full image - Repost: Bitter Times Are Here: How and Why Josh Boone's The Stand Sucked (from Reddit.com, Bitter Times Are Here: How and Why Josh Boone's The Stand Sucked)
Mining:
Exchanges:
Donations:
The most boring part of any article about a movie is the opening, where the author burns paragraph after paragraph explaining in minute detail what said movie is about. At least, it’s boring to someone who already knows and just wants to get to the damn point already. Because of that, I will keep this as brief as possible.The Stand is an epic 1978 novel by Stephen King in which a man made plague kills something like 99 percent of the world’s population. The survivors (including a future hasbeen rock star, a yokel from East Texas, a pretentious old college professor, and a schizophrenic who gets his kicks by torching random shit) are drawn by prophetic dreams to either an old black lady who lives in some corn or Evil Billy Ray Cyrus, a demonic creature made all the more vile by his affinity for Canadian tuxedos and Tennessee top hats. Ugh, you really are Satan, aren’t you? In the end, the good guys make their stand against evil but evil prevails when a genocidal hand descends from the heavens and helps the antagonists - Farmer “Ralph Bretner” John and The Amazing Hasbeen Larry Underwood - destroy an entire city and its thousands of residents, children included.Children especially.Alright, fine, I’m joking. Long story short, Mother Abigail dies and on her death bed, she sends four men - Ralph Bretner, a hick from Kansas; Glenn Bateman, a former sociology professor; Larry Underwood, the last one hit wonder to ever live; and Stu Redman, an aw shucks country boy - on an odyssey to face Flagg. Stu breaks his leg and the others leave him to die on the side of the road, Glenn is shot and killed by Flagg’s right-hand man, Lloyd, and Ralph and Larry wind up as the guests of honor at a public execution. Good wins the day when the Hand of God smites Evil Billy Ray Cyrus and his den of depravity and our heroes (or what is left of them) can live to fight, bicker, pollute, and judge each other another day.The Stand - clocking in at a hefty 815 pages on publication - is unquestionably one of King’s most beloved works. During the 1980s, a theatrical adaptation was planned with George “Humans Are The Real Monsters” Romero attached to direct. That didn’t pan out and The Stand: The Movie (not it’s real title) eventually saw the light of day as a four part miniseries airing on ABC in May 1994. Its cast boasted more stars than a Mario game. There was Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise, whose character ironically suffers a catasoptic leg injury during the course of the story), that girl from The Breakfast Club (Molly Ringwald), that dude who was also in The Breakfast Club, I think (Rob Lowe), Parker Lewis (Coran Nemic), and Patrick Starr (Bill Faggerbake).Being serious for a minute, The Stand is a sweeping saga of good vs evil that unfolds mainly over three months and follows a huge cast of characters as they survive a plague, come together, and attempt to rebuild society. A complete and uncut version of the novel, restoring text King had to jettison back when he had an editor, was published in 1990 and runs to over 1,200 pages. It’s a big story and thus adapting it to the screen was no small task. The miniseries - written by King himself and directed by Mick Garris - did a fine job. Sure, it was a made for TV movie released in 1994. Some of the graphics were hokey and if you’d kept track at home, you’d find an alarming lack of F-words and graphic violence.But that’s okay, that’s not what The Stand is about.The miniseries wasn’t perfect but it told the story, stayed as true to the book as it could, and kept people invested (each installment was viewed by 20 million people). A remake had been rumored for years, first as a theatrical release and then as a Lord of the Rings style trilogy. Finally, it landed on the desk of CBS, famous for turning King’s Under the Dome into a snooze cruise with stops in Lamesville, Suck City, and the Delta of Declining Ratings. They pawned it off on its All-Access service and finally, it seemed like we were going to get an adaptation worthy of the novel.Boy, were we wrong.Before we get into the six part, nine-hour cauldron of crap that is the 2020 version of The Stand - a disappointing ending to a disappointing year - we should address a couple of controversies that surrounded the thing before it even had a chance to ruin anyone’s day. All of these controversies, come to think of it, have to do with The Stand’s casting choices.Henry Zaga, a hearing actor, was cast in the role of Nick Andros, a deaf-mute. Some people thought this was bullshit and that a deaf actor should have gotten the role. That makes sense, but actors often pretend to be things they aren’t, so it didn’t strike many people as a big deal. This issue was bigged up on niche geek sites and in other outlets, but I spent a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, IMDb, and other sites where people discussed the film, and I saw maybe one person bring it up. The outrage wasn’t really there even though our genre media attempted to generate it. Kind of hard to fan the flames when said flames are actually a teeny little spark. Not to discount the point people were trying to make. I get wanting a deaf actor to get the part, but by and large, most people weren’t that upset about it. Not from what I saw.Amber motherfreakin Heard. Look, I don’t know much about the whole Johnny Depp/Amber Heard fiasco. The lives and careers of celebrities have no effect on my own just like my life has no effect on theirs. I do me and let them do them. Now, if this involved someone important like Giovanni Lombardo Radice, I’d have been all over it from day one, but it didn’t, so I ignored it. The affairs of mere mortals hold no concern for me and, sorry, folks, Depp and Heard are mortals.Anyway, from what I gathered, Heard and Depp were in a relationship and violence happened. At first, it seemed like he was the bad guy and everyone jumped on him, then it was revealed that Heard was the villain, but now I guess they were kicking each other’s asses? I don’t know, it’s a bunch of high school tier bullshit. I do know that hundreds and hundreds of people mobbed virtually every Facebook ad, Twitter post, and IMDb thead about The Stand and complained about Heard being cast. On the night the first episode aired, a bunch of Depp supporters got “Depp Movie Marathon” or something like it to trend on Twitter. Depp, I heard, lost roles because of his role in the abuse but Amber Heard seemingly did not, and that’s where the salt comes in.Whoppi Goldberg. Whoopi has ben a host on The View for a minute and she’s very out-spokenly liberal. I don’t watch The View so I don’t know what she said to piss off thousands upon thousands of people, but a lot of people feel some kind of way about her. If the Zaga thing was a spark that a few people tried to turn into a fire, the anti-Whoopi sentiment was a raging inferno that never made the news. You can say that the people who were up in arms about her are idiots, don’t matter, whatever you want, and I won’t stop you, but you can’t pretend that they don’t exist. I saw entire threads dominated by anti-Whoopism with only the occasional lone voice - which you had to scroll and scroll to get to - defending her. It was wild and I never saw it reported on any of the genre sites that were all over Henry Zaga. I’m not saying the genre media lies, but it certainly chooses which stories to cover and which stories to bury. I have no feelings for or against Whoopi - save that I didn’t think I could take her seriously in such a dramatic role after Ghost and Sister Act - but, like I said, it was certainly a thing.Now, on with the review.Josh Boone’s The Stand is garbage.Of course, that’s my take. Maybe you liked it or maybe you would like it if you watched it. The Stand is an epic tale that sees many relationships forming (with some eventually breaking), and all of the many characters growing and changing, some in positive ways and other in negative ways. Harold Lauder, for instance, starts off as a fat dork and ends as a remorseful sociopath with, like, six bodies under his belt. Lloyd Henried begins as a low-level criminal and finishes as a powerful and respected member of Randall Flagg’s government. Larry Underwood - AKA future hasbeen - is a giant jerk when we first meet him, but he matures a lot during his journey to Boulder and, eventually, Las Vegas to stand against Flagg. Larry starts the game as a player who loves ‘em and leaves ‘em, but he finds love and stability in Boulder and goes from being a scumbag to a genuinely good dude. In the beginning, he’s just another roach running little roach errands, by the end, he’s reformed, and watching the torment he suffered at the hands of Flagg’s henchmen - such as having his guitar smashed against the rear bumper of a mobile death wagon by some jackass dressed like a pirate - hits us like a shot to the guts.The great pleasure of reading (or watching) The Stand is seeing all these relatable characters meet, form bonds, and stand together in the face of evil.Josh Boone completely ruined that by telling the story in a sort of non-linear style with most of the backstory - picked bare and distilled down to only what he and the writers perceived as its most important and relevant parts- told through flashbacks. The story starts in Boulder and we get glimpses of everyone beforehand, but that magic of discovery and relationship building was fractured, perhaps even lost. The film spent too much time focusing on characters that shouldn’t have gotten that level of screentime. Some characters that deserved more screentime didn’t get it and important plot details - Bobby Terry marking The Judge, for instance - took place off screen.Some characters - coughLloydandTrashcough - were outright ridiculous. Lloyd spent his screentime dressed like a caricature of a pimp and chasing Julie Lawry, and Trash was far more over-the-top than his novel counterpart. It was almost like a parody. Were you playing a parody, Ezra Miller? I think you were but I don’t know.In the novel, Las Vegas was presented as an authoritarian regime where the trains ran on time (or else), no one used drugs (or else), and things like leaving weren’t exactly met with a “come back and see us sometime.” In Boone’s glorified cartoon, it’s depicted as a place of nonstop partying and hedonism, basically the most remedial and basic take on evil one can possibly muster. All that Boone needed to complete the image was Flagg literally twirling his mustache and saying “It feels good to be bad,” You were right there, Josh, why didn’t you just go the rest of the way?At the last moment, the filmmakers tried to redeem the people of Vegas through pot smoking hippie Glenn Bateman, who posited that they weren’t bad, but “afraid and following someone who makes them feel less afraid.” Ding, ding, ding, College Boy for the win. That’s exactly how they were shown in the novel, but here? By that point it was far too late to do a 180 on the not-so-good people of New Vegas. Nice try, though.The much maligned climax of the novel - where Trash brings a nuclear weapon into the middle of Larry and Ralph’s execution and The Hand of God detonates it - played out a lot differently here. Namely, Trash brings a nuclear weapon into the middle of the big execution and a globe of ball lightning detonates it after zapping and killing virtually everyone but Flagg. The CGI hand from the ‘94 series has been dunked on more than a goddamn Oreo, so Boone’s bright idea was to add even more fake looking CGI.Oy vey.King wrote an epilogue where Frannie (played by Breakfast Club girl in the ‘94 series) does a Baby Jessica down a well and confronts Flagg over the fate of her baby. King said he felt like Frannie was sidelined in the novel. I can see that, then again, not every character got to personally spit in Flagg’s face. Did he feel guilty for pushing a female character off to the side? That’s not a crazy assessment. A lot of critics used to say King couldn’t write female characters, so he did Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne, and Gerald’s Game to prove them wrong. What I’m saying is, King totally caves to peer pressure. Maybe with our new social climate he felt bad for not letting Frannie play a bigger part (even though Mother Abigail and Dayna Jurgens, a spy in Vegas who killed herself rather than let Flagg get the information on another spy out of her, are totally girls). Maybe he just thought she could do a little more. Okay. Perhaps she could, but sticking on an unnecessary ending that exists for no other reason than to exist probably wasn’t the way to go about it.There were tons of little differences between the novel and this adaptation. That’s to be expected as a novel is translated to the screen, but the filmmakers seemed to revel in being different, like an edgy teenager rebelling against his liberal middle class parents by saying the N-word online. If you’re going to adapt a book to the screen, don’t go willy-nilly changing things just because you have nine hours and a fat CBS check that says you can. Those of us who love The Stand love it for what it is; if we wanted something like it but not it, we could always go watch Virus from 1980 (great movie, by the way). We wanted to see how you would do our favorite scenes from the book, not how you would gut and replace them.Josh Boone and his cohorts completely missed what makes The Stand such a beloved story. They showed us swollen tube necks, grue, sex, and lots and lots of cussing, but they bungled the story where it mattered. They couldn’t even be bothered to tell it in a coherent manner. The flashbacks and non-chronological plot made it difficult for fans who hadn’t read the novel or seen the original series to understand what was going on. They wanted to be special and avante-garde and wound up getting almost nothing but negative reviews for their troubles. Some movies don’t deserve the hate they get, but Josh Boone’s The Stand does. What he did with virtually unlimited freedom in 2021, a network miniseries did better in 1994.This movie could have been good or even great, instead, it fails as both an adaptation of The Stand and as a movie in its own right.Such a damn shame.Shaking my head.
Social Media Icons