Stephen King's Desperation
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Movie Reviews of Stephen King's Desperation
Movie Review: Desperation
Summary: 5 Stars
This cd came in a timely manner and was packaged very well. I really enjoyed itMovie Review: Too Biblical to be fascinating
Summary: 4 Stars
The book was interesting especially in the descriptions of the decaying nature of Tack as embodied in the sheriff and any other being afterwards. To show it in flipping pictures has a lot less effect. The pangs of conscience and intellect of the main opponent, the one who is going to destroy Tack, or rather to bury him or it alive in the underground mine is less convincing on the screen. Yet the film is strange, just as much as the book was, because Stephen King inverts some essential elements of his vision. For him, over and over again, evil is on the surface and causes damage underground, in the doppelganger world that is supposed to support us and yet is obliged to bear the great destructions we impose onto it. Here evil exists underground and has to be buried alive back into that underground from which human greed has managed to get it out in the most brutal way: mining and exploiting Chinese who are transformed into some un-respected cattle. This simplicity of the relation between the surface and the underground world is surprising for Stephen King who has often accustomed us to more complex relations, like in the Dark Tower. That makes the film slightly superficial and standing only on the frightening leg. We would have liked to be terrorized in our minds more than out superficial nervous system. Apart from that it is well built and directed though the emphasis on God, of course the good old Christian God, is definitely excessive and it should have been widened up to a universal God, ,especially in the present period where some are willing to start religious wars against anyone who is of a different creed or faith.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Good movie :)
Summary: 4 Stars
I`ve have waited for this movie since I read the book several years ago , and it follows the book rather well .
They have left out some of the most creepy parts of the start of the book ( the killing of a litle girl )
But the rest is pretty much like its suposed to be .
Some religius overtones , but not much .
All in all a very good movie .
Movie Review: Review of this movie
Summary: 4 Stars
This made for TV movie gets 4 of 5 stars. A bit cheesy at times, but not having a full budget rated "R" theater release production team behind it is why. Interesting, and don't miss the beginning. Well done I think.Movie Review: Could have been much worse, but could have been better.
Summary: 3 Stars
Desperation (Mick Garris, 2006)
Ron Perlman is an actor who isn't afraid to take chances, and in general, the more risks he takes, the better the resulting character. Consider his work in such classics as Cronos and City of Lost Children, for example. On the other hand, here you've got an adaptation of a Stephen King novel; it's pretty much a guaranteed shot out of the park, but there's not a great deal of room for Perlman to play with character, given that King is a master of characterization. Still, it's Ron Perlman; you've got a 90% chance of a fantastic performance. (The other 10% was Blade II.)
Perlman plays Collie Entragian, the sheriff of the town of Desperation, NV, where something very odd is going on. Collie is rounding up people just passing through and tossing them into jail; there's a renegade writer (Tom Skerritt) and his assistant (Steven Weber, who's done some King TV adaptations in the past, including The Shining miniseries and an episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes); a family; a hitchhiker. And there's something wrong with Collie, though we can't really tell what, at first. He's got some odd twitches, and he's sunburned, but you kind of expect that from a guy who polices out in the middle of nowhere. It becomes obvious, though, that there's a lot more going on with him. And the town itself looks pretty darned deserted, as folks are rolling through it in the back of the police car. The prisoners have to figure out what's going on, and quick.
I tend to slot Stephen King novels into three categories. There are the brilliant novels where there's not a thing wrong with the finished product ('Salem's Lot, The Stand, Misery, etc.), the mediocre novels I can take or leave (The Regulators, Bag of Bones, Needful Things, etc.), and the flat-out awful ones I'll never consider reading again (The Tommyknockers, Insomnia, etc.). Desperation is one of the mediocre ones, and I kind of avoided watching this for a couple of years because the mediocre novels, when they're adapted, tend toward mediocre movies. But, man, Ron Perlman. I'm not sure how much of a stretch this really was for him; it's certainly not as amazing a character as he played in City of Lost Children. But he brings something to the role nonetheless, and it's Perlman who's really going to hook the viewer here. The supporting cast isn't exactly full of slouches, either; Weber and Skeritt are joined by Charles Durning, Annabeth Gish, the woefully underrated Matt Frewer, Kelly Overton, Henry Thomas, and many more, all of whom bring, if not their A games, at least the top level of their B games. Garris, in his sixth partnership with King, keeps the pace fast and hard, though he does sacrifice some of the novel's character development in the process, and because of that the film is not all it could be. But then it's a TV movie, and so there were time constraints one wouldn't find in a feature film; still, it clocks in at over two hours, and to keep a movie this fast-paced for this long requires a good deal of artistry.
Very good work indeed; probably my favorite TV adaptation of King since Tobe Hooper adapted 'Salem's Lot over thirty years before. Not great, but well worth watching. *** ½