Necessary Roughness

Last week I was pretty tough on the new USA legal drama Suits, and the network's latest new drama Necessary Roughness gets back to what makes USA shows appealing: It's kind of forgettable and not exactly innovative, but it's likable enough to be able to watch on a casual basis, perfect laundry-folding or dish-washing TV. I doubt I'll deliberately tune in again, but I could watch it randomly a week or a month from now and have a perfectly good time.

It's also a slight change of pace for USA, since it features a psychotherapist rather than a lawyer or cop or doctor as its main character. Callie Thorne plays Dr. Dani, as she's known, who in the first episode is recruited as the therapist for a big-shot loose-cannon football star. She helps him out and is offered the chance to act as the team's go-to therapist, although press materials indicate she'll also start treating other high-profile clients (actors, politicians, etc.). I'm not entirely sure how that will work, since the regular supporting cast is focused around the football team, but since therapists tend to see clients regularly, presumably characters will stick around rather than being a "case of the week."

Thorne is appealing as the somewhat cliched character of the therapist who can't get a handle on her own problems, and the pilot does a good job of balancing the character development with the plot of the week (something that Suits failed to do). Therapy is less obviously results- and process-oriented than medical treatment or legal work, and the show has a tough time showing how exactly Dani helps her client address his problems. But Roughness breezes along amiably enough, and Dani's interactions with her teenage kids, her gambling-addicted mother, her asshole ex-husband (go-to asshole actor Craig Bierko) and her ditzy best friend (Amanda Detmer) are all enjoyable to watch and full of potential. I probably won't be watching Necessary Roughness again anytime soon, but for fans of the kind of show that USA puts out, this is a much safer bet than Suits.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Barney's Version

I haven't read the Mordecai Richler novel that Barney's Version is based on, but it's not hard to tell that the movie has been condensed from a much larger narrative. The sprawling character study is entertaining and often moving, with a great lead performance from Paul Giamatti, but its various elements often feel disjointed, like there's some connective tissue that got lost in the translation from page to screen. It's no surprise to learn that the novel relies on first-person perspective and a question of narrative reliability, as the aging Barney (suffering from Alzheimer's disease) tells his story (his "version"), while his son offers corrections.

That whole device is missing from the movie, although Barney (Giamatti) still suffers from Alzheimer's disease in the present-day framing sequences. Without the narrative uncertainty, it instead comes off as a little sappy, although the movie avoids overplaying the cliched memory-loss moments too much. The main draw of the story isn't that part, anyway, but the flashbacks to Barney's life as a younger man, first as a vagabond in Italy bumming around with his drug-addict aspiring novelist best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) and marrying a troubled free spirit (Rachelle Lefevre, underused). Barney then heads back to his native Montreal, where he becomes a TV producer on a trashy soap opera and marries a shrill Jewish stereotype (Minnie Driver). Driver's character (who's never named) is pretty one-dimensional, and Driver's inscrutable accent and hammy mannerisms don't help her develop further.

It takes almost half the movie to get to the heart of Barney's story, his romance with the lovely and compassionate Miriam (Rosamund Pike), the love of his life and mother of his children. The bits with Driver are sometimes funny, thanks mostly to Dustin Hoffman's goofy performance as Barney's uncouth dad, but Barney's relationship with Miriam has real depth and emotion, and the slow demise of their marriage is the movie's most effective and resonant plot point. Pike does a great job of conveying Miriam's allure as well as her intelligence, and she convincingly shows how Miriam could fall for this schlubby older guy. She then just as convincingly shows Miriam's heartbreak as their relationship falls apart. A good hour of the movie is a wonderfully affecting portrait of the arc of a relationship, but it's a little lost amid all the other stuff (including a tacked-on mystery about the possible murder of Boogie). A novel can easily encompass this kind of diversity in taking stock of one man's entire life; the movie struggles to do the same, although it comes out mostly ahead.

Available on DVD June 28.

Suits

USA shows are not generally known for being edgy, but the first episode of new legal drama Suits deploys basic-cable swear words and a drug-dealing subplot like it's angling to be taken seriously, which only makes its formulaic set-up all the more unimpressive. The extra-long pilot also spends more than half an hour setting up the extremely basic premise, so that the boring case of the week comes off as an afterthought (not that it's really worth any more attention). I imagine that future episodes will focus more on the procedural stories, and there's no indication here that creator Aaron Korsh (who was a writer on the similarly unimpressive ABC legal drama The Deep End) has any innovative or original stories on tap.

The characters that will have to anchor this show around the cases of the week aren't really worth following, either. They're probably supposed to come off as cool and capable, but I just found the two leads to be irritating douchebags. The idea is that Mike (Patrick J. Adams) is some kind of slacker genius with a photographic memory, so he never went to law school but he knows everything about the law. He's been supporting himself by taking the bar exam for people, and has reluctantly agreed to help out his drug-dealer best friend. Then he conveniently (although it takes far too long for the events to fall into place) runs into hotshot corporate lawyer Harvey (Gabriel Macht), who is also conveniently looking for an unconventional maverick like himself to take on as his new associate. Harvey agrees to fabricate some fancy credentials for Mike, and finally we have a show. What should have taken at most 10 minutes takes three times that.

Harvey jerks Mike around and pretends not to care about Mike or their clients, but of course deep down he really does. Mike knows every aspect of the law but can't do practical things like fill out a subpoena form. They're collections of quirks rather than real people, and even welcome faces like Gina Torres and Rick Hoffman in the supporting cast can't make up for the void at the center of the show. USA shows are usually breezy and inoffensive, even if they don't exactly compel you to watch every week, but this one is just insufferable.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Combat Hospital

Summer on network TV is time for cheap reality shows and Canadian imports, and ABC's Combat Hospital is the latter, another standard-issue TV drama that feels just a tiny bit off thanks to being produced abroad. At least Combat Hospital doesn't try to hide its its foreign origins like another ABC show, Canadian cop drama Rookie Blue. The show takes place at an internationally staffed field hospital in Kandahar, so characters come from a variety of countries that make up the coalition fighting in Afghanistan, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia and, yes, Canada, where main character Dr. Rebecca Gordon (Michelle Borth) hails from.

There's some decent acting talent here, including Elias Koteas as the hospital's head doctor and Deborah Kara Unger as an Australian psychiatrist (although Unger barely shows up in the pilot). But despite the unique setting, most of what happens in the first episode is fairly basic medical-drama stuff, including a useless pregnancy scare (plus scene-setting relationship trauma) for the main character, some vague operating-room suspense, and a character who says "It's nothing" and then later (surprise!) collapses and convulses. The cast also seems strangely underpopulated for a show of this type, which would usually explore the scope of a large medical operation. Here you get the sense that the four main characters are the only doctors in the entire place (although for all I know, that's true of a place like this).

The show is set in 2006 and doesn't seem to be angling for any political commentary; the wartime milieu is mainly just an excuse for heightened urgency in the medical emergencies, and in practice isn't much different from the approach used in the short-lived and little-loved Off the Map. Medical-drama junkies who are desperate for something new to watch will probably find this show tolerable, and performers like Koteas and Unger could bring some depth to it eventually, but for now Combat Hospital is just a generic medical drama with superficially distinctive trappings.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: Payment on Demand (1951)

Despite how old-fashioned it seems now, Payment on Demand probably represented a pretty progressive attitude toward divorce in 1951, just in broaching the subject in a straightforward, non-sensationalistic manner. It seems horribly retrograde now, of course, with its harsh judgment of a woman's desire for even a modicum of independence and self-determination, but you can see the wheels of progress turning slowly but surely in the background, in the ways that some characters interact and respond to the news that wealthy businessman David Ramsey (Barry Sullivan) has decided to divorce his wife of many years, Joyce (Bette Davis). Yes, there's the sleazy married guy who hits on Joyce as soon as he learns she's divorced, and yes, there are the patronizing lawyers and private detectives who take advantage of her distress. But there's also a surprisingly sympathetic and nuanced reaction from Joyce's society friends, as well as from her young-adult daughters. You get the impression that by the time the younger Ramseys get around to potential divorces, things will be a whole lot easier for them.

Director and co-writer Curtis Bernhardt sort of stacks the deck against Joyce, though, showing her as a manipulative social climber who pushed her husband to become a high-powered rich executive when he would have preferred a simple rural life. It's an interesting performance from Davis, because Joyce isn't just a conniving villain that Davis can play with maniacal glee; she's a flawed woman who's a bit insensitive and calculating in her efforts to achieve what she believes is best for her and her family. Bernhardt sets up periodic flashbacks throughout the movie, showing the development of Joyce and David's relationship from early bliss to eventual resentment (it's sort of like the 1951 version of Blue Valentine), and Joyce is clearly the bad guy in many of them, but she doesn't do what she does out of malice. Davis plays her more as sad and misguided, and it's a shame that the movie essentially dismisses Joyce's interests and goals, because they are entirely legitimate.

Regardless of Joyce's shortcomings or genuine concerns, of course the movie has to head toward her and David patching things up, although at least it resists tying things up as neatly as, say, a movie made 10 years earlier might have. Bernhardt allows for ambiguity in the flashbacks (which use an interesting theater-style technique of constructing walls out of translucent material that gives everything a sort of artificial feel), and he even gives David's mistress probably the most progressive attitude in the whole film. When she and David are discovered by the P.I. Joyce has hired, he desperately offers to marry her so that she won't have to endure a toxic scandal. But she brushes the idea aside, asserting that her friends and associates won't care that she had an affair with a married (but separated) man. Throughout the scene, lush classical music plays like the swelling score of an old movie, and when the mistress tells David she's through with him, she shuts off the record player in her apartment and abruptly cuts the music. It's a stark and creative way to show the contrast between generational attitudes, and an indication of the sophistication that this movie has in spurts, even if it's a little dull and conservative on the whole.

Triskaidekaphilia: 13 Moons

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

In the early '90s, Alexandre Rockwell was an important part of the vanguard of new independent filmmakers, along with people like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. He collaborated with those two (as well as Allison Anders) on the 1995 omnibus film Four Rooms, and he won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his 1992 film In the Soup. It seemed like he had a promising future ahead of him.

But unlike Tarantino or Rodriguez or Kevin Smith, Rockwell was never able to translate his initial acclaim into a lasting career, and he's made films only sporadically since the '90s. By 2002, he still had enough goodwill to assemble a pretty impressive cast for 13 Moons, including Steve Buscemi, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell and Peter Stormare, along with both the filmmaker's ex-wife (Jennifer Beals) and his future wife (Karyn Parsons). There isn't anything impressive about 13 Moons beyond the casting, though, and even the many capable actors in the ensemble turn in some pretty lackluster work. Rockwell shoots on ugly, cheap-looking video, and half the time it looks like the cameraman is running to catch up with actors who've wandered away from the set. The rest of the time the camera sits uncomfortably close to the actors' faces, not in a revealing, well-composed close-up but like an awkward, inept home movie.

The plot involves the tired device of disparate characters coming together over the course of one night, in this case all connected to a bail bondsman (David Proval) whose son is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. The unlikely crew works together to track down an unstable donor (Stormare) who's run off from the hospital, in the process coming to terms with their own personal issues, etc. None of the actors seem to have a handle on who their characters are, and most of them never evolve beyond their initial one-dimensional portrayals. The movie ends with one of the phoniest, most random "moment of clarity" bits I've ever seen, as a yellow hot air balloon flies over the city (via incredibly fake-looking special effects), somehow symbolizing rebirth (or something?) for these damaged people. It's a fittingly nonsensical ending for a movie that can never justify its own existence. I haven't seen any of Rockwell's earlier films, but whatever he had in the '90s, he'd clearly lost it by 2002.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: So Big! (1932)

This one is kind of a bust on two fronts: On the Bette Davis front, her presence in So Big! is pretty paltry, confined to the last 20 minutes of the movie and just a handful of scenes (I couldn't even find a decent picture of her in it). Plus, it's a pretty unremarkable movie overall, with Barbara Stanwyck giving a fairly colorless performance as a woman who goes from an artistic dreamer to a hardscrabble farmer while trying to give her son the creative life she never had. It rushes through a decades-spanning story in about 80 minutes, with Stanwyck's Selina going from young girl to old woman over the course of the movie. The rushed pacing means that the movie never really pauses long enough to give any of its plot elements enough time to develop. Just when we're getting used to Selina as a young schoolteacher in rural Illinois, she gets married to a taciturn farmer and pops out a kid. And just when we're getting used to Selina as a farmer's wife with a young son, her husband dies and the kid's all grown up.

The whole movie flies by in that way, until Selina's old and gray and her son is a heartless businessman who gave up his ambitions of being an architect. At that point the movie is three-quarters over anyway, and that's when we get a little bit of Bette Davis as a fabulously sassy artist who teases Selina's son Dirk with her sexy allure but pulls back because he's such a boring suit with no passion for anything. Davis, looking delightfully fetching and with a naughty twinkle in her eye, does wonders with the small part, and even our old friend George Brent the wet blanket (in the first of his many collaborations with Davis) shows up about five minutes before the movie ends and provides a bit of a spark.

None of that makes up for the hectic pacing of the rest of the movie, or the abrupt ending, or Stanwyck's listless performance. Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was adapted for the screen two other times (once before this, and once after). For her sake, I hope those versions were more interesting.

Stephen King Month: The Shining (1980)

I have to confess that I'm not much of a Stanley Kubrick fan; that's film-critic heresy, but much of Kubrick's work strikes me as too aloof and closed off, and even the movies of his that I like I tend to appreciate more than enjoy. The Shining is a movie of immense technical achievement, but at heart I find it too cold. That kind of detachment is fine for certain stories, but Stephen King's work is almost always driven by emotion, and I think that's a major element lacking in Kubrick's film. At the same time, I was constantly impressed with Kubrick's ability to build tension in a sort of sadistic, dispassionate way, like a kid torturing a bug with magnifying glass. It's difficult to empathize with any of the characters in the movie, but the sense of dread that comes out of the imagery combined with the relentless score of modernist classical music will eat at you over time.

The Shining is also just an amazing movie to look at; it features one of the earliest uses of the Steadicam, and Kubrick's long tracking shots through the cavernous Overlook Hotel are mesmerizing, giving a sense of its enormity as well as its emptiness. The hotel itself was built entirely on soundstages, and it's a monumental achievement in production design. Kubrick's meticulousness comes through in the movie's use of color, the way each corridor and room is dominated by a particular hue, sometimes bold and bright, sometimes muted and pale, but always noticeable and always contributing to the sense of the characters being isolated and overwhelmed.

The characters themselves are another story, though. Despite Kubrick's legendary penchant for dozens of takes, the performances in The Shining don't quite work together, or with the movie's impeccable design sense. Jack Nicholson, as writer Jack Torrance, is plenty intense and scary, but the problem is that he plays Jack as essentially unhinged from the start, even before the Overlook starts to warp his mind. So even the early domestic scenes of Jack and his family, or his interview with the managers of the Overlook for the job of winter caretaker, come off as slightly unsettled and disturbing. While King's story is about Jack's descent into madness and his possession by the evil that resides in the hotel, the movie seems to present Jack as inherently unstable, and thus much of the humanity of the character is lost.

Shelley Duvall is irritatingly hysterical as Jack's wife Wendy, and Danny Lloyd is awkward and flat as their son Danny, although that sometimes contributes to the creepiness of his line readings. It's weird to say that the movie succeeds in spite of its characters, but that's a testament to Kubrick's abilities as a craftsman. It misses the point of King's novel, and it seems to have a misunderstanding of what's truly scary about the story, but it nevertheless manages that feeling of dull anxiety throughout, which is something that few King movies achieve. And of course, telling the story exactly as conceived in the novel isn't the best approach anyway; I may not love this movie, but I wouldn't hesitate to take it over the more literal King-penned TV adaptation from 1997. That one has the whole story, but almost none of the craft.

How far to Castle Rock: Kubrick is definitely not the type for cutesy references to other works, although at one point Jack does mention Portland, Maine.

Stephen King Month: Christine (1983)

It's weird to see someone else's name as the possessive credit on a Stephen King movie; even the most tangentially connected films often slap King's name above the title as a cheap marketing gimmick. But this is indeed as much "John Carpenter's Christine" as it is "Stephen King's Christine," and Carpenter is one of a handful of directors who seems genuinely interested in putting his own stamp on King's material rather than just serviceably dramatizing it or cashing in on the familiar name. He doesn't bring as bold a vision to the King material as, say, David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick, but he does make the movie his own. Of all the King movies that I watched this month and had never seen before, Christine is the only one that actually impressed me.

It fits in well with other early Carpenter horror movies like Halloween and The Fog, setting horrific events among mundane suburban activities, and featuring unassuming average people as the protagonists. And Christine the car, a 1958 Plymouth Fury with some sort of demonic soul, is as unknowable as Michael Myers or the fog itself; none of the "villains" in these movies ever speaks a word. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips take out some of the back story from King's novel, making Christine more of an enigma, and the movie is scarier when we don't know how or why this car has become evil and taken on a life of its own. Carpenter also does a much better job than King himself did a few years later in Maximum Overdrive of making a driverless vehicle seem malicious and scary.

The humans in the movie are good, too: Keith Gordon is excellent as the nerdy Arnie Cunningham, who becomes obsessed with Christine and turns into a nasty, vindictive loner under her spell. Carpenter ties the car's menace to the period of time in which it was created, adding a masterful, dialogue-free prologue that shows the car's genesis on a Detroit assembly line, and using sunny rock n' roll oldies as signifiers of the moments when Christine is about to get homicidal. And in one of the cleverest touches in the movie, Arnie starts dressing more and more like a '50s greaser as he falls further under the car's influence. King has played with the insidiousness of 1950s culture and style a handful of other times (probably most notably in Sometimes They Come Back), and Carpenter makes it subtle enough to avoid being silly while being obvious enough to convey the change in the character.

John Stockwell is also good as Arnie's more level-headed best friend, and he and Gordon have a nice relaxed chemistry that establishes their friendship before Arnie goes off the deep end (Gordon and Stockwell both later essentially quit acting to become successful directors). The ending comes on a little abruptly, but overall Carpenter maintains an excellent balance of character development and scares, throws in some nice moments of humor (Robert Prosky is amusing as Arnie's curmudgeonly boss) and is always inventive with his camera movements. It may be more unassuming, but I'd put Christine right up there with Carrie and Misery among the very best King movies.

How far to Castle Rock: The book takes place in Pennsylvania, and the movie switches locations to California, but neither one features Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: The Night Flier (1997)

Carrying the dubious distinction of being the Stephen King adaptation with the lowest theatrical gross, The Night Flier plays like a mediocre '90s TV show -- perhaps a forgettable episode of The X-Files, or an installment in the syndicated revival of The Outer Limits. The flat direction and straightforward procedural story only take a slight turn for the inventive toward the end, but at that point it's far too late to care about what happens to cynical tabloid journalist Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) in his quest to track down the title character, a vampire who travels via single-engine plane.

Ferrer is a solid character actor who knows how to play gruff and off-putting, but he overdoes the tough-guy routine a little as Dees, a veteran reporter who doesn't take kindly to demands from his editor or the fresh-faced young recruit (Julie Entwisle) who wants to muscle in on his story. Dees is meant to be unlikable, but Ferrer and co-writer/director Mark Pavia can't quite make the leap from Dees' early jaded antagonism to his later development of empathy as he witnesses the vampire's horrors. It doesn't help that the pouty Entwisle (playing a character who isn't in King's original short story) adds nothing to the movie other than a way to stretch the plot out and keep Dees from getting to the vampire too quickly. The contrast between her wide-eyed ambition and Dees' burnout is never fully developed.

There are a few creative touches at the movie's climax, including an amusing moment in which Dees sees the vampire pissing blood into a urinal behind him -- only all he sees is the stream of blood, since he's looking in a mirror. And the hallucinations that lead to Dees' downfall are pretty much the only actually creepy moment in the movie. The choice to have the vampire look like some outdated Dracula stereotype (complete with florid cape) makes him seem silly rather than scary, but there isn't enough humor for the movie to play effectively as a black comedy. This movie could have been edited down and aired as an episode of the unimpressive Nightmares & Dreamscapes King anthology TV series, and it would have fit right in.

How far to Castle Rock: The wall of covers at Inside View, the tabloid where Dees works, features a number of headlines with references to King stories, but none to Castle Rock. Dees does track the vampire to an airport in Maine, where an employee tells him that the vampire had just flown in from King's other favorite fictional small town, Derry.

Stephen King Month: Cujo (1983)

According to Stephen King, he barely remembers writing Cujo because he was drinking so heavily at the time, and I remember the book reading like it was written by someone who didn't know what kind of story he was trying to tell -- although admittedly I don't remember it all that well since it was such a long time ago (I was, however, sober). The movie version of Cujo, directed by Lewis Teague (who went on to also helm Cat's Eye two years later), streamlines King's story a bit, but by cutting out some of the extraneous subplots, it just emphasizes further how little there is to the story. Everyone knows that Cujo is about a rabid dog terrorizing innocent people, but it's a little surprising to watch the movie and see how long it takes for those events to actually occur.

Before we get to Donna (Dee Wallace) and her young son (Danny Pintauro of later Who's the Boss? fame) trapped in a car that won't start while the homicidal Cujo stalks their every move, we have to spend a long (long, long) time with Donna and her husband as they deal with their personal and financial troubles: She's having an affair with a moody carpenter, while he's about to lose a big client at his advertising firm. (Snore.) Building up characters over time can work well in a horror movie, so that when we finally do get to the terror, we care about what happens to these people and understand what makes them tick. But the domestic drama in Cujo is so anemic that all I was doing was counting down the moments until Cujo started tearing into people's flesh, which takes until at least the halfway point of the movie.

There's nothing supernatural going on in this story, and the way that two mundane things (a broken-down car, a rabid dog) can combine to create a horrific situation is portrayed effectively. The scenes of Donna and her son panicking as their options quickly dwindle are intense, and Wallace does a good job of creating empathy for her character (even though she's sort of being punished for her thoughtless affair). There's not enough of a connection between the earlier drama and the later horrors to justify all the time spent at the beginning, though, and the way that Donna's husband (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) symbolically heals their marriage and forgives her by coming to her rescue is a little retrograde and simplistic.

Then there's Cujo itself, which despite some heavy make-up work still looks like a fairly placid St. Bernard. It's easier to make a dog look menacing than it later was for the creators of Graveyard Shift to make rats look menacing, but there are still times when Cujo seems more cuddly than dangerous. I would have preferred a better sense of agony and terror from both the animal and the human characters, rather than a bland soap opera followed by scattered moments of genuine suspense.

How far to Castle Rock: Cujo is one of King's main Castle Rock novels, and the movie takes place there as well, although there's only one brief moment to indicate the setting, and the town as a whole doesn't really play a part in the story.

Stephen King Month: Dolores Claiborne (1995)

I always thought of Dolores Claiborne as unfairly underrated compared to more well-known "serious" Stephen King movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and The Green Mile, but watching it again this week I noticed a lot more flaws than I remembered. I still think it's unfairly underrated, and I also think it's an interesting kind of departure for King, not going for the inspirational uplift of those other "serious" movies, but also sticking to realism and a fairly grounded story without resorting to supernatural horror. It's a drama with a bit of a thriller in it, but mostly it's a character study of a woman who endured a lifetime of emotional abuse and tried hard not to pass that on to her daughter. And in that sense, it often succeeds quite well.

Kathy Bates brings a steely intensity to her performance as Dolores, a strong woman who mostly keeps her head down and does what she needs to do to get by, except when life pushes her so hard that she has to push back. It's a very different performance from the one Bates gave in Misery, but it's effective in its own less flashy way. Jennifer Jason Leigh is not quite as impressive as Dolores' daughter Selena, who returns to their small Maine island village when her mother is accused of murder. Dolores didn't kill the rich old woman she was taking care of, but she did kill Selena's abusive father (David Strathairn) 18 years before, and the movie switches between the two time periods as we learn what pushed Dolores over the edge.

Director Taylor Hackford navigates the two time periods well, but some of the emotional reveals are a little clunky. Leigh has a long courtroom speech at the end of the movie that lays things out far too neatly, and her relationship with her boss back in New York never feels like it matters. King's not known for writing great female characters, and Selena isn't as fully realized as Dolores. But Dolores is one of King's most interesting protagonists, and Hackford (along with screenwriter Tony Gilroy) mostly keeps her from becoming a stereotypical victim or a stereotypical bitch (even though one of her trademark lines is "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto"). Selena, however, is a little more the stereotype of the brooding, ungrateful daughter, who left for the big city at the first opportunity. As we learn more about Dolores, we understand the tough choices she had to make, but as we learn more about Selena, she mostly just comes off as more selfish (even if she too was mistreated).

The wrap-up is too tidy, and the grudge held by a detective (Christopher Plummer) against Dolores for getting away with her husband's murder lacks the proper intensity. Still, Bates and Leigh play off each other well in the scenes that find them tearing into each other, and the dark drama offers probably the most realistic approach of any King movie. Not all of it works, but that parts that do deserve a second look from people who may have dismissed this movie as not up to the standards of other prestige King adaptations.

How far to Castle Rock: Accent-wise, this gives Pet Sematary a run for its money as the Maine-iest King movie, but there's no mention of Castle Rock (although Dolores does reference Shawshank Prison).

Stephen King Month: Cat's Eye (1985)

Released in between the two Creepshow movies, Cat's Eye takes a similar approach of adapting several Stephen King short stories in an anthology format (and has a King-penned screenplay to boot). Unlike the Creepshow movies, it doesn't have a tongue-in-cheek tone or a nostalgic connection to old horror comics; it's pretty much a straight-up rendering of three King stories, connected by a cat who wanders through all three (and plays a major role in the final one). As such, it's a little flat, although the first two stories have a bit of charm to them. James Woods does a good job as the star of "Quitters, Inc.," about a very unorthodox agency to help people quit smoking. He plays a twitchy businessman who gets more than he bargained for when signing up with the company, which uses threats and violence to scare its clients into staying smoke-free. Director Lewis Teague stages one great scene in which Woods imagines cigarettes everywhere at a party, but the story kind of peters out at the end and suffers from too many leaps in logic (why do none of the clients ever call the police?).

The second story, "The Ledge," also loses steam after a little while, but Kenneth McMillan is amusing as the sleazy rich guy who forces his wife's lover (king of bland Robert Hays) to walk around his high-rise apartment building on a tiny ledge. It's a pretty one-note tale, and a little reminiscent of "Something to Tide You Over" from Creepshow, but it has moments of genuine tension and suspense. Unfortunately the movie climaxes with the lamest story of them all, featuring Drew Barrymore at her whiniest and some sort of tiny troll creature that terrorizes her. It isn't scary or darkly humorous like the first two, and it seems designed solely to justify the running cat motif. It's always been tough to find the proper medium to adapt King's short stories, and Cat's Eye doesn't quite get it right.

How far to Castle Rock: This movie is chock full of King references (the cat evades killer car Christine and rabid dog Cujo in the opening scene; The Dead Zone movie plays on a TV; characters read King novels), but none to Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

By a certain measurement, The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest movie ever made. If you believe the masses who vote over at the Internet Movie Database, Shawshank tops The Godfather, Schindler's List, all of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies and various other classics and fanboy favorites. Of course, IMDb's list is always in flux, but Shawshank steadily maintains a place at or near the top, despite being a box-office failure in 1994 and left out of most academic or critical assessments of the best films (even just American films) of all time.

How did this happen? Part of it seems to come down to the deal that TNT got on the movie, which made it incredibly cheap for the channel to play it far more often than other licensed programs. The studio also flooded the home-video market after Shawshank tanked in theaters, and the movie found a much more receptive audience among people at home. It does sort of sneak up on you, and I can definitely imagine people passing it by on TV one afternoon, curiously stopping to watch a few minutes and getting sucked into the whole thing. Shawshank offers a familiar look at prison life in many ways, but it also turns that downbeat setting into the vehicle for a stirringly inspirational story, one that feels only a little bit manipulative. Unlike writer-director Frank Darabont's second Stephen King adaptation, The Green Mile, Shawshank mostly plays fair with its audience, allowing us to understand exactly how and why Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) triumphed over a corrupt system out to keep them down.

Of course, Shawshank presents an idealized version of prison life, notwithstanding the occasional beatings. Although Andy is innocent of his wife's murder beyond a shadow of a doubt, everyone else in Shawshank prison presumably committed the crimes they're serving time for, and the movie never bothers to reconcile those violent pasts with the inherently warm and kind personalities of the inmate characters. Only one convict in the entire prison ever treats anyone poorly, and he's the leader of the group known as "the Sisters," violent homosexuals who try and fail to make Andy one of their own. Red qualifies at one point that they're not really homosexuals ("you have to be human first"), but the mild homophobia on display is one of the movie's only sour notes.

Otherwise it's one triumph after another, starting small and moving toward Andy's eventual escape from prison and his reunion with Red on the outside. There are a lot of elements from Shawshank that have since become iconic (Robbins shot from above, his arms outstretched in the rain; "Get busy living or get busy dying"; Freeman's entire narration), and they've stuck with audiences for a reason. Darabont knows how to build emotional moments, and Robbins and Freeman work well together to get just the right kinds of reactions. Robbins plays Andy as quiet but competent, the kind of guy who knows way more than he ever lets on. And although Freeman's character could be a cliche (and has become one in later parodies and imitations), Red almost never feels like a sidekick or plot device. He's friendly but cynical, and his rapport with Andy comes about slowly and naturally. He's as amazed as everyone else when Andy finally escapes, and that disbelief carries over to the audience even if we've seen the movie dozens of times.

Red's demeanor aside, Shawshank is also one of the least cynical movies ever made, and that's not only because it promotes hope and tolerance and the inherent goodness of humanity. It also denies some of the audience instinct for revenge, as Andy declines to exact vengeance on those who wronged him once he gets out of prison. Yes, he arranges for the corrupt prison officials to be indicted (although presumably he didn't plan to have the warden commit suicide), but he never goes after the man who really killed his wife and got away with it, who laughed about Andy's decades in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The cops who wrongfully arrested him, the judge who wrongfully convicted him, the lawyer who improperly defended him -- all are implicitly forgiven as Andy simply heads down to Mexico to start over. Maybe that's the secret of this movie's success -- its message that we are all better people than the worst circumstances in which we may find ourselves, and that we can forgive those who wrong us and start anew, free from any burden of guilt or anger that we may have harbored in our souls.

How far to Castle Rock: Although Shawshank is Maine's most notorious prison, none of the inmates hail from Castle Rock.

Stephen King Month: Needful Things (1993)

Apparently there is a three-hour cut of Needful Things that director Fraser C. Heston put together for TNT, which includes nearly an hour's worth of deleted scenes but also has been sanitized for television, with profanity and violence toned down. On the IMDb comment boards for this movie, someone notes a bootleg version with the TV cut and the theatrical cut stitched together in order to maximize both R-rated content and additional footage. There's clearly a very obsessive (if also very small) cult around this film, which is strange given that it comes off like a halfway effective adaptation of one of Stephen King's more bloated novels. I found a lot of it to be pretty entertaining, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted it to be an hour longer.

Part of the movie's strength is actually the way that it streamlines King's sprawling story and cuts out a whole bunch of minor characters. A TV miniseries version would have explored every little digression in the novel, but a movie should be more focused and condensed, and that's exactly what happens here. We have the hero (Ed Harris as small-town cop Alan Pangborn), the villain (Max Von Sydow as evil shopkeeper Leland Gaunt), the love interest (Bonnie Bedelia as Alan's fiancee) and a few supporting characters to illustrate the premise. That's all we need, especially since King's novel, which is billed as "the last Castle Rock story," relies heavily on background for character and setting from other books, which the movie doesn't have. Heston and writer W.D. Richter take just enough to tell the story, and throw out the rest (or at least relegate it to the extended cut).

Some of the stuff here is a little awkward, and the movie's climax relies too much on big explosions and a convenient speech that seems to erase all the complicated animosities between characters. Harris is a little bland as the crusading Alan, who seems to have no flaws, but Von Sydow is predictably strong as the devious Gaunt, who uses people's greatest desires to prod them into evil acts. J.T. Walsh hams it up as a paranoid local politician, but his performance works well as a depiction of the descent into complete madness and paranoia. Heston could have gone a little deeper, not by adding extra subplots but by exploring the themes more thoroughly, but his approach is entertaining enough, and the running time is just right.

How far to Castle Rock: As mentioned above, Needful Things is a key Castle Rock novel (although of course it wasn't really King's last Castle Rock story), and the movie takes place there as well. The character of Alan Pangborn was played just a few months earlier by Michael Rooker in The Dark Half, but the movie ignores connections to other King stories (even omitting the major character of Ace Merrill, played by Kiefer Sutherland in Stand By Me).

Stephen King Month: Creepshow 2 (1987)

There are a lot of basically unrelated sequels to Stephen King movies (the Children of the Corn series, Pet Sematary Two, etc.), but Creepshow 2 is the only King sequel that fits my criteria for this project, since it's based directly on King source material (a few of his short stories). It's also a much more straightforward King adaptation than the first Creepshow, despite nominally sticking to the conceit of mimicking old E.C. comic books. Unlike George A. Romero, who directed the first movie (and wrote this one), sequel director Michael Gornick doesn't try to approximate the look and feel of lurid horror comics with his visual style, sticking instead to a more sedate, basic shooting style (which is a little odd considering that he was Romero's cinematographer on the original). Instead, he puts all of the E.C.-style stuff in the interludes, animated segments that feature a Cryptkeeper-like ghoul introducing the various stories.

Even those bits kind of look like '80s Saturday-morning cartoons, though, and the whole thing just comes off as a little low-rent and second-rate. Even the quantity has been reduced -- only three stories here instead of five, and only two that really pack any punch. "Old Chief Wood'nhead" opens the movie limply, taking way too long to get to its horror conceit (a wooden store Indian that comes to life to avenge the deaths of its owners) and then underplaying the eventual carnage. The concept is pure E.C. cheese, but Gornick doesn't know how to goose it properly, and it ends up awkwardly balanced between camp and seriousness.

The next two stories fare better, and even have moments of genuine creepiness. "The Raft" makes good use of a minimalist monster (basically just a film of slime floating on the top of a lake) but is undone by some truly awful acting, and "The Hitchhiker" has a classic moralizing E.C. premise but stretches itself a little thin. The woman who runs down a hitchhiker and then flees the scene clearly deserves a proper comeuppance, and seeing the man, bloody and beaten, continually in her path is a nice way to torment her. It's a little like an old ghost story given extra trappings, including an opening scene that features the woman visiting a male prostitute, as if King and Romero needed to make her just a little bit more distasteful so that her torment would be easier to accept.

It's too bad that the Creepshow franchise didn't continue (there was a direct-to-video Creepshow 3 in 2007 that involved neither King nor Romero), because the idea was fun and King clearly has affection for the old E.C. style. But even by this second installment, the commitment to the idea seemed to be waning.

How far to Castle Rock: Although the first Creepshow had a couple of Castle Rock references, there aren't any in this edition.

King cameo: He plays a truck driver who stops to help the injured title character in "The Hitchhiker."

Stephen King Month: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Usually cited as Exhibit A in the case for why Stephen King should stick to writing books instead of making movies, Maximum Overdrive is really not as awful as it's made out to be. The only movie King ever directed, Overdrive is dumb and clearly a bit of a mess (King has admitted to being coked out of his mind the entire time he was working on the movie, and not really sure what he was doing), but it's also sometimes clever and fun, and if the camp moments had outweighed the plodding action sequences, it might have emerged as a genuine cult classic. Instead, it's merely an intriguing misfire.

Based loosely King's short story Trucks, Overdrive features machines (mainly big-rig trucks) coming to life and menacing human beings, thanks to some sort of cosmic radiation or possibly alien influence from the tail of a comet that is enveloping the Earth and producing cut-rate neon-green special effects in the sky. The movie starts out with a nicely nasty sense of humor, as we see the LED screen outside a bank displaying "Fuck you," and an ATM merely prints the word "asshole" over and over again. King then stages a rather amusing sequence that involves a drawbridge going up without warning, as cars, people and watermelons collide into each other.

These two bits are essentially disconnected from the main story, which takes place at an isolated truck stop where a group of people are hiding out from giant semis that have suddenly become sentient and gone rogue. It's a standard post-apocalypse collection of colorful types, including the stoic hero (Emilio Estevez). King alternates between campy touches (the sort of leader of the trucks is a toy company vehicle with a giant Green Goblin head on the front of it) and boring seriousness, which reaches its low point in the ridiculous romance between Estevez's hero and a drifter played by Laura Harrington. The supposed worldwide revolt of the machines is poorly conceived and full of plot holes (a newscaster advises people to stay away from all electrical devices, while presumably broadcasting using a whole range of them), and the solutions to the problem are inconsistent and lazy.

The whole movie is lazy, which is the main problem. King goes for the easy laughs and the easy suspense, and when he's stuck in a corner he just blows stuff up (the movie's entire climax is just explosion after explosion). Overdrive is definitely not the work of a filmmaker in control of his craft, but it's also not so moronic or inept as to be unwatchable. It's a misfire with flashes of potential, and it's kind of too bad that King has bought into the dominant narrative about the movie and will probably never direct again.

How far to Castle Rock: Somewhat surprisingly for a movie over which King had complete control, Overdrive doesn't even take place in Maine; instead it's set in North Carolina.

King cameo: He plays the bank patron getting insulted by an ATM in the opening scene.