Stephen King's Bag of Bones--Book and Film

photo: Cover of Bag of Bones, from its Wikipedia page

Some quick thoughts after having seen Stephen King's Bag of Bones (or, Stephen King's Bag of Bones) on A&E last night, while I'm presently reading it (and had read it when it first came out):

--First, let's start off by saying that the movie was really bad, okay?  Especially as compared to the book, which, in some spots, is among his best.  I just finished the part now where he had the fever and the triple dream of being with Jo, Mattie and Sara Tidwell at the same time.  The feelings, the descriptions, the skeletons and corpses described, especially those in NYC with his agent...good, perhaps great, stuff, that nothing in the movie matched.  I know that books are better than movies for just this reason--because of the details, the images you can produce on paper that you can't produce on film (especially on a commercial channel like A&E)--but the huge difference in quality and image go beyond the normal book to movie difference here.

--Pierce Brosnan looked just plain creepy when he smiled, didn't he?  Didn't his smile look more like a carnival clown's grimace?  He didn't do it for me in this role.

--The movie didn't, or couldn't, go into the vagaries of small-town life or the internal thoughts and fears of Mike Noonan--both things that make up 90% of the book.

--When I first finished the book, I remember thinking, "That's Stephen King doing Peter Straub."  High praise.

--Stephen King's internal dialogue is perhaps the best in the business.  His vocal dialogue is, of course, excellent as well.  The movie took large helpings of dialogue straight from the book.  I'm talking verbatim.  Stanley Kubrick famously did the same with The Shining.

--Despite the violence and gore (excessive by my prudish standards for a commercial channel like A&E), the movie was not scary at all.  The book is.  The movie did do a good job, though, of the gory creepy.  (I'm still seeing the ugly woman's jaw-dropping dying silent scream after getting stabbed in the neck.)  But a pruny and green and grimy dead thing looks like a pruny and green and grimy dead thing, and there's only so many times you can see that before it's not scary anymore.  Stanley Kubrick didn't understand this for The Shining, either; nor did the makers of The Shining miniseries.

--The ending of the movie, I'll say again, was effective, but way too violent for A&E.  He even told the little girl to look away before he stabbed the woman in the neck with the thin scissors, before the gouts of dark blood sputtered out.  But the little girl had not looked away, as the viewer wouldn't, either.

--The beginning of the movie--not in the book--has Mike at a book signing.  A fan comes up and says "I'm your number one fan."  Before I could say, "Annie Wilkes," or "Misery," to someone I was watching it with, Mike's wife leans over and says "Have fun with Annie Wilkes."  This overt nod to Stephen King didn't work for me, and, loathe as I am to say it, newer (and younger) Stephen King fans won't know who Annie Wilkes is.

--The pickup truck blowing-up scene was an almost-hilarious sendup of every car-hits-something, however slowly, and blows up scene ever made for a parody.  When your film is an unintentional parody, that is not a good thing.

--I have to assume that if a Stephen King film isn't released in the theatres, then it isn't going to be good.  If the producers thought it would be great, they would've released it theatrically, where the big bucks are.  And who doesn't think of big bucks when they think of Stephen King?

--Some of the movie's dialogue (not taken from the book) and scenes were simply not realistic.  Some of them laughably so.  For example, the man in the senior facility at the end hadn't told a soul his dirty little secret for over 50 years, but it takes just 50 seconds for Mike to get it out of him.  The book does not contain one scene, or one piece of dialogue, like that.  Not one.  Garris just doesn't understand the genre.  The scene in the book, where Mike stands on the stairs in the dark, and communicates with one or more ghosts as they knock on the boards below his feet (once for yes, two for no), was eerily effective and could've easily been done in the film.

--The book, simply enough, was in the hands of a master.  And the movie wasn't.  Surprising, I think, as Mick Garris co-wrote, produced and directed it.  Hasn't he done good things before?  I've heard the name.  Be right back...

--Of course!  He directed The Sleepwalkers; The Stand; and the aforementioned Shining miniseries.  He wrote *batteries not included, which was very good, but the aforementioned tv fare, which was not.  And his The Fly II was simply awful, but a guilty pleasure if you like gory flicks.  He directed Psycho IV, which I actually liked. I haven't seen Hocus Pocus, but it's very popular and well-received.

--Whoever sang the songs Sara Tidwell sang did a very good job.  The song repeated throughout was well-done, jazzy, memorable and creepy, all at the same time.  The woman who played Sara Tidwell did a great job in an odd role.  (If she also sang the music, I doubly applaud her.)  Melissa George did a very good job, too, in a brief and thankless role.

--I hate it when the name-selling appears as part of the title, like Stephen King's Bag of Bones, as the movie is actually called.  I assure you, that mess was more Mick Garris' Bag of Bones.  John Carpenter does this for his movies, too.  Woody Allen doesn't.  Hate that.  The piece either stands on its own merit, or it doesn't.  If it doesn't, don't make it.  If it does, you don't need the name to sell it.

--Someone mentioned earlier that the writer must okay all material made from his written works.  He can't, and he doesn't.  Once you sell the copyrights, you're all done with it.  The moviemakers could include you in on things, but they don't have to, no matter how big a deal you are.  I think it's telling that Stephen King didn't make a cameo appearance in this film, as is his trademark.  Then again, he didn't in Shawshank Redemption, or The Shining, either, so never mind.

--That cabin in the woods was more like a mansion in the woods.

--Read the book and save your DVR space for something else, like American Pickers.

A Winter Haunting--Dan Simmons

Very effectively creepy.  Reminds me a lot of an Aidan Quinn/Kate Beckinsale movie, Haunted, and John Gielgud, in which everyone's a ghost, and everything's haunted, and that the beautiful mansion he saw was actually a decrepit wreck of a former mansion.  Both this book and that movie have an almost sex scene, too.  No, check that--Quinn and Beckinsale have a scene, maybe the first nude scene with a "ghost" ever on film.  And the dead talk to each other, and there's animosity...Well, anyway, both are credibly creepy, hard to do these days, when we all know the tripes of horror and ghost stories.  That this book succeeds despite that is deserving of applause in of itself.  But perhaps the best thing to say about it is that I read all 371 pages in half a day, and this after finishing another long novel, Straub's A Dark Matter, today as well.  Not feeling well, physically and psychically.  Anyway, a good psychological tale that tips its hat to the works of Henry James, and a few other works of creepiness...though I could have done without the Egyptian gods parts, and the extensive Beowulf references, but you need something to set your writing apart, right?  The ending of the occasional ghost-narrator taking over the recuperating, and coma-resting, body of the main character is sort of inspired, and not believable, and a nice touch, all at the same time.  Another Dan Simmons winner.

Four More Straub

Ghost Story

My favorite Straub.  Rivals anything King has done, including The Shining, The Stand, It, etc.  One of the few books, like The Shining, to actually and literally give me the chills.  Great read as a mystery, as horror, as literature, as, well, as anything!  A must-read for any fan of any genre.  And brilliantly constructed, from the very first sentence.

Houses Without Doors

Good compilation of stuff, uneven when combined, well-written individually.  Contains stories of men who go crazy, partly because they read too much.  Uh-oh...

In the Night Room

Solid, creepy, and well-stylized.  Straub's just a good writer, no matter what the genre.  He could've written in any genre.

The Throat

So well-written that I read all 600 pages or so in about three days.  Straub is simply a good writer.  Good story; characterization; mood; setting.  All coalesce to an effective creepiness.

Getting Back, Slowly--Peter Straub's A Dark Matter

Interesting read from the POV of a writer.  Might have liked it less if I'd read it when I first encountered Straub in the 80s, solely as a reader.  What I mean is, the ending isn't really in doubt, per se, in the sense that you're not worried about any of the characters.  You know they'll be okay.  It's a little like The Decameron, in a way, maybe like Canterbury Tales as well: basically a small bunch of specifically designed people (they're not stock characters; that's important) who all tell their angle or POV of the same instance.  Speaking of which, An Instance of the Fingerpost springs to mind, as well.  Anyway, you never see one of the major characters--except maybe briefly in an airport, and in a hotel lobby and elevator--and the whole thing may just be an excuse for Straub to go phantasmagoric on us (which he does well), but as a stream-of-consciousness step into evil, and a bit into the unknown, it holds up well.  The existential scene with the boy and the cards and colors representing the realities he thinks he's experiencing was a nice touch.  He still goes on a little too long about the mundane--where they're eating; what they're eating--which is a constant slight, and sometimes not-so-slight, critique of Straub as a writer for me, but he gets away with it.  (One gets the feeling at this time that Straub himself cares a great deal about where he's eating and what he's eating, and that he likes the good stuff.)  In short, if you like various views of the same scenes in a book, and how they're all different, yet the same, you'll like this book, and if you don't, you won't.