The Dark Tower is surely the biggest budgeted Stephen King adaptation thus far, releasing after a relatively long-lull since the King cinematic-adaptation factory downsized about a decade ago. With It primed to make a boatload at the box office in little more than a month, let’s take a look at a few of King’s most notable film adaptations, diamonds in a truly rough slog of visual atrocity.
With Carrie – fittingly a story about the horrors of maturation into independent adulthood – director Brian De Palma finally crawled out of Alfred Hitchcock’s attic, where he had been lurking for most of his early films, and emerged as a force all his own. It was also a smashing success, instantly making De Palma a household name, but unlike many of his latter, equally commercially viable films – Scarface, The Untouchables, Mission Impossible – Carrie does not flatten out De Palma’s iconoclastic style or collapse his rhythms by aiming for middle-of-the-road spectacle. Retaining his unique style of frazzled poetry and trading in writer Stephen King’s dry, accusatory writing for a mood of erotic melancholy, Carrie is a mosaic of depleted teenage energy, and by far the second-best King adaptation in film history. (Behind, obviously, The Shining, only a very tentative King adaptation, and the one Stephen King hates the most). Radiating unpretentious pulp, Carrie exudes a quality of social neglect and personal loss, or never really belonging, thrumming with the outsider spirit De Palma brought to all his great films. In its own devilish way, Carrie is as much of a yardstick of teenage innocence and social ostracization as any song Bruce Springsteen was penning around this time. Continue reading
Misery
There’s a fundamentally volatile, empathically compelling core about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, more akin to an over-budgeted experiential art film than what might pass as a narrative in the conventional sense, especially for summer blockbusters and their perennial fetish for stories of self-actualization. In Dunkirk, characters are ciphers, stripped of anything resembling backstory. They are defined only by the minutiae of how they react to peril of the moment. Nolan strives not to detail, from above, the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers after the failed British invasion of German-occupied France during WWII. Instead, he works over-time to feverishly emblazon the past in highly subjective, ground-level cinematic strokes. An experiment in the moment, in an eternal present-tense, Dunkirk is a stark refutation (within blockbuster confines) of the tendentiousness of narrative where moments are primarily valuable for the pay-offs and catharsis they will lead to in a theoretical future. 
Now in its third and possibly final film, the 21st century Planet of the Apes series has shuttled audiences from the thickets of armed revolt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) to the middle passage of Greek Tragedy (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). With War for the Planet of the Apes, we’ve now descended into an even more classical and essentially mythological register. While Shakespeare was the obvious focal point in Dawn, director Matt Reeves and co-writer Marck Bomback double-down on the Biblical aspirations of the original series with this trilogy-conclusion, rendering War an heir apparent to the Cecil B. Demille Bible epics of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Among the five original Planet of the Apes pictures, 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is undeniably the most obvious forebear to the modern trilogy. A review of this most unheralded picture in honor of the conclusion of the new trilogy.
I so wanted to write some nonsense about Andy Serkis in War of the Planet of the Apes and in The Lord of the Rings films to make this connection, but really I had these reviews on my computer, and I guess that’s as good a reason as any.
Ever since the truly sublime Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch “Salad Days”, Sam Peckinpah has been something of a punchline for critics who reduce him to the rampant Novocaine of violence opiating the masses. His only proper war film, Cross of Iron, is not a full-throated rejoinder to that criticism, but it certainly problematizes the animating cinematic thrill of, say, The Wild Bunch. It’s not an abandonment of violence, though, so much as a rough and rowdy revision, punchy in the typical Peckinpah milieu but more decrepit and alienated from its bloodletting.
Ahh, the wonderful world of John Boorman, that perennial cinematic oscillator between the realm of exhausted greatness (Point Break, Deliverance) and spirited atrocity (Zardoz and Exorcist II). The man just eludes categorization, except that all of his films seem to share a pure and unabashed self-centeredness. Yet many of his best films paradoxically stamp themselves in the director’s personality not through baroque visual extravaganzas but through thriller minimalism. His greatest achievements are not screeds radiating shards of discontent or phantasmagorical whirlygusts of excitement. Deliverance and Point Break are white-knuckle, certainly, but they are also thoroughly dog-tired, whipped features, spent forces rather than self-propagating fires of combustion. 
With Dunkirk making the rounds and tearing up the critics, I’ve decided to review a few (better) alternative WWII films that are not part of the official war film canon, or experience delayed entry to the minds of the public. Saving Private Ryan need not apply. 
The Long Take 