Apparently we have a Pet Semetary prequel coming courtesy of Paramount+. And so the King Renaissance continues on…
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Pet Cemetery prequel - The daily life of church before the accident and getting buried in the cemetery. It will connect with The Secret Life of Pets to become the “Petverse”
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The other side of the King movie resurgence, I‘m afraid. With all the good and great adaptations come the pointless spin-offs.
Especially after the wasted opportunity of the remake this prequel is misunderstanding the source novel as well. One of King‘s best books, a story dealing with grief and the unwinnable fight against death, apparently also losing sight of the emotional trauma of that situation and going for gory zombie action.
This property is burned for quite some time. But I wished a serious director would give the novel a serious treatment after all.
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I am sure you know my opinion on this already, but you just can’t transfer King’s wonderful work to film.
For me, there’s too much to pack in. Something that takes between 10 and 24 hours to read doesn’t fit into two, on screen. And so much of it is important backstory, inner monologue and even outside voices in someone’s head that it would just be weird in a movie. Additionally they normally miss the dark humour in his work.
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I know–a thumbsucker from The New York Times–but there is an interesting point or two made:
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“Not whether we go to back to the movies, but how we take the movies back.”
Some food for thought there.
One point mentioned, the inverse relation between accessibility and relative interest, I noticed myself often enough. Before the days of home entertainment I used to think that if I had Bond films readily available at home I’d watch nothing but. Since I can actually watch them - and thousands more whenever I want - I only do it very rarely, and hardly ever with the sense of urgency one used to feel when a film was shown in a rerun at a theatre only for a week or two.
I can also imagine that the sheer abundance of material, in combination with the changed mode of consumption that allows to fast-forward and switch from one to another, may in fact bury treasures instead of making them popular. An important task perhaps for the critics trade, to go beyond the algorithm and trawl the depths of the streaming ocean for productions which don’t fit the box and can’t afford the promo campaign.
Overall the entertainment landscape will be shaped by what the people watch; even more so in an environment that makes no distinction between cinema, streaming and television.
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Very interesting views - and it´s telling that I posted two news about the new (fifth) movie in a nostalgia franchise afterwards. That’s what I seem to immediately response to: things I know from back when everything was new and fresh to me (even if in this particular case the original movie already fed off nostalgia itself). Heck, I’m a Bond fan - what else is that but nostalgia?
My (for my interests) formative years, of course, were during the 80´s and 90´s. I thankfully know the effect of films being only available in cinemas, having to search for them, anxiously awaiting the programming news every Friday (and later on a Thursday when Germany switched the release days due to “tv-dominance”). I remember the first VCR in our house which I kind of occupied for myself because my parents couldn’t handle the equipment as well 
I began to tape the movies that were on tv and rewatched them again and again and again.
Then, when my preferences became more “adult” and “art-film-oriented” during the 90´s because I became a film critic during my university years and strove for approval from my film professor who accidentally also was the main critic for the newspaper I worked for, I attended all the special showings of European classics, and it opened my mind for everything I considered boring or dry before.
Flash forward to the end of pre-pandemic times. Streaming and blu-ray made almost everything available immediately or in a very short amount of shipping time. And… I have actually never watched less movies. Building up a huge archive of films made me actually stop and sell almost half of it, even more, because I realized I would never be able to watch everyone of them anyway. Nor would I want to. At the same time there was the flow of new movies I simply could not find the time to catch up with.
Even worse: Some films I watched I either stopped when they did not hold my attention or the phone rang or anything else in my life happened. Or I - gasp - fast-forwarded through them. Something I, of course, could not do sitting in a theatre. Some films actually were not worth paying attention to, naturally, but some films I have seen in theatres and was won over by through their whole running time. This is very difficult in a home video-experience. And that changes movies, especially the streaming content since that is now absolutely created to hold your attention with every cheap trick in the book.
So I agree with Scott: we already have lost a lot with the constant availability of films. The ability to experience a film with enough patience, in a secure room. The chance to discover films we would never have chosen because our comfort would have made us pick the easier one. The possibility to see films which are not created to tickle your fancy every second out of the sheer fear of its producers to lose approval.
Then again, who actually is reponsible? Aren’t we ourselves to blame? Our constant and self-imposed impatience due to our self-induced need for constant input, through our phones or the internet? Haven’t we become spoilt children who always want everything right now and once we have it we are quickly bored by it? On the flip side, haven’t we become the old fogies who always just long for the times which we idolize because those times made us what we are, which is why we want to reconnect with them through the art that made us feel so exuberantly fantastic back then?
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This is an interesting comment, and a very different experience to me, right now.
I was just thinking the other day that I now have Nextflix and also Foxtel movies here in Australia, but I am certainly nowhere near being able to watch the movies I want to watch.
I can’t find the wonderful “Last Night” (1998) anywhere at all, and I would really like to watch The Conversation (1974) again, or Mulholland Dr., The Wicker Man, The Poseidon Adventure, Silver Streak…
Or with my kids - Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Innerspace, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the older Muppet movies… and, at the moment, it’s never going to happen…literally never.
And I can only find old classics or art house movies if a TV channel decides to show them.
So I am in a very different situation. Also with no DVD player currently hooked up, I am unable to watch any Bond films, or any of my DVDs like the Disney films we have, or Blue Velvet, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now, The Amityville Horror, the Star Wars movies.
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Most are available on platforms, but you would have to pay for them.
Here in Germany there is also the problem that some movies are only available in dubbed versions, not with the original audio. Which is really annoying.
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Villeneuve is a great visual storyteller, I am interested in seeing how he treats DUNE.
However, I do love Lynch´s version, even if he himself does not. And I cringe a bit watching the very contemporary humor in this trailer (“Muscle? No.”) or the “You only need to be my son”-modern parenting stuff, or the emphasis on the Chani-love story, or the overly choreographed video game-fight scenes…
Yes, I cringe at a lot. But this is a trailer, it is a film which has to conquer the current marketplace, therefore… yes, yes, yes.
Is it a good idea to clearly have it set up sequels which will tell the rest of book 1? I don’t think so. If this one’s not successful enough - and how could it be in the current situation - it will be one of those event films which are diminished by ambitions which can not be fulfilled.
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The problem with any mainstream adaptation of Dune is that the book offers few characters to identify with and root for. Paul, the more we learn about him - the better we get know him - becomes actually ever stranger due to the spice and his messiah role. There’s a fabulous Prince Valiant role with an adventurous fight to reclaim his heritage, but it’s ultimately broken and refused in favour of a much larger role, far removed from what readers would expect.
Leto has a huge responsibility on his shoulders - yet he goes more or less blindly into what he knows is a trap.
Paul’s mother always seems to have harboured her very own ideas and her dedication to save Paul comes across not as a lioness protecting her litter but a manipulative chess player about to unfold the next stage of a strategy. This becomes even more of a theme when she drinks the ‘water of life’ poison while being pregnant.
Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck are bit players, the first dropping out early without having had much impact - that would only come later in Dune Messiah - the second duped into thinking Paul’s mother Jessica had betrayed her husband and his entire house.
The list of Dune’s characters goes on, most of them pawns in a greater game they don’t comprehend - and quite a few are aware of it and okay with this knowledge. Few attract sympathy like a typical blockbuster production would usually aim for. I’m not surprised the trailer - and probably the film - will try to make the story easier to digest and introduce some typical Hollywood lore as we’ve come to expect since the days of STAR WARS.
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Absolutely.
I just wonder whether these days an adaptation of a brand which was established decades ago still has enough fans to buy a ticket - and fans which are ready to part with their knowledge and expectations, willing to see “their” story being turned into a simplified contemporary update which shakes off its basic ideas.
Which is not to say that I expect Villeneuve to have done that. The movie could actually be much closer to the novel than the trailer seems to indicate. But I fear that Villeneuve had to contend with all the studio notes which demanded DUNE to be snazzier, hipper than it actually is. Especially after his box office disappointment with BLADE RUNNER 2049 (which really was very true to the original and shook off almost every convention one associates with such an endeavour these days).
Maybe I liked Lynch´s DUNE because it was filtered through his weirdness, thereby achieving another kind of distance the novel embraces.
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@dalton there’s something strange in the neighbourhood…
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Confirmation that it is Egon’s daughter and grand-kids! Janine!! Lots of Paul Rudd!!! RAY!!!
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Not only are we getting a new Exorcist sequel from Halloween’s David Gordon Green, we’re getting a new trilogy, with Ellen Burstyn set to reprise her role from the original.