am a fan of King’s (I’m currently reading Mr. Mercedes, in fact, which is a different, sort of hard-boiled cop genre for him, but I’m quite enjoying it).

The OG on-screen spooky cat.  How they got the eyes to look like that I know not.

My one-line summary of what makes Pet Sematary such a middling experience is that it’s for the most part maddeningly inconsistent.  It’s possessing of sky-high highs, which is what I’m sure managed to captivate the SXSW crowds, but it also has a roughly equal measure of cellar-dwelling lows, and this is perhaps nowhere more prominent than in the cast.  While John Lithgow is magnetic in his supporting turn as the pivotal and wizened Juddson Crandall, and while Amy Seimetz is pretty convincing, and frankly a revelation given her relative unknown standing amongst the cast, leading man Jason Clarke is actively and surprisingly bad, and for the most part really just never shows up.  Equally uneven is the pacing of the film, as it feels at times (mostly in the front half) like there are a number of filler scenes that are breathlessly trying to get to things that the filmmakers deem more interesting – and they might be right that those scenes, which are mostly at the beginning, aren’t as interesting as the undead stuff towards the end – but having a palpable sense of rushing through exposition that would have been clunky even without the frantic pacing has never helped a movie ever, and it doesn’t here.  The occasionally choppy editing – which at times features jump cuts to entirely different scenes when a character has only barely finished a line – doesn’t do Pet Sematary any favors either.

Jason Clarke knee-deep in one of many moments showcasing some poor acting.

But Pet Sematary has one consistent strength in that its premise and its core story are good – having been created by arguably this generation’s master of horror storytelling – and the film is therefore well-positioned to pose interesting questions about life, death, and what lies beyond, or even in between.  The trouble is in the fact that in spite of making some great dramatic choices – giving a resurrection to a character that can actually speak about it rather than giving it to an infant, for one – Pet Sematary‘s script is frustratingly reductive with its morals and the deeper ideas at hand, often opting instead for violence and disturbing imagery that while at times effective is largely a mixed bag, and at other times feels gratuitous and/or self-serving.  Also frustratingly reductive is the film’s approach to its numerous promising subplots, which at worst are brushed off with less than a second’s screentime and not given a further thought.  In spite of all of this reduction, though, Pet Sematary impressively also has no real subtext to speak of, instead filling itself with shoddily written what-you-hear-is-what-you-get dialogue.  In terms of macro-plotting, I was on board with the majority of its decisions, but (no spoilers) I’m a bit back and forth on its ending as of now (which was reportedly chosen from a number of endings based on test screenings).

This is eerily similar to the way me and my girlfriend’s cat typically regard each other.

It’s certainly not all bad, though.  As I said before, there are some high highs in the form of solidly-crafted jump scares, great use of sound, and decent tension-building.  Some viewers may lament its ultra-predictable trajectory, but I actually thought this was a plus in some scenes.  The introduction of a graveyard that brings back dead animals naturally begs the question of what would happen if a human was buried there – this is in some sense the beauty of King’s story, and I can only imagine how great the book is given King’s ability to get inside of his character’s heads (which you’ll find is where a lot of Pet Sematary seems to take place, and while the numerous dream sequences are alright, they fail to tell the same transfixing story as a reader’s imagination, I’ll bet).  In any case, at the point of the introduction of the resurrecting powers of the forest, we know a major character will die, and we’re essentially just waiting for it to happen – that’s a decent tension-building mechanic, even if the identity of the character, the nature of her demise, and the chaos that ensues upon her return is completely spoiled by the bafflingly long and revealing final trailer for the film.  Not having the marketing material spoil essentially the entire film probably would have helped Pet Sematary out some – after all, an audience not knowing everything a priori (especially if the film deviates from the source material significantly, as Pet Sematary does) can only help to crank up the interest factor.

One thing I could have gone for much more of was usage of the spooky masks/masked children.

For me, Pet Sematary largely built to a single conclusion, and the thought that was evoked within me pretty much throughout, and it’s a thought that does a disservice to anything the film tries to accomplish.  That thought is: “Wow, the book must be great,” and one thing that I can assuredly report after watching the film is that the novel has shot up towards the top of my summer reading list, if only so I can further investigate the places that the film deviated from it.  As King adaptations go, though, it’s probably just as middle-of-the-road as the reviews suggest: I’ve seen far better (The Shawshank Redemption would be the obvious choice) and far worse (I watched this movie called Thinner once, which is an adaptation of another King novel of the same name, and all I have to say is wow).  Unless you have a theater subscription service at hand, it’s probably not worth the $11, but it’s decent enough fun and contains a high enough scare quotient to be solid Redbox fodder.

John Lithgow probably said it best – when it comes to remakes, sometimes, dead is better.

And now, for a brief moment of hype-building: next week will most likely (I don’t have my viewing plans fully fleshed out yet) bring the Tuesdays with Cory of Endgame – spoiler content TBD.  Check back in then!

Castle Rock – Some Preliminary Thoughts

It has recently come to my attention that if you take any given television show and add up its total runtime, accounting for all episodes, you typically get an amount of time that’s much, much longer than that of any given movie, or any given franchise for that matter (well, except maybe The Fast and the Furious franchise).  It stands to reason, then, that if you can find a TV show that’s worth all of that time, you stand to gain more in terms of entertainment value, especially if it’s available for free on a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu.  On top of that, it seems to me, based at least on the front page of Rotten Tomatoes, which I tend to cite quite a bit around here, that the production standard for TV is in some sense higher than that of American cinema – maybe not the production value, per se, but the production standard.  To put it another way, going to Rotten Tomatoes at any given time and comparing the scores of the site’s most popular TV shows (most if not all of them current) with the scores of the movies opening, coming soon, and holding the top spots at the box office typically shows that any TV show that’s worthy of a spot in a cable lineup or on a streaming platform is going to be far more well-reviewed by critics, with only a few exceptions.  Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Me looking confusedly at the dizzying array of watching options offered by the glorious internet.

It’s with all this in mind that my girlfriend and I picked Castle Rock from a worthy lineup of movies and shows alike, arguably with the impending Halloween extravaganza in mind, given the slant of our choices towards the ooky and the spooky.  Castle Rock is a Hulu Original Series based on characters and settings from the mind of bestselling author Stephen King, created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and produced by J.J. Abrams‘ production company Bad Robot.  Branding itself immediately and in all of its promotional material as a psychological horror anthology, it has so far fit that bill nicely, and even though I’ve only watched three episodes so far (planning more tonight – it has me hooked!) I thought I’d say a few things about it.  Again, it’s either that or review movies I’ve already seen, or the Bills – who actually managed a shocking win this week, but that’s besides the point.

Arguably the creepiest scene in the show so far (coming in Episode 3) – a Halloween children’s courtroom?

Castle Rock, while buoying my interest level and the show’s overall watchability with a preponderance of Stephen King-ness, is anchored by a strong cast.  The show’s protagonist, Henry Deaver – a former resident of Castle Rock, a survivor of a childhood trauma, and now a capital punishment lawyer visiting from Texas after receiving a mysterious call – is played by Andre Holland (Moonlight), who has thus far been excellent, if in an appropriately reserved way.  Joining him are Melanie Lynskey (Up In The Air, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.), playing Deaver’s childhood neighbor who claims to have psychic powers, Sissy Spacek (Carrie, The Help), playing Deaver’s dementia-riddled mother, Scott Glenn (The Hunt for Red October), playing former Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn, and Jane Levy (Don’t Breathe) playing townsperson Jackie Torrance (relation to The Shining protagonist Jack Torrance currently unknown), among others.  Bringing all of these characters together is the ultra-mysterious and ultra-nameless antagonist (?), a young, pale, and absurdly skinny prisoner found in the depths of the nearby Shawshank Prison‘s abandoned and shuttered F Block, played by the world’s most creepy-looking actor Bill Skarsgard (It, Deadpool 2).

Having two different colored eyes probably helps when you’re trying to look as ominous as possible.

If I were to compare Castle Rock to another show thus far, it’d be hard for that show to not be Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things.  Sure, it’s not quite as good – at least not so far – and that’s likely due to a number of factors: Castle Rock isn’t soaked in a delightful but tasteful amount of 80’s nostalgia like Stranger Things, and while it’s largely carried by a talented ensemble cast the same way Stranger Things is, the set of characters that cast is portraying is not really as likable overall, at least not yet.  What I will say, though, is that three episodes in, Castle Rock has given me an equal if not larger number of creepy/scary moments, and its paranormally-inspired plot at least has the potential to be as rich as that of Stranger Things, not to mention the fact that it has the added bonus of allowing the show’s creators to be able to throw a kitchen sink’s worth of Easter Eggs from Stephen King’s literary and cinematic repertoire into the mix pretty much wherever possible.

One of Castle Rock’s as of yet unmentioned major but less fleshed-out characters, a prison guard at Shawshank.

There are also some parallels to be drawn with Lost, which is an older and perhaps more divisive show, but a good one in my book, and an undeniably successful one at that.  Castle Rock‘s willingness to talk about the ideas of good versus evil in a big-picture, often bordering on if not fully religious sense, definitely give rise to some echoes of J.J. Abrams’ most highbrow television venture thus far.  There’s also the idea that all of the spooky happenings chronicled by the show are surrounding a specific geographic location (admittedly also a hallmark of many great King stories), using inciting events in the present to pick up the threads of various characters’ pasts, assumedly with the plan of weaving those threads together at some point in the future.  Sure, no one’s on an island, and no one’s in purgatory – at least as far as I can tell – but there are similarities.  Oh, and also, Terry O’Quinn, assumedly a friend of Abrams, plays central roles in both shows, first appearing in Lost as John Locke, the writers room’s champion of faith in the show’s seasons-long “man of science, man of faith” debate, and now appearing in Castle Rock in a recurring role as Shawshank Prison’s former warden.

One of the truly scariest parts of the show so far: Scott Glenn’s haircut (right).

At the end of the day, and given that I’m only three episodes deep into the first ten-episode season, it’s hard to tell yet whether Castle Rock will be as good or better than either of those proven shows, but I’d say it’s off to a solid start, and it’s keeping pace with Stranger Things (and besting the made-for-cable Lost) in the critical area of bingewatchability (a word that maybe I’ve just made up).  Assuming it remains good enough, I’ll probably check back in a week or two with some further thoughts and criticisms.  In the meantime, check it out on Hulu!

Review: IT

IT finally happened.  And by IT, I mean I went and saw IT.

Bad title-related puns aside, this is one that I’ve been pretty excited about for a while now.  While I’ve never read the source novel nor seen the original miniseries, I have read and enjoyed a number of Stephen King‘s other works, and I like a good scary movie now and again.  Add a record-breaking trailer and a solid amount of positive reviews and buzz on top of that, and you have my attention.  Let’s get right into it.  Spoiler alert, though – I was a big, big fan, so if you’re looking for a review that somehow differentiates itself from the chorus of praises being piled upon IT, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

This isn’t IT-related, I just needed to fill space, so here’s a picture of my house.

Make no mistake: while IT has its fair share of jump scares, where I found it truly at its most horrifying was during the quieter, more unsettling moments.  Andy Muschietti makes excellent use of lights and camera to deliver countless action shots that might be more apt to make an audience cringe and shrink with fear rather than scream, feasting on a number of the setpieces that King so graciously provides – and that Cary Fukanaga (of True Detective fame), Chase Palmer, and horror vet Gary Dauberman so faithfully bring to the silver screen.  Some scenes that stand out: Richie’s heavily foreshadowed confrontation with a room full of clowns on Neibolt Street, Beverly’s Dexter-esque bathroom bloodbath, the slideshow scene (pictured below) and of course Eddie’s encounter with the Leper, which in fact was cut from early drafts of the screenplay.

No spoilers, but this scene had me extremely on edge by the end of it.

Another aspect that drives the horror home effectively is the use of children as the protagonists.  We’ve all watched countless scary movies in which a number of the cast members are killed due to an overage of curiosity, a lack of good survival sense, or both, and I personally found that with children navigating the twists and turns of Pennywise’s various torments, I was more forgiving of a character’s wanting to investigate that creepy voice or wander into a dark room to see if they actually heard that door slam.  Take it this way: kids are more naturally curious, and less is typically expected of them in terms of understanding the world’s darkness, and for that reason it feels pretty silly yelling at a screen when they’re the ones on it.

If ever I break my arm, I can only hope my cast is this flattering.

Compounding this crucial perspective is the fact that most adults in Derry either seem oblivious, uninterested, or at times straight up evil.  Disregarding for a moment the outwardly abusive situation Beverly finds herself in, we also at various times in the film see parents yelling at their children (berating them for holding out hope over a missing sibling, blaming them for a broken arm that was actually caused by an ancient evil, etc.), stuffing an absurd amount of medications down their throats, and at one point even shooting at them.  Furthermore, this makes no mention of the absolute indifference of most adults towards the fact that so many more innocent people – namely children – go missing in Derry, never to be found, than anywhere else.  Here’s a tip – if you’re a librarian and you bump into a clearly terrified kid in the poorly-lit basement of a library in a town with a known child-napping problem, you might want to ask him a few questions before brushing him off.

Sophia Lillis is excellent as Beverly Marsh.

The film’s heroes, and the primary ensemble cast around which most of the action is centered, has affectionately dubbed themselves The Losers Club, and they all – in their own way – possess traits emblematic of high school’s less socially fortunate, which really took me on a pleasant trip down memory lane.  There’s the protagonist, Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), leading the rest on an often ill-planned mission to find his lost little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott).  There’s Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a portly new kid in Derry who chooses to spend his lonely summer becoming a small-town historian.  There’s Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs), a gun-shy homeschooled kid with a devastating past who takes up a spot in the Losers’ group after a run-in with the fiendish Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton).  There’s Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), a hypochondriacal, Macaulay-Caulkin-in-The-Pagemaster-like boy constantly in a young Fred Savage lookalike contest.  There’s Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef), the son of a rabbi with a particularly relatable fear of misshapen fine art subjects.  And finally, there’s Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the oft-sought-after lone female in the group, forced to deal throughout with an abusive father and an overabundance of false rumors swirling around her.

IT is like The Sandlot, except instead of playing baseball they all get together to fight shapeshifting demons.

Rounding out the Sandlot-esque teen crew is perhaps the most enjoyable character of the bunch, at least comedically speaking – Richie Tozier.  Richie’s dialogue is rife with one-liners throughout, and Finn Wolfhard plays the role excellently.  All told, the entire child cast did quite well, with Wolfhard and Lillis setting themselves apart with roles that are respectively funny and heavy.

Why, yes, I did let IT’s costume department use the glasses I wore in the third grade.

Driving all of the chaos, though, is Pennywise, the embodiment of an evil so pure and so powerful that even the twisted creator himself, Stephen King, refuses to write about him again.  Having never seen the Tim Curry version of the character, I have little basis for comparison here, but as far as I can tell, Bill Skarsgard was fantastic from his beginning interaction with Georgie in the sewer to the bitter end.  Perhaps the most chilling piece of Skarsgard’s character was not the sinister voice, nor the menacing smile, but the way it moved, be it through the famous dance, general contortion, or the truly bone-chilling berserker-like head-shaking charge demonstrated at various points throughout the story.  Skarsgard’s dedication to the role shows through in his performance, and it will be a thrill to see him bring even more to the role in the next go-round.  The real question: can he make all of the adult actors cry during his first day on set like he did with the kids?

Truly the stuff of nightmares, and I’m not even afraid of clowns.

Being the first chapter, plenty of other questions remain unanswered at this point, but not all of them relate directly to the plot, nor the fate of IT.  What’s the significance of the key that Beverly Marsh wears?  Who will headline the cast for IT Chapter Two (set 27 years in the future)?  Will anyone else besides The Losers Club notice everyone going missing in 2016 after the advent of social media?  Here’s hoping we find out when IT Chapter Two drops in 2019, but in the meantime, check out the first installment if you haven’t already.