Bag of Bones

Hello, and welcome to the first post of 2013, here on The Impossible Quest. I hope you haven't missed me too much during my extended break.

As with the first post back last year; because tradition is important, dontcha know; I was determined to find something in the terrestrial schedules to write about. After all, isn't the Christmas break supposed to be a time for the television stations to break out their big guns? Also as with last year, I struggled to find something that wasn't the Doctor Who Christmas Special. ALSO, as with last year, Channel 5 came to my rescue late in the day with a mini-series imported from the states. Well done Channel 5. And so, without further ado...

First things first, because I'm told that's the way to do it, I just want to get a little bit of a moan off my chest. Bag of Bones was a mini-series, written and shot to air over two nights. Channel 5, in their infinite wisdom, took the decision to condense it into a movie and show it in one go. Given it's themes, it obviously had to screen post watershed, which meant they had a 3 and a bit hour production that ran until past midnight; how did they not anticipate that that alone would put people off?

Then, of course, the people who did watch, and who were expecting a movie; since Channel 5 were billing it that way, and hadn't made it's original form clear; were faced with over an hour of very slow scene setting and build up. The air of boredom radiating from twitter during the screening was maddening. A slow part one with a decent cliffhanger is one thing, but lumping it together like this meant that when the big finish to part one happened... people looked at the clock and thought 'Another hour plus of this? Nah thanks mate' and went to bed.

They fucked up, is what I'm saying.

But what of the show itself? We all know that Stephen King material can have a bit of difficulty transferring to the screen; for every The Stand or Stand By Me we get, well, virtually everything else ever adapted for the screen from a Stephen King story. Where on the scale is Bag of Bones?  It wasn't awful, let's put it that way.

Hello. I used to be Remington Steele you know.

I'm fairly certain Pierce Brosnan was high, or drunk, or something, for most of the filming, because he hammed it up like no-ones business, but the rest of the cast were excellent, and the little girl playing the main kid managed to stay just on the right side of annoying, so they win points for that at least.

I say the cast were excellent, but here's the thing... they hired a lot of people for this who, when they first appeared on screen, made me very excited. Matt Frewer is here, Melissa George, Jason Priestley... and yet they barely appear; a massive wasted opportunity. And before anyone says anything; I know George's character dies early on in the book too, but she's much better developed there, before she goes, which made the eventual shock of her death that much more, well, shocking. Here you barely care, because you just don't get the sense of her importance. As I say though, she does brilliantly with what she's given.

The mystery at the heart of the story is simplified a hell of a lot in the show, and not in any way that seems particularly necessary, either. Certainly the explanation in the novel is not one that is problematically complicated; it's complex, yes, but makes sense and would have been relatively easy to explain in dialogue. Also, eliminating several characters altogether in order to allow Brosnan more to do might seem logical; you want your hero to be a hero; but it does raise the question of how a middle aged writer is so good at so many things.

Stop diluting my part you fuckers!

The ending of the book is watered down significantly here too, again to the detriment of the story, and again to every character not played by Pierce Brosnan. The book has the villain despatched by the ghost of one of the deceased characters, in defence of their daughter; the show has the villain killed by Brosnan, in defence of someone elses daughter. A small thing, to be sure, and it does play to the paternal responsibility theme, but still, it just makes Melissa George's character that much less important.

If you've not read the book, it probably played a little better; assuming you watch it in it's intended form and therefore haven't fallen asleep at the halfway mark. Certainly the new, truncated version of the mystery is not in itself offensive and makes sense in it's own right; the villains are genuinely creepy, if a little over the top in one case (and they get points for casting Death from Supernatural in one small but pivotal role); and Melissa George looked, as Melissa George is wont to do, very lovely indeed.

In all, I would say watch Bag of Bones. Make sure you're watching it as a two parter with a break between episodes, make sure you brace yourself for the alterations to the book, and make sure you don't expect to take Brosnan seriously; make sure of all those things, and you should have a good time.

It would have been so much fucking better if Priestley and Brosnan had swapped roles though. So. Much. Better.

Maybe in the remake mate. Maybe in the remake.

No idea what I'll be talking about next time, but I'm sure it will be riveting stuff indeed. Riveting, I say!

See you then. Maybe

The Stand

I'm about to ask you all a favour. Please don't click the big red X when you start to read it; I promise, the whole post isn't that; there is actual discussion of the telly box after the waffle.

Have you read many posts on here? If you have, you'll understand what I'm about to talk about.

I struggle with finding a consistent tone for this blog (and for the other critical blog I write). Some posts are a sort of potted history (mostly cribbed from Wikipedia) of whatever show I'm in the process of watching. Other posts take the form of reviews. Some are just surreal stream of consciousness waffle. From one post to the next, you don't know what you're going to get and in fairness, that's in large part because I just make them up as I go along, and see where they take me. Still though, it's always me doing the writing, so you would expect some kind of uniform style to develop, wouldn't you?

Anyway, I've had a think about this and I've decided that... I can't decide. I don't know whether this wildly inconsistent tone is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't even know if people read this blog enough to have noticed it. Certainly I get a relatively high view count but, somewhat tellingly, the majority are on posts that contain pictures of particularly popular stars; I'm not naive enough to miss the connection there.

So I'm going to do something now that I would normally never do. I'm going to specifically ask for people to comment. If you are a regular reader, who has partaken of the Quest's dubious pleasures enough to have formed an opinion (or, of course, if you're a newcomer willing to spend a bit of time poking around in the archives) I'd like to know what you think of the Quest. Does it need a more consistent tone? Do you even care? If you like, feel free to comment merely to say you just come for the pretty pictures. I'm genuinely curious as to how people perceive the Quest. (Cue zero comments and I look like a needy fool)

And now, to the actual point of this weeks post.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...

I read The Stand (The Complete and Uncut Edition) when I was, oh, must have been about 15 or 16. I think I'm right in saying that it was one of my earliest encounters with the work of Stephen King; certainly it was the spark that ignited the desire to read a hell of a lot more by him.

Maybe I loved it because it fulfilled a subconscious need for something a little bit larger, or a bit more 'epic', to mark my true ascent into adult reading. Maybe I loved it for precisely the opposite reason; that it's huge death toll appealed to the adolescent bloodthirstiness that still abided within me, whilst allowing me to feel 'grown up' by sheer virtue of it's heft. To be fair, though, that desire for a nice big bodycount has never really left me, and I suspect never really will. If it did, slasher movies and fps video games wouldn't be the money spinners that they are. Maybe the desire to 'grow out' of those urges is the true sign of lingering childhood, and the acceptance that you never will and shouldn't want to, the true sign of maturity. Eh? Yeah!

Anyway, whether it be the epic scope or the multitude of cool deaths; or more likely an amalgam of both of those things and a multitude of others; I loved The Stand with a fierce and abiding passion. Until I forgot it.

I mean, I was young, and you do, don't you? There will always be specific scenes that never leave you; Nick's early exit from the story, and the female spy doing what she does to avoid interrogation being two prime examples for me with The Stand; but many aspects of the book fade from memory, leaving just the bare bones of the plot behind. You could re-read it, of course, and one day I plan to do just that, as I have several times with such classics as The Borribles, but The Stand is a big book and King so prolific, that there is always something new on the horizon from him; some new wonder demanding your attention. So it sits untouched, awaiting my return.

In the meantime, a TV version hoves into view. I remember a time when a new Stephen King mini-series would pop up once or twice a year, and Channel 4 seemed to have something of an unofficial monopoly on broadcasting them in the UK. They became 'Event' television, in a very real way, with Storm of the Century in particular being a massive talking point; what did that dude want? For the record, I nearly called it. Nearly.

The reason I bring up these other King shows, is that I want to say that The Stand was the one that started that little golden age of King minis. I'm not entirely sure that it was, but that's my recollection, and I don't feel inclined to look up the dates so I'm gonna stick with that assertion; in much the same way that I think the Ted Danson Gulliver's Travels was the first of the big all star Hallmark mythology minis. (And didn't they settle into a pronounced downward trajectory pretty bloody quickly?) If The Stand was the first though, then it's easy to see why it might have made networks sit up and take notice of King as a television writer; because it is superb.

The show, even at it's not inconsiderable 6hr length, had to apply some fairly intensive nips and tucks to the story, so perhaps it's for the best that I don't remember the specifics of the book all too well but I'll tell you this; whatever changes were made, be it sub-plot excision, character amalgamation or whatever other tricks King applied; the story didn't suffer a jot. When I sat down to watch it again just recently, I was held rapt for the duration.

It's down in large part, I suspect, to King's willingness to spend time building his characters before tearing them down; something he used to great effect in novels Salem's Lot and Needful Things, amongst others. Indeed, I'd be hard pushed to name any character in this show that you could point at and say "they're cannon fodder", because they're all of them afforded the screen time to really appear relevant. Not to mention, for the most part they're all cast to appear relevant as well.

With every role, from leads Stu (Gary Sinise) and Franny (Molly Ringwald), to relatively small (but still pivotal) roles like Judge Farris (Ozzie Davis), the cast is a veritable who's who of stars. I mean, who watches a show with Rob Lowe and expects him to die 2hrs before the end? Or for that matter, you don't tune into a show, see Ed Harris and Kathy Bates, and say "I reckon they won't even last the episode."

Yes, this is a dream cast and, for the most part, one that recognises what it's a part of. The weak links; because in a cast this size, of course they exist; are few and far between (I really don't know what Laura San Giacomo thought she was doing) and they can't even begin to drag down the average.

Even King himself, in a role that is considerably larger than the tiny cameo I remembered, manages not to embarrass himself. (Of course, he missed a trick by not playing himself as a survivor. Would have been a nice hint at the meta stuff in the Dark Tower series, don't you think? Although all of that was still years away at this point.)

Long story, well, long I suppose looking at the wordcount, I remember really, thoroughly enjoying The Stand back in the day and I enjoyed it just as much this time around. Even the oft criticised ending worked brilliantly for me. Of course nothing the leads did affected the outcome; that's the point. It was about making a stand because it's the right thing to do, even if it is hopeless. The clue is in the title.

And those are my thoughts on The Stand. Not particularly enlightening, insightful or even, when you get right down to it, interesting, but what did you expect? I knocked it up in about an hour, for Heavens sake. Join me next time, when I shall be discussing something or other that may or may not have been on your TV screen recently, which I may or may not have enjoyed, and which you may or may not be interested in. It'll probably be a cartoon.

Firestarter Rekindled

This post should have gone up a while ago but I spent a little over a week without any 'net connection and things got lost in the shuffle when that elusive connection was re-established. Anyway...


Well, after Friday 13th and Freddys Nightmares, I come to the third of the shows horror has graced me with these past couple of weeks. Namely, Firestarter:Rekindled, the belated sequel to the Drew Barrymore starring adaptation of Stephen Kings novel. Not the follow up to the novel you understand, the follow up to the adaptation. This is an important distinction to make because as we all know, King fans more than most, when it comes to page to screen transfers, the end result is oftentimes borderline unrecognisable. So this is billed as a sequel to the events as depicted on screen, not on the page.

How big is the difference in this case? I'm going to be honest here and say that I don't know. I read Firestarter well over a decade ago and have distinct memories of disappointment but little else, plotwise or otherwise. I don't think that I'm alone in this; it does seem to have the reputation of being some distance short of Kings best work. As far as the move goes I have to hold my hands up and say that I've never seen it. I suppose it could be a Shawshank/Stand By Me level classic but I'd be surprised.

All of which means that I'm coming to Rekindled at something of a disadvantage. I of course recognised the characters of Charlie and John Rainbird, and the whole concept of Lot 6 and its aftermath came back to me quite readily but beyond that I had nothing. Which, perhaps surprisingly, didn't matter in the slightest. The plot of the movie was quite succinctly summed up in a few nicely staged flashback sequences and the thrust of the new story was sufficiently different that it was well able to stand alone. I found that I had no problems at all grasping what was going on.

The basic idea is that an investigator for a law firm is tracking down the participants in a long ago Drug Trial (Lot 6) in order to furnish them with cheques for their share of a big class action compensation claim. He discovers that when he finds them they are in fact being killed and so he goes on the run with Charlie, whom he bumps into while she is running her own investigation of her origins, as the sinister blokes try to track them down to stop them causing any bother in the run up to the launch of their new project; a bunch of creepy kids with various powers, which they intend to market to the military.

Don't you just wanna slap him?

Of course it all ends with Charlie confronting Rainbird (badly burned after the book and presumably movie climax) and his psycho sprogs, preventing their big 'kill loads of people in a mad way' plan from coming to fruition and killing Rainbird once and for all. Surprisingly though, Rainbird does kill the investigator blokey, inevitably now Charlies lover. Even though he had just promised to visit his dying estranged father. No teary reconciliation for him, he gets a blade through the ear into the brain. Shocking, but somewhat cathartic for the viewer, due to the fact that he was played by the pathologically annoying Danny Nucci.

Laura San Giaco... Sorry, what?

Charlie herself is played by an actress called Marguerite Moreau. A woman I'd never heard of but who looks a hell of a lot like a slightly smaller chested Laura San Giacomo. The internet tells me that Moreau is fairly well known as an actress in her own right but I'm afraid I just got flashbacks to Just Shoot Me whenever she was onscreen. Not that she was in any way a bad actress, managing to hold her own in scenes opposite noted scene stealers Malcolm McDowell and Dennis Hopper. Slightly weirdly, Hopper showed up halfway through this, from out of the blue (I'd not noticed his name in the titles but it was there when I rewound the tape) not 5 minutes after I heard the news on the day of his death. Spooky.

rip

Anyway, this is a miniseries which I've been wanting to see for a while now, ever since I managed to miss every single showing on the notoriously repeat friendly Sky network. I forget whether it was Sky One or Movies but I remember it seemed to always be on and life just insisted on getting in the way. I'm glad to finally be able to put it to rest and also that after such a long wait it didn't turn out to be a disappointment.

Next : ????