This doesn't really surprise me. There are some novels that just don't lend themselves to being good movies. I think our imaginations use the words to create an image that could never be recreated with much success on the big screen. I'm curious to see how "It" does in the theater. I think that comes out in September. I didn't care for the first one, which I thought was boring, compared to actually reading the novel which scared the hell out of me.
Wow. You are reading my mind. Excellent post, Chatelaine!
Reviewers panned the Dark Tower for years. My own belief is that this was one of the last "alcohol-fueled" works by King. He has admitted that he often drank heavily while he was writing. That obviously explains the grotesque UNEVENESS of many King books. I virtually ALWAYS had to skip over vast passages (often whole chapters) of King's meandering, unfocused, downright poor writing in several of his novels. Only his earlier ones (The Stand, the Shining etc.) seem to have been spared his proclivity to repeatedly digress into plodding, wandering, pointless delineations.
Dark Tower though brilliant in places, was overall horribly disappointing to me. The ending (a favorite target of critics) was so lame that it was almost comical.
When one adds the H-Wood habit of "dumbing-down" material, I frankly cannot see how a film that attempted to condense (eight books = 4,250 pages) about 200 HOURS of reading time into 120
minutes could be anything but an almost complete waste of time (creatively speaking).
It is a clue at how unsuitable the material was that no production company was willing to serialize the content into several movies, so instead it got distilled it into a single film. Doing one film instead of a series is always the safer approach to producing material that one isn't sure will pan out creatively.
King sold out any sort of creative integrity or loyalty to seeing his own work treated with dignity or respect by T.V. or film makers YEARS ago.
I frankly think that he is probably a fairly pedestrian, boring person in real life. He is after all, a committed, radical leftist in his politics, which suggests that (his arguable talent as a writer notwithstanding), he is neither very moral nor very bright.
I'll tell you some books that might well be worth making into films or serial cable shows, Ann Rice's, "Christ the Lord" series (magnificent), her savage, horrifying "Servant of the Bones" or Gene Wolfe's astonishingly well-articulated "Urth of the New Sun" series. But they are lengthy, very character-driven and not very politically correct so it would have to be an independant studio with the vision and fortitude to do some very hard work ( and invest some serious cash) to make them creative successes.
