Doctor Sleep (2019)

Dr.Retarded said:

It’s been a long time since I read the book, but I don’t remember a little black girl, and the Overlook was gone / burned down.

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Right, it burned down when the boiler exploded. But judging by that trailer. Stanley Kubrick's version is canon instead.
After 37 years, in done with King stuff. Unless it's really good

Chukzombi said:

Right, it burned down when the boiler exploded. But judging by that trailer. Stanley Kubrick's version is canon instead.
After 37 years, in done with King stuff. Unless it's really good

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That's actually an amusing direction to go as King hated Kubrick's version and this trailer is full of references to it.

I've bitched about Doctor Sleep a few times but if the Overlook is still standing in the show that will hopefully mean we'll get an ending that isn't a complete and total anti-climax like the one in the book. When I first finished it I thought it was alright but as time has gone by I've really soured on the whole thing. The prologue chapter is great, the villains are interesting and I liked getting to know them but it fizzles out so hard in the end it's almost baffling.

Arbitrary said:

That's actually an amusing direction to go as King hated Kubrick's version and this trailer is full of references to it.

I've bitched about Doctor Sleep a few times but if the Overlook is still standing in the show that will hopefully mean we'll get an ending that isn't a complete and total anti-climax like the one in the book. When I first finished it I thought it was alright but as time has gone by I've really soured on the whole thing. The prologue chapter is great, the villains are interesting and I liked getting to know them but it fizzles out so hard in the end it's almost baffling.

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i had the Dr Sleep book in my hands at a book store, but i never bought it, i think King hated the Kubrick version because of Jack Nicholson being cast, he said after One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, everyone expected him to go crazy. he also hated the tone and resolution. so much so he directed some absolutely horrible TV version years later. its unwatchable. Kubrick did it better.

It was a good book and could make a good movie. Yeah, I though the end was anticlimactic but appropriate so it didn't bother me. Then again I thought the end of Deadwood (the series not the movie) was perfect, despite being anticlimactic.

It bothered me quite a bit that we go from young Danny at the start of the book to complete failure drug addict drunk adult Danny with the only explanation being that he couldn't handle living with the Shining. Meanwhile we're introduced to Abra, a girl more powerful than he ever was, and she's trucking along just fine. There's a jarring disconnect between a Deadzone-esque "cursed by his gift" character and someone in even bigger shoes doing just peachy. Face the arch villain in one on one psychic combat? No problem. Don't trip on your top hat on the way out of my head you punk ass bitch.

As the book went on I kept waiting for a big reveal about Danny's past. After everything his family was put through what is it that pushed him to alcohol of all things? Couldn't handle seeing spoopy things despite the entire prologue being about dealing with seeing spoopy things and started hititng the bottle because it just runs in the family. Lame. I'd call Abra a Mary Sue but Dick Hallorann got along just fine as well.

King's "prime" was a long time ago. He shits out what is effectively airport lobby trash novels regularly, but they haven't been good in well over a decade. Maybe two. Serviceable trash-stories for killing time, but not good works.

WHAT THEY should do is release to the theatres- limited release- a remastered version of the shining by kubrick, for a week or two THEN release this.

Vanessa said:

Finally a movie I'm excited to see that's not a Marvel movie LoL! The Shining is one of my favorite movies of all time... it's one of those rare films that, to me, feels flawless. Kubrick was, after all, a genius.

There's a LOT of proverbial weight to carry when it comes to making a sequel to a film that was A) such a classic B) such a long time ago. With all that weight TO carry, I hope the film's legs don't give out from underneath itself.

In other words, there's a lot that can go wrong here, but I'm praying this film is to The Shining what Blade Runner 2049 was to Blade Runner: Worthy.

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Yeah I think that's a high bar. I just finished the book. It's not great. It isn't bad, certainly I've seen worse, but it's not on par with the original, and to expect Blade Runner 2049 with that as the source material, yeah...

Outsider was a good story. It was very simple though, which I think was to it's benefit.

zzeris said:

It has nothing to do with liking him and everything to do with poor stories. He is very good at character building and just ok at world building. He was far better at one time and your comparison just shows there are few talented writers today, not that he's still good. Every genre has this issue. I read a ton of SF and there are few really talented writers. All of them have a few flaws and King's is that he ran out of really good ideas a long time ago. He can still write characters but the stories suck. I haven't really liked a King horror story in over two decades. That's a long fucking time of average.

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King's written some of my favorite stories ever. It's just that when he fucks up he fucks up really badly. His books are often too long, a few of them are kinda dumb and when you mix in a really shit ending you've got yourself quite the problem.

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."

Then over the course of seven (now eight technically) books each littered wtih interconnections between King's literary multi-verse how does the final showdown between Roland and Randall Flagg go? We never get one. Flagg gets killed by a brand new villain introduced at the ass end of the last book that serves no purpose other than to kill a main character and immediately die himself. Well, surely the final confrontation between Roland and The Crimson King is good though right? Character we've never seen before aside from a tiny sorta cameo maybe in another 1000 page book walks through a magic door and erases him. Then to conclude the series we get a non-ending. Too fucking long, bad final showdowns, bad ending. His magnum opus perfectly encapsulates his flaws more than his triumphs.

Doctor Sleep doesn't have all those problems but it does have a terrible final confrontation between Danny Torrence and the True Knot. King villain that is put over strong most of the book, someone we spend quite a bit of time with even, jobs hard at the very end. I'm hoping the film rewrites that whole fucking thing because it is not satisfying.

idk, Flanagan is good. But his ending to Haunting of Hill House was kind of lame. All that buildup kind of washed away. It's cool that he tried to merge the books and the movies into a single story, and promising since there's some amazing stuff from the movie of The Shining that wasn't even hinted at in the book, but that neatly wrapped up ending seems pretty on brand for Flanagan so far.