Director Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train has a May 16, 2008 release date. That’s right at the beginning of the summer season, and I don’t know what that means. The film stars Bradley Cooper, one of People‘s Sexiest Men Alive. (Hey, the girl on the elliptical next to mine at the gym was reading it.) He was listed under the “sexiest scars” subheading, which is oddly appropriate.

* Jason Adams has blogged his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Like me, he thinks that the lack of on-screen canoodling between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Fobes smacks of rainbow-flag cold feet; also like me, he thinks it ranks with your average okay BSG episode. I think that normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but when you’re debuting something as a feature-length movie, selling it as a stand-alone DVD, and using it to tide fans over during a year-long hiatus that is itself under the shadow of a strike that may postpone or even eliminate the series’ final episodes, okay probably isn’t good enough.

* Jason has also blogged his thoughts on The Mist, which he says he “mostly dug.” His main complaint, a pretty fundamental one, is basically that the whole never added up to more than the sum of its parts. That sounds about right to me. Aside from obvious missteps like Mrs. Carmody it’s hard to point to anything disastrous about the film (even she isn’t so); everything works, but nothing works wonders.

* Jon Hastings is Mistblogging too. He liked it quite a bit, except for the ending, which (like me) he wasn’t crazy about not because he objected to it in principle but because he found it tacked on. Amid interesting comparisons to 28 Weeks Later, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and Romero’s Dead movies, he articulates in a roundabout what I think is the core appeal of this story, namely that the monsters aren’t waiting around stalking the humans, but that they’re going about their everyday business of eating each other, stopping only to dine on something more readily available whenever the humans happen to cross their paths. That was what was so scary about the original story, and what also makes even the un-scary movie adaptation compelling (and re-watchable, even to me): Yes, the world of the mist-creatures is infiltrating our own, but the result is more akin to our world being plopped in the middle of theirs. (The novella made this more explicit with its earthquakes and great rifts in the ground, meant to evoke the shifting or perhaps even replacement of our earth’s crust to match theirs.)

* While he’s at it, Jon offers this dead-on observation about “inherent silliness” in genre works by way of musing on big creepy monsters and their discontents:

As for the goofiness issue: different people will bring different standards to the table, and, I’ve noticed, very few people are consistent about it. That is: some people will balk at taking stories about super-powered mutant heroes seriously, but have no problems with stories about the living dead. Other people might be completely down with the whole flying dudes in tights thing, but just can’t believe that anyone over the age of 12 would be interested in stories about a teenage wizard. In generally, I’m pretty accepting of any kind of fantasy element and while I recognize that it’s pretty common for folks to draw a line somewhere or other, I can only just wrap my head around doing that.

Bingo! Jon notes that The Mist takes its monsters dead seriously, which is one of its strengths.

* Jon’s post also got me thinking about The Mist‘s kind of surprisingly (to me at least) lackluster take at the box office. I tend not to think about box-office stuff at all anymore now that I don’t work at Wizard, so the main reason it surprised me is that I read a post on the blog of one of the big horror websites that theorized it could have a $100 million theatrical run. In retrospect I realized that this kind of thing is one of the reasons I’ve learned to ignore the big horror websites in terms of prognostications, criticism, or anything other than news. I think I really got the message around the time they started worrying about what Hostel Part 2‘s failure “meant for our genre.” A) It’s not our genre, that’s goofy; B) It failed because it was bad; C) In the short-term it means fewer shitty Hostel and Saw knockoffs will get greenlit, which is fine; D) in the medium-term it means some good horror movies might have a harder time finding distribution and an audience, but that’s always a crapshoot even in the best of times; E) in the long-term it won’t mean anything, because as we’ve seen time and time and time again, dozens of crappy Exorcist-Omen / slasher / self-reflexive / WB-stars-in-peril / Sixth Sense / J-horror / ’70s-remake movies can come and go and the kinds of people interested in making good horror movies will continue to make them in new and unexpected ways, and now we can just add torture porn to that list. In terms of The Mist, Cloverfield will still make a lot of money, and The Mist will end up with Carrie and The Shining on the perennial “hey, there are a few good Stephen King movies” articles that media websites run at Halloween, and it’ll make up its money on DVD if not in the theatres (and I can’t imagine it cost that much anyway) and we’ll all live happily ever after. The reason to be upset if horror movies don’t find an audience is if they’re good movies and people would enjoy them.

* I found this pan of No Country for Old Men by Fernando F. Croce fascinating insofar as it repeatedly uses the movie’s acknowledged strengths as exhibits for the prosecution. Much like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Croce cites the wholly successful use of Chigurh as a figure of horror as a failure. He does it by calling him “some peevish bad-guy out of Diamonds are Forever,” though, which is a lot (intentionally) funnier than anything Rosenbaum said. Also like Rosenbaum, he cites the Coens’ articulation of a bleak worldview as a failure, and though he faults it for its aesthetic shortcomings rather than its political ones, I of course agree with this argument no more than I agreed with the other one. Finally, and again like Rosenbaum but also reminiscent of the critics who lambasted Children of Men for its proficiency, he continuously cites the Coens’ ridonkulous level of skill as filmmakers as a sign of emotional paucity, which as a student and lover of film is utterly baffling to me; you’d think it’d indicate the opposite. Finally, Croce misuses the words “decimated” and “et al,” which is a dick move of me to point out, but I find that sort of thing funny when it’s done by someone who’s obviously a good writer. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* I liked this Dick Hyacinth post ranking the different types of continuity gaffes. Continuity is a tricky thing. As you might have gathered over the years, I’m a bit of a snob and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics tedious, but I’m also a bit of a nerd and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics delightful. I’ve come to think of continuity as one of the pleasures of superhero comics if used entertainingly. I think complaining about continuity in, I don’t know, Green Lantern is like pointing to a Conan novel and saying “this book requires you to know a lot about Conan.” Well, duh. I mean, hopefully it’s enjoyable on other levels, hopefully it’s not just a wikipedia entry with sequential art illustrations, but the continuity is what it is. Anyway, I think Dick’s post helps draw lines between helpful, fun continuity usage and reductive, byzantine regurgitation.

* Johnny Ryan, the G.G. Allin of humor comics, once called by this writer “the funniest cartoonist on Earth”, is premiering “dozens of new paintings inspired by cult, horror and exploitation films” in an art show called, appropriately enough, HORRORSHOW, debuting this Friday at California’s Secret Headquarters.

Please let there be a book of these coming out from Buenaventura or somebody.

* It feels good to be done with blogging The Dark Tower, for a few reasons. A) As I mentioned, it showed me I can handle really long-term reading-and-blogging projects, which I hadn’t been sure about. I’ve got a couple of biggies in mind now. B) In the meantime I can just enjoy a second breeze through the wonderful World War Z by Max Brooks, which I’m doing in lieu not just of those other two projects but reading the latest Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk novels, too. And because it bears repeating, I want to thank my commenters and email interlocutors once again for blogslinging along with me, which is really how I felt about it. Yep, I mean all you guys who encouraged me to stick with it, too. Your sincerity and passion challenged me not just, and not even mostly, to finish the books but to try to analyze and articulate my own less passionate reactions to them as best as I could. Thanks!

* Oh boy.

* Finally, it’s awesome that this is what pregnant Helena Bonham-Carter looks like.

Pix at The Daily Mail, via Jackie Danicki, who advances the absurd notion that HBC doesn’t look smoking hot in that photo.

Ron Moore is blogging.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

I saw Battlestar Galactica: Razor a couple weeks ago, but it aired last night and finally people are talking about it, and a friend of mine asked me what I thought. I thought it was okay. Had its moments.

“Sean–that’s all you got?!?!”

Yeah, that’s pretty much all I got. It wasn’t the most inspiring thing in the world, for good or ill. If it were just a regular episode I’d just shrug my shoulders and say “let’s see what happens next week.” But I’ll try:

* One thing that bothers me is that they didn’t show any physical affection at all between the Pegasus Six and Cain. I thought that was a cop-out. Not just because I want to watch sex scenes between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes, though I do, and often, but because every other couple (Tory and Anders for gods’ sakes!) gets their steamy slap’n’tickle sessions on camera for all to see. Why not the Gina and the Admiral? To paraphrase Law & Order, is it because they’re lesbians? You’d think after all the flack the show is taken for not having any gay characters, when they finally did introduce them they’d go the whole hog with ’em. Especially because they’re women and not guys, which makes the whole thing easier to swallow for the hoi polloi.

* I loved the old-school Cylons. I want more! (And I never watched the old show.)

* My other big beef is that we never get a real reason for Cain to be such a fascist hardass. The attack happens and boom, she’s shooting her XO in the head for not sending troops on a futile suicide run. If the idea is that she was always a nut and the Cylon attack just took off the handcuffs, that should have been better articulated.

* That flashback seems like something Adama should have brought up earlier, huh? This was the same pitfall I thought they narrowly avoided with the whole “Adama triggered the first post-ceasefire hostilities with they Cylons” story because they tied in his guilt about losing his friend Bulldog and that made his silence feasible. No such excuse here.

* I get impatient with fiction drawing out things we’ve already figured out long ago, it’s obviously a pet peeve of mine lately, but for real, were we not supposed to know that Kendra fired the first shots against the unarmed civilians?

* Still, it’s Battlestar Galactica and therefore better than 90% of anything else you could watch. Kendra was a cool character and well-acted. (Her bad skin was sexy!) Adama’s flashback and Kendra’s confrontation with the hybrid were good and creepy. Watching the Pegaus’s descent into collective madness was depressing and frightening. Lee, Kara, and Bill are still endlessly compelling.

In closing, it’s a goddamn crime that we have to wait until February April for more epsiodes of this show, and until god knows when for the end of the series.

Read: The Dark Tower–“Hides”; “Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane”; “Patrick Danville”; “The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear”); “Mordred”; “The Crimson King and the Dark Tower”; “Epilogue: Susannah in New York”; “Coda: Found”; “Appendix: Robert Browning–‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'”; Author’s Note

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Constant Reader.

There, in the scarlet field of Can’-Ka No Rey, I heard the sound. The Horn of the Eld.

Would you like to know what it sounded like?

Okay.

Listen closely…

Hark thee well, may it do ya fine…

It sounded like this.

—–

I don’t know what I was expecting. Not in terms of the ending itself; I totally expected that one. (God bless you, Bruce B., but like I said, you sure did spoil that sucker.) I mean in terms of the quality of the ending, the whole build-up included. After everything I’ve read and everything I’ve written about it, for some reason my hopes were up. Shoulda known better! But I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that the likes of the Three Stephen Kings, the evil stand-up comedian, and a guy with Harry Potter hand grenades couldn’t possibly be the best final bosses King could come up with for his goddamn seven-volume fantasy epic.

I wanted to believe that the successful resolution of the quest of Roland, this great lone warrior who strode the sands of time and space alone even when surrounded by friends, friends he almost inevitably led to their deaths on his behalf, wouldn’t hinge completely on the godlike actions of another character we’d never met until the book’s final chapters–unless you’d read another goddamn Stephen King book first, and if you hadn’t, hey, visit your local bookstore!

I wanted to believe that King would stop belaboring points that were painfully obvious to everyone, perhaps, but his own entranced self. That maybe he wouldn’t spend three full pages unraveling an anagram obvious to every single reader the second he had a character think “hey, why do those words look familiar?” That maybe he wouldn’t draw out the question of why the evil stand-up comedian cut the erasers off the pencils of the idiot-savant deus ex machina when it was plain as day that he could use them to erase things out of existence.

I wanted to believe that Mordred, who as both character and nemesis started lame and hadn’t improved, wouldn’t die the way he lived. But c’mon, you’ve gotta grant me this one. The whole sixth book was building up to this sucker’s birth! He was supposed to fulfill some prophecy (that we’d never heard before, but still)! He was named after the infamous Arthurian patricide! And he totally killed Randall Flagg (in the most bush-league and anticlimactic way possible, but still)! Surely he’d do something really cool and important and unpredictable before it was all over! Surely he’d do more than just run at the gunslinger’s camp in spider form, get shanghai’d by Oy, and get shot to death like a bobcat who smelled the food in their RV? I mean, that would be incredibly stupid and a colossal waste of time for it to play out like that, wouldn’t it?

I wanted to believe I wouldn’t literally be mocked and berated by the author of this series for wanting to read a satisfying ending. I thought maybe that this would be at least as important to the author (whether or not he’d truly deluded himself into thinking he was transcribing this nonsense rather than writing it himself, as he so frequently claimed) as it was to me. Shit, they sure would have been better books if it had been!

I wanted to believe the payoff would make the pain in getting there worthwhile.

Oh well!

I’ll tell you this, though: I actually liked the resolution (“resolution”) to Roland’s storyline just fine, as I predicted I would. It’s a good idea, and it fits. And interestingly, the prose in the section leading up to and following the revelation that Roland’s about to do the time warp again took on the tone of The Gunslinger, which is obviously a treat to me. I guess it’s appropriate considering that he goes directly to Chapter One, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading The Dark Tower Saga it’s not to expect the appropriate, and not to look a gift piece of good writing in the mouth when it comes along. So yeah, that part was just fine. It’s just everything that surrounded it that was either infuriating, insulting, or uninteresting. And need I even list the loose ends forever untied? From Bango Skank to the fate of the Grandfathers, from what Nort told Allie to what happened to Black Thirteen on 9/11, from LaMerk Industries to Rhea of the Cöos, from why the Mejis portion of Roland’s pre-The Gunslinger story was filled out in such detail while the rest was sketched in or ignored completely to the unimaginable battle Roland was supposed to wage at the Tower (please don’t tell me it was this ridiculous skeet-shooting game he played with the lame-ass Crimson King)…I mean, it was like King wasn’t even trying. Wow, is this whole “hey, I’m just the messenger” business a convenient excuse.

As for me? Well, now I’m done, which is a good feeling, let me tell you. It’s also the longest blogathon I’ve ever done, by a long shot. That much at least I’m grateful for. I learned I could read and blog about what I read every day for a long time, which I’d tried in the past and couldn’t keep up. I think I got something out of the exercise of reading every day and picking apart what worked and what didn’t in what I read. I think I was able to articulate certain ideas about genre and storytelling, and pinpoint what both what excites me about them and what leaves me cold. I think I learned a lot about where writers can go wrong, but I also learned that it’s possible to zig where they zagged. And it was a lot of fun interacting with the comment crew. I totally felt like it was a group effort.

Was it worth it? I don’t know. This is certainly the most time I’ve ever spent reading books I didn’t like all that much outside of a classroom environment. I can’t really say I enjoyed it. I can’t really say I’m glad I followed the advice of everyone who encouraged me to stick with it, the books get better, I’d come around. They didn’t and I didn’t. I don’t think the nuggets of goodness scattered throughout the seven volumes were worth the junk I had to wade through to get to them, and not just because of the junk in and of itself–I worry that exposure to that junk will leave me less favorably inclined to the Stephen King books and stories I’d come to know and love and really treasure before I laid eyes on the damned Dark Tower, and that’s a real tragedy, because those books mean a lot to me. Time will tell.

Go, then. There are better books than these.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks us for our favorite horror novels. Mine might surprise you given my mood of late.

Read: The Dark Tower–“New York Again (Roland Shows ID)”; “Fedic (Two Views)”; “The Thing Under the Castle”; “On Badlands Avenue”; “The Castle of the Crimson King”

Another chunk of the final book in the series, another ad for another Stephen King book that apparently it would have really helped to have read before getting to the climax of a seven-volume fantasy epic. I’m getting kind of tired of that, though I do take comfort from the fact that Roland seems no more anxious to read Insomnia than I do. But in a way, each of these King-centric interludes–the notion that character-King doesn’t always get the messages from Gan right so that’s why so much stuff in all the books that touch on the Tower mythos contradict one another; the idea that the reason there’s just so much shit going on in these books is because it’s basically being dictated to him by God and his usual process of narrowing and editing isn’t in effect; capping off the constant references throughout the series to graffiti artist “Bango Skank” by basically giving up and calling him “the Great Lost Character”; even the fact that King himself is a character in his own magnum opus–embody the problems they purport to explain and describe. There’s nothing wrong with these books that a red pencil couldn’t fix, but try telling that to a guy who thinks this stuff’s being beamed to him by divine intervention.

A few more trims and the strong stuff here would stand out. And there was strong stuff. The scary things under the castle, for example–the creepy doors to historical atrocities, the sound of a mouth full of fangs chewing endlessly behind a flimsy portal, that big giant centipede monster refugee from “The Mist” or “Jerusalem’s Lot.” The use of relentless, non-fatal chilliness, slowly driving Susannah and Roland into desperation. The three goofy Stephen King lookalikes (how great would it be if they were King’s first appearance in the series?) and their unpleasant fate. The Crimson King sitting on a throne of skulls while ordering all his followers to their deaths. I’ll even grant you the meeting between Roland and the heads of the corporation dedicated to facilitating his work in America. There’s almost enough stuff right there for a good book, but what you’ve got is about, I dunno, one-eighth of a gigantic overstuffed monstrosity that is itself one-seventh of an even MORE gigantic overstuffed monstrosity.

I’m also pissed because it felt like Flagg was going to be in the Crimson King’s castle but he wasn’t. Rip-off.

Via Infocult comes word of these astonishing hidden underground temples in the Italian countryside. Started in 1978 by an eccentric businessman and built in complete secrecy beneath the earth’s surface over the course of 16 years, the temple complex is 20 times the size of Big Ben.

Shades of everything from Foucalt’s Pendulum to Coldheart Canyon.

One thing I’ll grant The Mist is that its monsters are threatening the way Hostel‘s torturers or 28 Days Later‘s infected or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface is threatening. There’s no hardy-har-har-it’s-a-monster stuff or pauses to stand slackjawed and gawk at them “wow!”-style, reinforcing that it’s just a movie, like, at all. The film convincingly articulates the idea that if you see these things coming after you, you will either have to kill them or be killed yourself. I feel like it’s been a long time since a movie did that with non-humanoid monsters–the bug sequence in King Kong stands out in that regard too, but before that you’d have go back to, what? They still weren’t scary, but you did at least feel that kill-or-be-killed panic.

Read: The Dark Tower–“The Attack on Algul Siento”; “The Tet Breaks”; “Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South”; “Ves’-Ka Gan”

Bloodbath! Not since the shootouts in Mejis back in Wizard and Glass, and maybe not even since the massacre in Tull allllll the way back in The Gunslinger, have we seen the gunslingers cut loose like this. I enjoy that their methods go beyond the Thermopylae “pick the right place” strategy and generally dive straight for no-bones-about-it ambushing and shooting people in the back. They’re rough customers.

So naturally King starts killing them off in the least entertaining order possible, leaving my pick for “please off this one first,” Susannah, as the last non-Roland, non-Oy gunslinger standing. It certainly takes cojones on the author’s part to insert a race to prevent his real-life car accident right after the death of one of his main characters, and make it lead to the death of another. The problem is that the deaths aren’t as affecting as they’re supposed to be because, as I pointed out way back when, we’ve never been sold on Roland’s transformation from the grim hardcase who’d let a kid die rather than deviate from his quest to the loving den mother of his rag-tag bunch; it just sort of happened when King jettisoned the spare style of The Gunslinger for the busy Kingisms of The Drawing of the Three, as though the prose tics did the work for him. We’re supposed to feel this great ocean of grief overwhelming us, but I’m still not sure why. But because of this, the “King” material doesn’t bug me as much as it otherwise might. I actually like his character better than Eddie, and Jake throwing himself in front of a speeding van to save a guy is the kind of thing the kid would do, so that’s okay too. (It also helps that we’ve already had a great Jake death scene in this series.)

SPOILER WARNING. Real, straight-out spoilers this time. So if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read this, even if you’ve read the book–certain additions and changes are most definitely blown below.

So, The Mist. I went with it all the way till the end, until I got so mad that the dumb fucking studio fucking spoiled the fucking ending in the fucking COMMERCIALS (soldiers in hazmat suits using flamethrowers, um, HELLO) that I basically stormed off in disgust. It was only in the cold light of this disillusionment that I realized the movie wasn’t scary at all. Gross, sure, and intense in its gore, but never frightening, not even boo-scary. Maybe that last is because if you’ve read the novella, you know pretty much every major monster beat, with the exception of one new addition that’s such a flagrant Aliens rip-off that you know what’s coming anyway. The one thing that really succeeds on horror terms is the creature design, which takes a lot of the critters in directions that are both entirely faithful to the book and totally not what I would have expected, from the almost centipede-like tentacles to the death’s-head faces of all the insectoid beasts to blowing up the unseen lobster-monsters to King Kong size to shrinking the giant monster that walks over the jeep at the end but making it this creepy cthuloid mess that you can actually see rather than just a few giant legs that trail off into the stratosphere. But, and I stress, while some of this is cool, none of this is actually frightening, and horror movies should be scary. So, fail.

Ditto Mrs. Carmody. Never the most nuanced depiction of religious fundamentalism, she works in the novella because–well, because I read it for the first time when I was in 7th grade, probably. But let’s be generous and say she works because of the deliberate, lurid, pulpy quality that was King’s stated aim with the piece. By casting the younger, thinner, less central-casting Marcia Gay Harden, they had a chance to do something really precise and nasty regarding the apocalyptic fervor that lies beneath your garden-variety evangelical, but instead she chews the scenery like Elmer Gantry with the occasional “hi I’m actually a nutball” tic thrown in for seasoning. (I found her oddly sexy, though. I actually think this was a deliberate move on the movie’s part–as time passes and she exerts more influence on the survivors, her hair comes down and her behavior gets more and more passionate.) Tom Jane’s star turn as David Drayton, the lead, is hit and miss. His tough-guy act feels like just that, but he’s oddly excellent at conveying grief and horror. The supporting cast shines, though, I’ll give the movie that. Andre Braugher is just perfect as Brent Norton, better than the character is in the book; I didn’t see the racial subtext coming at all, and he played it brilliantly. Toby Jones’ Ollie is precisely the lovable little guy he’s supposed to be, William Sadler’s Jim is convincing in his journey from blustery douchebag to repentant would-be good-guy to broke-down cult member, and William DeMunn, who’s really given the single most important bit of acting in the whole film as he’s the first person we see to really react to what’s lurking in the mist, aces the assignment.

It’s actually the filmmaking that’s the best part of the movie. And I don’t mean the CGI, which actually gets a lot better than that opening tentacle salvo (shame they had to lead with the least convincing visuals). Frank Darabont uses jump cuts, zooms, hand-helds, fades, and an extremely judicious application of score to create a ragged, urgent rhythm. In terms of camerawork and editing it’s one of the more impressive horror films to come along in quite a while, simply because it’s doing stuff I can’t remember seeing in a horror film, and doing it pretty well. The best illustration is probably that initial panicked run through the parking lot and into the supermarket by DeMunn, which again is depicted in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated from reading the novella yet fits perfectly with its sense of unexplained, impending chaos.

What about the ending, then? I don’t have any problem with the mist dissipating and humanity coming out on top, since I’m actually pretty fascinated with the idea of apocalypses that end before the world does. Nor do I have a problem with Dave mercy-killing his companions, including his son; this was set up in the book and it’s completely believable. And as I mentioned, shock and sadness are handled really well by Jane, who’s given an awful lot to sell to the audience in this scene and does it. The problem is just that the ending feels like what it is, which is slapped on. First of all, it cuts the entire affair short–the mist is gone, there’s no cryptic radio message from Hartford, perilous journeys to Connecticut, eking out a living with a band of survivors tirelessly searching for a solution, or all the other good stuff that your imagination unfurled before you when you reached the end of the novella. That’s that. Secondly and more importantly, we haven’t really gotten to know these characters beyond their stock roles. Unlike the comparable units in the first two George Romero Dead movies, for example, none of these five has done anything surprising, nor have they grown and changed from the people we first met, really. They’re just there, so this horrible ending that befalls them is just there too. Finally (and I’ll admit this just may be where I’m at right now) all the King-fan in-jokes–from the fact that Dave starts the movie painting the poster for a movie of The Dark Tower to Mrs. Carmody’s quoting the Trashcan Man’s catchphrase to the Castle Rock Gazette on the newsstand to various King idioms and neologisms peppered throughout the dialogue–naturally undercut the movie’s effort to earn the seriousness of a quadruple murder/infanticide and attempted suicide-by-monster that turns out to have been completely unnecessary.

Ultimately, I’ll just say it’s not as good as the book. Sometimes that doesn’t mean much. In this case it means a lot.

SEMI-QUASI-SPOILER WARNING FOR THE MIST. What I’m about to say isn’t itself a spoiler, it’s more like a clue that could lead you to intuit a spoiler. But I would still heartily recommend that you DON’T READ ANY FURTHER if you haven’t seen The Mist.

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Okay, everyone gone?

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You in the back?

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Okay, right. Now then.

Is it too much to ask that when a movie adaptation of a book changes the book’s ending in some top-secret fashion, they don’t SPOIL THE FUCKING NEW ENDING IN THE FUCKING COMMERCIALS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

My wife is emetophobic, which means she’s afraid of vomit. In order to go to the movies she needs to get a reliable “vomit-check” first to make sure she’s in the clear. There are a few trusted friends we use as sources–paradoxically, they tend to be the people who find vomiting hilarious, which means they’ll remember it if they see it–but there’s also a great website called Kids in Mind that non-judgmentally lists any questionable content (down to its most minute, like someone sneezing) so that parents can judge whether a movie’s appropriate for their kids. They’ll list vomit as part of their “violence/gore” subcategory, but of course they list everything else. So I’m sitting here as Amy goes through the listing for The Mist to see if she can see it, and while there’s apparently no vomiting in it she just keeps going “Eeeewwwww…eeeewwwwwww…eeeeeewwwwwwwww…OH MY GOD EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!”

Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched to see this movie now.

Read: The Dark Tower–“The Last Palaver (Sheemie’s Dream)”

The thing in the world that makes me the saddest is roadkill. Roadkill makes me so, so sad. This is because when an animal is hit by a car on its way someplace else, that animal isn’t dying for a reason–not even for a bad reason, like avarice or ignorance or cruelty. That animal dies for no reason. Its death is literally pointless.

With Sheemie’s beautiful nightmare King has finally sold me on the threat to the Dark Tower, and why maybe neither Flagg/Walter’s death nor the lameness of the Crimson King and Mordred as villains ultimately won’t hurt the sense of urgency to stop the Tower’s destruction that much. Different people may have their own reasons for helping the destruction of the Beams and the Tower along–the Crimson King and Blaine and Jack Mort because they’re crazy, Mordred to spite Roland, Walter/Marten/Flagg to try and sneak in and take over at the last minute, Pimli and Finli because they’re hard workers and get satisfaction from that, the Breakers because they need to feel appreciated and can’t face the truth of the circumstances behind why they’re appreciated, the low men out of religious fundamentalism, the vampires because they like killing things and eating them, Rhea for revenge and cruelty’s sake, Balazar’s mafia and the Big Coffin Hunters because it pays well, Ben Slightman Sr. because he wants to protect his kid and maybe get something out of it himself, Andy the Robot and the Wolves because they’re programmed to, John Farson and his followers because they hate the prevailing order that props the Tower up–but what it all adds up to is nothing, no reason. The Beams are being broken, the Tower is being knocked down, reality is being destroyed, joy and beauty are being torn apart and replaced by the sad, meaningless entropy of the first few books which itself will then be replaced by nothing at all, all ultimately for no reason at all, other than that’s what happens to good things in this world.

That dream is one of the best things King’s ever written.

“It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing.”

–John Russell, managing director, Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., “Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm,” AP, CNN.com

Read: The Dark Tower–“Tracks on the Path”

This brief interlude with Roland and Jake hinges on two of the characters’ most endearing traits: Roland’s near-inability to be caught by surprise, as it turns out he’s known Mordred has been tracking them; and the sad love between Roland and Jake. The latter was the emotional heart of the series’ first and best book, and while it’s depressing that the prose here is not that volume’s equal, it’s at least comforting to see some weight given to the deepest, darkest, most complex relationship the main characters have established. As I’ve said before, if these books starred only Roland and Jake (and Oy), they’d be better.

There’s a cameo by the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, who goes by the nicknames Tony Starks and Iron Man and has sampled the old IM cartoon heavily, and is basically the exact kind of smooth, rich, talented badass Iron Man should be. Someone on this movie gets it!

Bonus points to Ghostface for referring to himself in the third person as “the kid” throughout the interview.

(Via Pitchfork.)

Read: The Dark Tower–“The Shining Wire”; “The Door Into Thunderclap”; “Steek-Tete”; “The Master of Blue Heaven”

So that’s it? He’s dogged the forces of good through The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, and six and a half volumes of The Dark Tower, and how does Randall Flagg–the villain formerly known as Walter–go out? Like a punk. Like a sucker. Popping up again only to be hoodwinked and eaten by stupid spider-baby Mordred, a character he’s at least an order of magnitude more interesting and more frightening and more established and funnier and cooler than. Boo! Hiss!

To make matters worse, this account of Flagg’s demise futher mucks up King’s already shaky (that’s an understatement) continuity. One of the few clarifying revisions King made to The Gunslinger was to spell out that Walter/Marten/Flagg wasn’t a servant to John Farson, Walter/Marten/Flagg is John Farson. So what does King do just a couple years after writing that? Ignore it and say Walter/Marten/Flagg and John Farson were indeed two separate people. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Ditto the new assertion that Walter/Marten/Flagg was once a full-fledged human being and is approximately 1500 years old, rather than the indescribably ancient demon he’s tagged as in The Stand, a book superior to this series in every way including positing an interesting origin for Randall Flagg.

The thing that really rankles here is that we King readers have been following Randall Flagg for just as long as we’ve been following Roland Deschain, and through better books for that matter. To punk him out like this just plain feels like a rip-off, and once again displays a shocking lack of understanding of what is interesting about these books. Having your new big bad kill the former big bad is the oldest trick in the book writers have for making the new villain look dangerous, but that’s not what happens here. Here, you just wish there was no new big bad, because the original one was just fine, especially after King informs you that no matter who he’s nominally working for, Flagg is always looking out for number one. That’s the kind of villainy I can get behind!

So. Now the guy who teleported out of Las Vegas in time to avoid a nuclear bomb blast has been eaten alive by a psychic spider, and we’re left with–what, exactly, as an antagonist? Nothing all that frightening, to be honest. The Crimson King is by all accounts crazy, and no more an “antagonist” for Roland than late-seasons Uncle Junior was for Tony Soprano. His minions, as represented by Pimli Prentiss and Finli o’ Tego, the head honchos at the Blue Heaven telepath gulag, are basically working stiffs; I know this is King’s attempt to say “and the Nazis were just regular people too,” but I don’t care, it’s still an incredibly uncompelling set-up for the books’ big climax. I guess Mordred is kind of a villain in the classic sense, but not really–he’s a grumpy kid who hates his dad and likes to eat. I want Randall Flagg’s gleeful, giggling nihilism and swagger.

Finally, I don’t care about Ted Brautigan.

1) I saw No Country for Old Men.

2) Okay, I saw most of No Country for Old Men. Almost all of it, in fact. Except for the ending, during which I had gotten up to go to the bathroom.

3) I did not spontaneously combust upon returning from the bathroom and discovering I had missed the ending of No Country for Old Men. This is an achievement in sheer willpower.

4) I got to know this gentleman:

Future horror icon and Halloween-costume perennial. Guaranteed.

5) I read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s infamous review of No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this is just the brain damage incurred upon discovering that I’d missed the film’s ending when I got up to take a leak, but I am partly convinced this review was conjured from my unconscious mind as an embodiment of the stupidest possible way to engage with a violent genre movie. It’s not just, and it’s not even mostly, the unintentionally hilarious, outraged insistence that everything be about one’s own politics, perhaps best represented here by the straight-faced statement that a reference to a serial killer’s dog-collared victim is a “particular allusion to Abu Ghraib.” Nor is it the inevitable factual error made while ignoring all other concerns in favor of getting everything point in the direction the reviewer wants it to go, in this case lambasting a character for refusing to help a dying man when it is precisely helping that dying man that gets him into the mess he’s in in the first place. No, the review’s philosophical core is what I’ll have no truck with, and that is this:

The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity.

To which I can only reply (twelve months ago):

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That’s what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn’t understand the belief at all.

6) I saw a trailer for There Will Be Blood, which with a combination of its title, its music by Jonny Greenwood, and post-Bill the Butcher Daniel Day-Lewis may have been the most ominous trailer I’ve ever seen.

The new Cloverfield trailer is out. It looks like it will be a scary movie.

(Via AICN.)